India Again

India kind of fascinates me because it is a completely foreign culture but at the same time it is the world's largest democracy and among the world's fastest growing economies. I have written previously about India's growing skills gap and labor shortage, here is a follow-up of sorts.

In the 12/1/2006 Edition of the New York Times an article appeared about the growing disparity between graduates of India's more prestigous colleges and universities and other college graduates:

India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.

Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories rather than memorize them.

But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.

The rest of the article explores deficiecies in the Indian higher education system and is well worth the read.

Technorati tags: India, Education