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Is our technological manpower keeping pace?

Thanks to its foresight in steadily building up infrastructure in Science and Technology (S&T), India now has a far stronger technological base than most developing nations. In certain mission-oriented areas such as space and nuclear energy, we have developed large capabilities, and we are making steady gains in IT, pharmaceuticals, and many other high-tech sectors.

We can be justifiably proud of this progress considering where we had to start after Independence. But it would be a mistake if even in the new millennium we continue to applaud ourselves by post-colonial, Third World standards. We must shift gears, since we are now in a far different situation.

Our stature in the world is steadily going up because of a number of factors. Our economy is booming and our GDP, already about a trillion dollars, is expected to continue growing at 8-9 per cent annually. While there is genuine concern that vast segments of our population are still untouched by this prosperity, there is nevertheless an expectation that India is emerging as a major world power. We already demand a seat at the high table on every front — whether it be the United Nations Security Council or the nuclear club.

Is our S&T prowess keeping pace with our expectations of emerging as a world power? Conversely, can our present high rate of economic growth be sustained without a commensurate development of our S&T capability? Honest answers to these questions give plenty of cause for concern.

How much technical manpower will we need in a couple of decades, and of what quality and in which areas, to support a major world power of, say, 1.2 billion people with a GDP of several trillion dollars? It is shocking that there are no such detailed projections available. The Department of S&T (DST) and the Institute of Applied Manpower Research have useful data on existing technical manpower but no projections of future requirements. Nor do the websites of our chambers of commerce.

In the absence of such projections, we can still try and get some idea of what is needed by looking if not into the future at least at major developed countries as they stand today. Of course, the S&T landscape may be quite different a few decades from now and it is very difficult to forecast which technologies will dominate then.

The best long-term strategy is to ensure that you produce a large and broad-based manpower, well trained to be flexible and innovative so that it can adapt itself to new technologies. Comparisons with today’s developed nations can give us some rough measure of the S&T workforce needed.

For instance, there is detailed data available about the S&T workforce of the U.S. If we want to be among the top players in S&T in a couple of decades, we should at least reach by then where the U.S. is today.

Let us start with quantity and turn to quality later. The latest available figures show that we have about 116,000 people in India engaged in scientific research and development (R&D) activity. By contrast, the U.S. has 1.3 million people in R&D, despite its total population of 290 million being less than a third of our one billion. Per capita, its R&D manpower is 40 times larger than ours — a personnel of 4,500 per million, as compared to our 110 per million. If you include all U.S. workers who need a B.Sc level knowledge of science and engineering, the S&T workforce in the U.S. is even larger — about 9.2 million.

Why is India’s technological workforce so much smaller in comparison? It is not because we do not have a sufficient stock of science and engineering graduates. We have nearly 9 million science graduates, 2 million postgraduates and a lakh of PhDs. In addition, two million fresh students enrol for science degrees annually (though not all graduate), along with another 7 lakh in engineering. Thus there is no shortage, in terms of sheer numbers, of our technical manpower. Why have they not been drafted into contributing to the R&D effort?

A standard reason trotted out for this is shortage of funds. Certainly that is a major contributing factor. In a poor country, government funds for S&T will necessarily be limited. But if the GDP continues to grow as hoped for, the funding constraint will become less severe. Already about one per cent of our GDP is being spent on R&D.

Another factor has been the absence of substantial demand for indigenous technology from the marketplace — an essential requirement for a healthy growth of S&T. For decades, our major industries were content to not innovate too much. Where new technology was deemed necessary, it was generally bought from abroad. Even as recently as 2004-05, the private sector contributed only 14 per cent of India’s R&D expenditure, as compared to 63 per cent in the U.S.

Fortunately this is now changing. There is more demand for technical skills in the private sector, thanks to the expanding economy, increasing privatisation and globalisation. But that has brought to the fore a different problem. Employers find most of our graduates not only inadequately trained, but un-trainable.

For instance, our IT-BPO sector is expected to hire over a million more employees by 2010 but, according to an industry analyst, only 8-10 per cent of our 495,000 engineers graduating annually are qualified to work in this sunrise industry. As a result, the IT giants in India hire several thousand graduates from abroad, even as 2 million science graduates remain registered at our employment exchanges. Other emerging high tech industries face similar problems.

Thus the shortfall in quantity is in turn related to quality. The notionally large stock of science graduates dwindles to a much smaller effective workforce because of poor training.

While our higher education system has done well to grow in size to 300 universities and 17,000 colleges and formally bring educational empowerment to tens of millions, it has in the process lost grip on quality.

The glamour of the IITs and the IIMs has diverted attention away from the sorry state of the bulk of our teaching institutions. The majority working engineers in India come not from the IITs but from the thousands of engineering colleges where the quality of instruction is by and large indifferent.

The problem has been further aggravated by the disempowerment of university science vis-À-vis advanced research institutes. These institutes, modelled after the prototype Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) in Mumbai, were set up to provide talented scientists with well funded places to do research unhampered by the teaching loads and other “constraints” of the university system. Indeed, these institutes do produce much of India’s best scientific research today. However they do not perform the role of training the large number of undergraduates required for the technological needs of a big country. That can only be done in colleges and universities.

The founding of a few research institutes would have been fine, had university science also been strengthened at the same time. But such a balanced strategy was not pursued with any seriousness by the leadership, which has taken the easy route of creating more and more research institutes outside universities. These have had the effect of reducing the universities’ share of funds and talented new faculty, who flock to the better working conditions at the institutes.

The practice in most technologically developed countries is that universities house a large fraction of their best scientists and expose young students to them. This is essential for producing good quality technical manpower in the bulk. It is vital that our universities too do the same.

Besides, our colleges and universities, with all their problems, represent the country in microcosm. It is not healthy for top scientists to isolate themselves from this milieu. If they keep doing that, Indian science will only “shine” in the way that India itself is shining today — in a skewed manner with a vast underbelly in relative darkness. And our dream of becoming a major world power in S&T will remain just that — a dream.

(The writer is Emeritus Professor of Physics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.)

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