I am Pradeep Kumar R and am a 1st year MBA student.

I strongly feel that vocational education and training courses must be introduced in all schools across India. The decision to impart "vocational education and training" in all schools in India would involve considerable investment to be made in terms of time, money, energy and other resources. Hence, the immediate question which would arise is will we, as a country, be better off by spending these resources on general education or vocational education. There are significant trade-offs for both the decisions.

However, I strongly feel that for a developing country like India, imparting vocational education and training in all schools would be more beneficial. I would like to elucidate why.

There are 3 important reasons why I feel we need to introduce vocational training in all schools:

1. In India almost 90% of students who enrol in 1st standard drop out before passing out of 8th standard. Why is this so? This is because most of these students come from poor families and the benefits of the education is not immediately felt. These students either end up working in agriculture or become unskilled workers. Both these options do not lead to significant monetary gains due to low value addition and low productivity. Introducing vocational education at schools would change this scenario. Presently just 12% of our workforce is employed in Industry and around 60% are employed in agriculture. Since these students would already be trained vocationally, If corporates fund these students education beyond 8th standard in institutes similar to ITI, this would solve the skilled labour shortage faced by our industry. L&T has already adopted a model similar to this.

2. The 2nd most important reason why Vocational training should be imparted is that it plays a significant role in bridging the urban rural divide and results in more equitable distribution of wealth in the society. Let me explain how. Even though we pride that India is growing at more than 7-8% year on year, almost 30% of our population lies below the poverty line. The rich-poor divide has increased significantly since India's liberalization in 1991 because most of the benefits went to those who had professional education and were ready to benefit from it. The trickle down effect, though taken place, has been slow. India is still ranked at 134th position out of 168 countries in HDI and research shows that there is a very strong correlation between HDI indicators and per capita income. Vocational training at school level will achieve this by sending a trained workforce to the Industry which would result in a significant increase in per capita income. Growth in industry would directly and indirectly employ a large number of people who do not belong to the upper strata of the society. Hence vocational training in schools would increase the talent pool for the industry and would be a win win situation to all.

3. The 3rd reason why I believe vocational training must be introduced is to change our outlook towards manual labour. Unfortunately we as a country historically had a caste system based on the type of work one does and manual work came lower down the hierarchy. This has led to lack of respect towards manual labour. A change in this attitude would be beneficial to the country as a whole. We will stop looking down at professions which involve manual labour. A respect for those professions would eventually increase the salaries of people in those professions. This would bring in more peace, less divide between rich and poor and more tolerance in our society. It would make our country a better place to live.

I would infact like to give 3 important suggestions:

a) Vocational education must be made compulsory till 8th standard in all schools in India.
b) Institutes like ITI must be encouraged to be set-up by private sector through supportive policies.
c) The role government plays in training and in education must be reduced and a business environment must be created through incentives to generate private sector participation

Thank You!
Pradeep Kumar R
PGP1, 2008-2010