JOIN USPrime Minister Narendra Modi’s approach to a technology-driven growth, as envisaged in his unveiling a Digital India Week in New Delhi recently, drew serious flak from one of his arch malcontents, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who said recently: “I have never been anti-industry but no country can become an industrial giant with an uneducated and unhealthy labour force.”
With only 2.3 per cent of the workforce in India trained in formal skill compared to 68 per cent in the UK, 75 per cent in Germany, 52 per cent in the US, 80 per cent in Japan and 96 per cent in South Korea, Modi’s National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship 2015 as well as the Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) scheme at least address what was long overdue.
Sen’s comment was not exactly in response to the role of digital technology per se, but in a 1999 study titled “Employment Technology & Development”, he did shed much light on the inter-relationship between institutions, technology, and employment. According to the Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) 2011 released recently, one out of three families living in villages is landless and depends on manual labour for livelihood and 23.52 per cent rural families have no literate adult above 25 years, suggesting a poor state of education among rural masses.
A technologically-illiterate people, the logic goes, will remain at best technology-consumers but not active participators. According to an estimate, some 200 management schools have shut down in the past few years due to poor placement and of the 1.5 million engineering students, over 70 per cent are unemployed, while the top of the cake – the IT sector – withered with 75 per cent of graduates going unemployed – areas supposed to be the forerunners of the digital or technological spectrum.
But what use is technology if there are no proper classrooms, committed teachers, and a properly thought-through curriculum in our public education system? What happens to our public hospitals, many of which though equipped with high-tech machines, fail to deliver technology-assisted services either due to poor maintenance, or lack of skilled personnel?
As per the latest National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) figures, around 86 per cent of India’s rural population and 82 per cent of its urban masses are not covered by any kind of medical insurance. Without the revamping of the basic physical infrastructure of public health and education, the value of technology is only incremental. How, pray, without a drastic reform of our agriculture sector, technology alone can save a farmer from committing suicide?
The instance of Japan is very instructive. It was the first major non-Western nation to embrace the Western technological and organisational advances of the century after the first industrial revolution. That it was fully able to exploit and contribute to the broad, sustained technological advances that began in the 20th century by harnessing science to technology was made possible by the emergence of entrepreneurs who began new and risky businesses, by business organisations suitably coping with changing technological conditions, by managers, engineers, and workers acquiring organisational and technological skills in right earnest.
University of Michigan professor Kentaro Toyama, involved in more than 50 projects, focused on finding technological solutions to poverty, illiteracy, poor health and unemployment in India, at the end of his stint concluded that to help people with technology, it was far better to teach them to become technology producers – engineers, entrepreneurs and corporate professionals – than to treat them as consumers.
Fundamental jinx
With this in mind, parents today have to solve a very fundamental jinx in the near future. Are their children going to become egregious consumers of technology, nerdy handlers of gadgets at best, or innovators and entrepreneurs with not only the ability to manipulate technology to their favour but also, and more essentially, creators and aggregators of technology?
Kevin Maney, technology journalist at Newsweek, envisages that in 2030, when today’s 10-year-olds are in the job market, they will need to be creative, problem-solving design thinkers who can teach a machine how to do things, rather than tamely take commands, when most of them will find that “coding skills are about as valuable as cursive handwriting”.
It looks surprising that the true author of the 1984 policy providing the provision for software exports through satellite links was Indira Gandhi weeks before her assassination, announced by the government headed by Rajiv Gandhi on November 19, 1984. Rajiv Gandhi brought computers to India at whose time reduction of taxes and tariffs on technology based enterprises and import quotas brought about significant changes in telecommunications, airlines, defence and computers. But as the succeeding decades came to prove, without human capital, technology alone can neither be our saviour nor magically solve our cultural problems.
As for “cyber warfare”, a blueprint was drawn up in August 2010 when the government asked agencies like the National Technical Research Organisation, the Defence Intelligence Agency and the Defence Research and Development Organisation to enhance their capabilities in cyber warfare. Mainstream economists, however, tend to think that technological advancement, at least in the long run, always leads to more prosperity and more jobs. As they consider this as an economic law, they are loath to anyone who challenges this “law of economics” dubbing them disparagingly as a “neo-Luddite”.
But if technology cannot have a life-transforming effect in pulling a large section of people out of poverty and illiteracy, or fail to improve their quality of lives, or worse, can lead to permanent, structural unemployment, we cannot think of it as a cure-all, but as just a tool for selective value-addition.
However much we assume that technology and the market economy work together to make us all the more wealthy, the reality is that the free market economy simply cannot work without a viable labour market as jobs are the primary mechanism through which income—and, therefore, purchasing power—is distributed to the people who consume everything the economy produces. Putting technology before people is akin to putting the horse before the cart.