Low Hanging Career Fruit

Many youngsters in India blindly move where the herd moves. Few young minds who have greater clarity and aspiration plan brilliantly, and they mostly plan to escape India. Had a conversation with the most sincere educationalist. We discussed about unleashing human excellence and creating the ecosystem to help faculties, learners and workforce to grow beyond.

We discussed in detail about how to get that idea of high value talent and holistic human development into the minds of the youngsters. We were wondering how to make the young minds to think, see and grow beyond.

He shared a very serious concern about the attitude of younger generation. He said “Lakshman, now a days, most youngsters come with horse blinkers. With that narrow vision, they aim just to get a degree without arrear and join TCS who do the bulk recruitment in campuses.” My response was that we cannot blame only the youngsters for the narrow world they live in.

Most of the young Indians are driven and misled by their uncles, neighbours, faculties, lovers, marriage brokers and future in-laws. They get attracted to the low hanging fruits instead of looking at greater opportunities and better future. TCS, Cognizant, Infosys and Wipro are the words that we can hear more in the conversations of relatives in marriage halls. Many of them do not have clarity on the career runway.

This has been going on since 2004. 18 years have passed by. Yes, few progressed well. But, this kind of success here and there cannot make big impact in a nation with 140 crore people. We did chest thumbing and pushed lies into the minds of young Indians, and made them to believe that India is at the top in IT and India will become the world leader. Where are we now? Our total IT revenue of all Indian IT companies in India is less than the revenue of one single company in China. People are misled by GDP ranking. Rulers conveniently ignore and do not talk about the pathetically low ranking in HDI.

Due to lack of focus on employability, institutions of higher education produce millions of unemployable graduates and engineers since early 2000. Companies struggle to find good talent, and they shamelessly created the situation for moonlighting. Noticing, the dip in productivity, and seeing the bad attitude, employers are putting pressure on moonlighters. Some have started to fire those employees who take up multiple jobs. On the other hand, there are millions of jobless and clueless graduates who could not be employed.

Situation is getting worse. Youngsters get trapped in Instagram, TikTok, religious fights and political arguments. They are getting distracted by the discussions on how an actress gave birth to twins within few weeks of getting married and without bulged tummy. Not sure how long youngsters can enjoy the pleasure of social media dopamine. Politicians and the power behind the politicians are happy to capitalize on these digital zombies.

I know for sure that we can grow collectively only when we can change the environment for better learning and working. Only when we can focus on nurturing productive human resources, we can make India great again.

Underemployment and low hanging career fruits cannot feed millions of youngsters for long. It is time to enrich education and skill building to help youngsters grow up to pick better fruits and more fruits at the top of the trees. As experienced experts move up, they can create more space for fresh graduates. Creating an ecosystem for sustainable growth is our collective responsibility. Till we create the right ecosystem to wisely live, India can be great again and again only for the few.