NEP: Quantity To Quality Is The New Wave

I grew up in the quaint town of Ranchi during the eighties and I was raised with a belief that I must study hard so that I do not end being ‘jobless’ in my adulthood. Owning a car was aspirational those days and I dreamt of owning a big one someday. This was the story of every small towner with big dreams back then!

From where I came from, Engineering or Medicine, were the only visibly-attractive career options unless one was determined to be a civil servant or someone in the immediate family was better exposed. India has made giant leaps forward from then, and owning a car is no longer a yardstick of success. Today, India offers incredibly large number of opportunities than what it did to me during my times.

With rapid expansion in the economy, the number of opportunities has grown manifold and new opportunities have spawned. In a largely left-brained focused job market that values quantitative skills in fields such as sciences and commerce, there has been a steady growth in opportunities that require creative right brained thinking. The newest opportunities are often cross breeds of behavioral science, digital technology and data science. The question that comes to my mind is, are these new-age opportunities available only for the selected few or can any youngster in any part of India access it?

The New Education Policy (NEP) has clearly laid out its focus on breaking barriers to equitable access to highest quality education, which creates great hopes for harnessing India’s human capital potential. In my view, Economics is a great social leveller and in the Knowledge Economy, there isn’t a more potent tool than education for achieving inclusion and equity through economic empowerment. NEP has drawn up the education framework that lays particular emphasis on realising creative potential with cognitive capabilities, that are so much the need of the hour.

While Internet and information availability have broken exposure barriers that in my times constrained our universe of ‘Paths to Success’, will the ubiquitous fast-speed internet allow every kid in the back of beyond to aspire for a share of this pie? I wonder how the average kid in a small town be able to find the needle of her opportunity in the haystack of the internet junk, without professional help? Will information overdose itself become the bane?

We’ll have many more questions, but it will be our attempt to look for answers to those and many more. For this one, I will leave some food for thought, “How can we create a universally accessible and professional managed career guidance program?”

Shiv Tiwary

Guest Author He has recently founded a Non-Profit Organization, Teysha Foundation, to channelize his efforts and resources in providing career guidance and vocational education to underprivileged youth, especially in the hinterland.