Thought for the day
"Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do."
-
Voltaire (French, 1694-1778)
Word for the day
Flummox (v)
To bewilder; confound; confuse.
(Source:
Dictionary.com)
Teaser for the day
Wonder why Salman Khan's sister's
wedding is so much news!
Maid in India
For past couple of days many readers have been losing patience
with me. They find me totally distracting. The common refrain is "why do
you bother so much about decades. Tell us what the market will do between
9:15AM to 3:30PM today". They are not wrong. Neither am I. It's only
matter of different approaches to achieve same goal.
Many live life as a series of discrete days. I see life as a
continuous time series. I do not assign much importance to the discrete days,
like last or first days of months, quarters, and years, in the infinitum of
time. The random data points published on these days also do not bother me
much. These data points, including daily prices, monthly sales and production
numbers, quarterly profits, are relevant to me if they form a discreet pattern
in a secular trend.
Now coming back to our discussion from yesterday, I believe that
nurturing our youth well should be the top priority of the government. The
incumbent government has in fact shown some promise by laying strong emphasis
on skill development. But to me efforts so far look devoid of a conceptual
framework. The objective appears to be limited to engaging youth in some sort
of employment to keep them away from unlawful activities. This is not enough.
In my view, youth should be educated and trained with the constitutionally
mandated objectives of:
(a) Equality -
regional, social, gender and economic;
(b) Dignity of life
-self reliance and social status;
(c) Scientific
mindset and approach - global competitiveness;
only then the effort will make a socio-economic and perhaps
political sense.
Opening thousands of engineering and management colleges without
a conceptual framework has yielded nothing in past two decades. Thousands of qualified
engineers/management graduates churned out every year end up doing petty jobs
adding unacceptable level of cynicism to the economy.
A better alternative would be to open a micro institute in each
village which trains its youth to work as domestic help - 6month course in
basic language skills and etiquettes, nursing child and old, attending phones
and cooking.
If every year 20 youth from each village could be employed as
domestic help in cities earning Rs7000pm, they can easily remit Rs100,000pm (5000x20)
back to their families. This works out to be Rs7200cr annually for 600000
villages. This money will create sustainable demand for quality school, good
health center, paid electricity, financial services, housing, travel and other
civic amenities.
At this point in time, nursing colleges will make much more
sense than medical colleges. Providing drinking water to each household will
bring more girls to schools than mid-day meal.
And let me tell you, not dowry or pride but incest is the
primary cause of skewed sex-ratio and gender inequality in many states. Any
youth policy that does not address this problem will remain as ineffective as
the efforts made so far have been.
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