EdExcitement

The madness of the last 2 years is settling down a little - jumping from vocational training to higher education; enough to allow me to reflect on the amazing experience of vocational skills training at the grassroots levels in India. Industrial Training Institutes On one hand, we have the ITIs (Industrial Training Institutions, for the uninitiated); reasonably good hard infrastructure (buildings, machines, facilities) and extremely poor soft infrastructure (people, quality of training and even basic discipline). It has been a great experience for me to be acting as Chairman for 7 ITIs in Haryana for the past 30 months. Taking a closer look, the students coming into these institutions from the villages in the state have great potential and most of them, contrary to popular belief, come in with a lot of expectation. However, they soon become part of the web of “free” education with no accountability on the quality of training. New buildings are made, but housekeeping staff (‘sweeper’ in...

The trigger for this piece happened as I was at Andheri CL center in Mumbai recently and saw this poster about “ants”. It said something like this – “Ants never give up on their goals, you obstruct them and they take a detour. However, they continue eventually in the direction that they needed to move, though in normal times, they move in a “herd format” – one behind the other”. The past year has been difficult for most of us. The process of surviving through difficult times is a challenge that one cherishes only when it is over. We have all been moving in a “herd format” – everyone bullish about growth, everything around us growing……till the world around us came crashing down – layoffs, salary cuts, no increments, no bonus. Some people gave up, others frustrated, depressed; only a few kept moving on towards the goal, just like the ants. A number of people came up to me during this period and talked about their difficult financial condition and the associated mental stress of self and ...