Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Food for thought...

It’s election time and it is a wonderful feeling when an entire nation wakes up to franchise for a better tomorrow, for themselves and for their future generations. The slogan for this year’s parliamentary elections has been “Vote for change.” Thinking about change and progress, one thing that comes to my mind is education of the masses. As all of you would readily accept, it’s the light of knowledge that has the capacity of leading an individual and an entire nation towards success.

Being a citizen of a country that is developing at a blinding pace is surely an interesting and also a difficult thing. As the eternal truth goes, its natural to make mistakes while growing up and we as a nation are still in the growing stage. We sure are learning by our experiences, we are traveling fast on the lanes of development and are catching up with some of the big guns out there. But in this frenzy of modernization, industrialization and development I personally feel that India has taken a wrong step and if not attended to immediately it might lead to disastrous outcomes.

As all of you might agree in the recent days, education has been taking a back seat in the road towards development. Although there has been a sudden surge in the number of people who attain their matriculation and degree certificates, it’s the people in villages and slums in and around the cities we live who have been grossly neglected. With talented men and women moving towards much fruitful prospects, the quality of teaching is also rapidly collapsing which is one more reason for concern. Although filled with blooming talent and proving to the external world time and again what we are capable of, the so called developed countries still view us as a bustling center of “QUALITY CHEAP LABOUR“. This phrase deeply hurts and burns me from the inside when ever I hear it.

So what do we do to to strip this label off our backs? Well, we already have one thing- Quality :)The next thing is innovation and entrepreneurship. To show the World what we are capable of, we first need to harness the untapped intelligence that is going waste in the underdeveloped regions of India. While thinking on these lines, an idea struck me..

I call it the “Kereya neeranu kerege chelli process” :) India has been a host and home to numerous BPOs , IT companies and other MNCs. As we all know, even in an average sized company at least 5 to 10 people are free on any given day, i.e they are on the bench or they do not have any urgent deadlines to meet. We can harness this manpower by requesting companies to spare such employees, who can be dispatched to schools and colleges all over the state and country on a one or two day teaching assignment. This will not only make sure that the river of knowledge flows through each nook and corner of India, it also improves quality of education imparted to the future generations of our nation. Oh! and also we get the much required break ;) Just imagine, what a revolution it would be if this is taken up on a large scale. Of course for all that the nation has given us, we are ready to do a bit of a sacrifice, aren’t we? Well the fun factor is always there too. Before its taken up on a large scale, voluntary involvement is the thing that will bring in the much required difference.