Our children are being strangled.

Companies in India are having to spend lots of money to train people for entry level jobs. The situation is especially acute in Information Technology and Pharmaceutical sectors. Pharma company Lupin spends Rs 25,000 to train each employee while Hexaware Technologies spends Rs 30,000 per head per year. TOI, 8 January. There are hundreds of colleges dishing out thousands of bachelors degrees in pharmacy every year charging between Rs 2-3 million per student. " While the absolute numbers look encouraging, industry-ready candidates with the required life skills and technical competence are very low. Therefore, companies end up investing heavily in technical training and life skills centers....almost like parallel universities to make already educated people industry ready," said Divakar Kaza, President Human Resources at Lupin. A medical representative is perhaps the easiest job in the pharmaceutical sector where each person is given around 20-25 products to present to doctors. Yet, apart from very few who work for the large multinationals, the vast majority cannot answer simple questions relating to the products they are trying to sell. Amit Bansal, CEO of Purple Leap says," Even in a bad year, IT companies are talking about hiring in large numbers. But there are skill gaps. At one of our clients, even nine months of training was not enough to bridge the gap in skills. Five years ago, companies used to hire from the top 10 institutes. Where are the additional employable people going to come from? From 90 percentiles, companies are now hiring 70 percentiles. That's where the problem arises in skill gaps." Thus there is no shortage of jobs and millions of graduates passing out each year yet companies are unable to find suitable people to hire at the most junior levels. Is there something wrong with our education system and, if so, why? The simple reason is that government school teachers are totally useless. The result of the Central Teacher Eligibility Test declared on 27 December 2012 showed that 99% of teachers are incapable of teaching even class 1 students. TOI, 3 January. Out of 796,000 who appeared for the test only 4,849 managed to pass Paper I or II or both. Paper I was mandatory and was to find competence to teach classes 1-5. Yet salaries of government school teachers was increased by 80% in 2008 by the Congress to win elections in 2009. Our most revered Prime Minister is on record boasting about recruiting 700,000 new teachers for government schools. So, how do you hide the dire standards of teaching? By making it easier to pass out, of course. The Gujarat Higher Secondary Education Board has declared that students who fail in 1 or 2 semesters will be passed if they pass in the other semesters. You need just 33% to pass. Our poor children. Their future is being strangled. By politician villains.