What should be the focus for a better young Generation?

Starting with the demographics, India represents almost 17.5% of the world's population, which means one out of six people on this planet live in India. The current population is around 1.27 billion; where male and female population representing 655.8 million and 614.4 million respectively. Sex Ratio is 940 females per 1000 males. But the most interesting part of the demographics is “More than 50% of India's current population is below the age of 25 and over 65% below the age of 35”. I am quoting that, as this is going to be the talking point here.

 About 72.2% of the population lives in some 638,000 villages and the rest 27.8% in about 5,480 towns and urban regions. It is evident from the statistics that India’s heart lies in the villages not in the big cities. But still focus factor is remaining with the big cities when it comes to expansion.

For now, let us focus on the societies influence over people, when I say people, especially kids and youth, as they cover half of our nation. Ten years before, the resources which we had is very less, but now it looks like we have more to offer and it is influencing big time in our nation, especially to the youth. It also has its flaws, take a silly example, who is remembering phone numbers of more than five people these days. Of course we don’t need to remember most of the things; as we have google in our finger tips but is that the right attitude?. But one thing we should keep in mind, wide spread technology usage mostly lies in the 27.8% populated areas.

Another worrying factor is, with the 17.5% of the world’s brain why do we have only 2.8% of the research output?  This shows we are contributing less to the World, when it comes to major innovations are concerned. We have cheered for the success of ISRO in Mangalyaan few days before; yes, we can take pride of that, it is one such a mission. But think of  the actual fact, we have actually stripped down to what others have achieved, like we made the cheapest insulin vaccine, cheapest car- the Tata nano, cheapest electrocardiogram, now the cheapest trip to Mars , in our first attempt. I am not looking to take away the credibility of our achievement. My point is why we are not often the first to make an innovation? Is our younger generation equipped to take over the nation to make a revolutionary change? What is lacking in our society?

I use to wonder, what is our society not doing but the west is doing for a major innovation? I want to share few things, which came up in my mind. It is easy to point out plenty of reasons, but we have to search for the solution and make it working. One thing is for sure; our imaginations/dreams are not growing big, and also we are not using our resources well. So, how does the society play with it?

I will make a small comparison to begin with, think of the movies getting released in India, am saying about our own movies in regional languages including bollywood. It stands out for its entertainment value; a good character in a movie might influence a kid watching it for molding his/her character to an extent. But romantic, dramatic movies are not going to influence the kids or youth in any big way. A kid is not going to dream big by watching these masala movies. We are releasing only very few movies with actual substance. But unlike this, we all know the varieties in hollywood, you can start thinking over it, there are n number of them, which speaks for itself. People will argue about the budget involved with it, but it doesn't matter here, as the relevance of what am trying to convey is different. Our movie fraternity and movie lovers may not like any of these statements, but movies do have a role in building a society for dreaming big. I never said our movies are bad, but am saying, it doesn't give enough imaginative ideas to our kids for exploring. Kids in the west are getting this opportunity in their regional languages. And we all know imagination brings innovation. Imagination power of a kid grows not just with this so called media, it grows with his/her surroundings. But this is just a silly example to show our industries are contributing less. 

Now coming into the bigger picture, in India we have around 650 universities, more than 35000 colleges and this is only going to increase. Around 20 million students are in higher education and half a million engineers are passing out each year.

But the skills of the graduates is an issue in hiring them, they need further training by companies. Shock reports have revealed a vast skills gap in India, with several surveys suggesting that half of all graduates are not employable in any sector based on industry standards. The standard of our education system is becoming weaker. We are not acquiring proper information during our graduation.

Another reason, our universities stands more for educational training not for the research. Students have to depend on the institutions particularly made for research, unlike in the west where even the private sector is doing more research in their universities and colleges by student’s participation. Here most of the research is separated out from the students by not planting it properly in universities and colleges. In India private sectors spend less in colleges to do a research is also a factor. And do you know our universities didn't feature in the top 200 universities around the world, surveyed by various world organizations, one of the biggest reason behind it is we do less research than others. Even our president quoted about it, in his one or two speeches. But all these can be taken care of, if there is intent not just with the government but also with the society.

Reaching out to the unreached in terms of technology and all other kinds of development is important as well. As we all know India also has the largest adult illiterate population in the world.

I would like to conclude by saying; Imagination, Information and Infrastructure are the three ‘I’s which is directly proportional to the fourth ‘I’, Innovation.

 “Our kid’s brain with imagination, graduates brain with information’s along with imagination, and to add in to this good infrastructure should be our focus”.

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