Time to rebuild human resources

Though India has all the potential to become a wealthy nation, it is let down by its poor human resources.

Over decades, India has not groomed the right kind of human resources for nation building.  Mind bungling mega scams, poor infrastructure, sinking water table, sick rivers, crumbling urban centres, poor research & development output, poor health facility, food adulteration, porous border and poor governance reflect on the deteriorating national character.

Though India has all the potential to become a wealthy nation, it is let down by its poor human resources. How to groom the right kind of human resources for nation building is the biggest challenge before the Narendra Modi government.

In most of the central government organisations, state government offices and colleges and schools, majority of employees use computers as type machines. Young computer savvy new recruits are exposed to a kind of yes men bosses who hardly motivate them to live above narrow personal interest.

Majority of executives in public sector organisations like to develop personal relationship with corporate and political bosses for personal benefits like promotion, lucrative foreign tours and place of posting.  Many PSUs and PSBs incur huge losses due to poor human resources which fail to overcome conflict of interest situation.

Theft, mismanagement of railway assets, poor governance, unscientific potential survey and corruption are the main reasons for the loss in Indian Railway amid huge demand.

The fat monetary incentive given to insurance and PSBs’ chiefs for achieving targets encourages them to manipulate ground level data. So many frauds happen in the insurance sector due to this incentive schemes.

Today, the banking sector is lamenting over growing NPAs which will cross two digit figure if restructured loan is taken in to account.

Poor loan appraisal, substandard audit, poor quality supervision, deteriorating credit monitoring standard and the total absence of information system audit in many banks are mainly responsible for galloping NPA in banking sector.

The entire banking sector needs total revamping under an able hand if PSBs want to survive amid huge financial risk in globally integrated financial system.

Our porous internal security system reflects on poor human material. The 26/11 Mumbai attack could have been avoided had the Indian intelligence agency heeded to US warning about Pakistan plan.

Though India has made a giant stride in satellite technology, the technology has not been fully used for monitoring the physical and natural infrastructure of the country.

The quality of physical infrastructures like schools, hospitals, roads, bridges and market yards etc and natural infrastructures like rivers, ponds, ground water table, forest and hills should be the criteria for distributing tickets to MPs and MLAs candidates in all future election.

Poor in sport
India is ranked 154th among the football playing nations in the world. India played barefoot football in 1948 Olympic Games.

Since then, it has not qualified for football in the Olympics. India wins a lone gold or a silver or bronze in Olympic events when many poorer nations from developing world walk away with more medals.

Sports and games have disappeared from the life of our youth due to lack of job opportunities and career prospect.

Our national game hockey is played in a few cities only. The general public cannot afford to send their children for competitive sports as sports arenas have become highly commercialised to cater to wealthy section of people.

Stadiums constructed with massive public investment are being used for political rally and marriage functions.  Unless India comes out with a sound sports policy, it would create a large number of physically weak people.

According to government statistics, an estimated 10 lakh people in India suffer from organ failure. Lack of physical exercise, adulterated food and medicines attribute to deteriorating health conditions of the people.

India is home to maximum number of malnourished children in the world. The UNICEF has found 47 per cent of Indian children are underweight.

An all India survey of school children in the rural areas conducted by ASER found only 58 per cent of children enrolled in class III to V could read class I text book. What is the use of having 121 crore plus population when half of them are illiterate, hungry and sick?

There is no quick fix solution for India’s chronic human resources problems. Routine activity like cleaning the environment, inculcating the habit of discipline, introducing sports and games, teaching moral lessons from different religious scriptures to children, introducing uniform CBSE syllabus across the country and above all instilling a sense of belongingness to the nation in the minds of children could help rebuild the nation. Nationalism should be redefined as visible nation building activities with transparency and zeal.