Whose job is it anyway?

The more I look at the ongoing tussle over job reservations in the country, the more I wonder if the country is stuck in some kind of a time of a time warp. I mean, here in India we have a booming IT sector, which is generating more jobs by the passing quarters. So why the dichotomy? Aren’t there enough jobs to go around?

Quite the contrary. I think the whole issue is one of misplaced priorities. In all the interactions that I have had with IT industry leaders, the universal concern has been that of a looming human resource crunch. The industry might be growing by leaps and bounds, but shortage of skilled manpower is going to hit the sector hard.

That’s where the government should come into the picture. Instead of leaning on the private sector to provide job quotas for the notified classes, the government would be better off in forming joint advisory bodies with the IT industry and the premier institutes of learning, to solve this problem.

Let me explain.

I believe that job reservation in the private sector is a concept that will never take off anyway. What will happen is that the issue will just get mired in litigation and lead to acrimony between the government and India Inc, something the IT industry cannot afford.

Coming back to my earlier suggestion, the government can set up advisory bodies that will look at setting up institutes of higher technical education on the lines of the IITs and the IIMs all over the country. The ownership of these institutes can be 50:50 between the government and the rest of the holding can be made public through an equity offering.

This move will also help the government to address another problem—there are various parts of the country which have the potential talent, but which largely remain untapped because of various reasons. Private sector IT coaching institutes do not branch out to these areas due to perceived unviable commercial opportunities. Again, the scale at which the government can operate these institutes will ensure that the fees charged for technical courses are not exorbitant, as is the case in a number of private commercial institutes.

These are the days when every industry leader is preparing his wishlist for the Union Budget. This idea of mine happens to be an addition to my own list.