Why there’s a huge gulf between Modi’s 'Digital India' dream and reality

After Swachh Bharat and Make in India, now with his two latest “India-series” initiatives, Digital India and Skill India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has clearly created an impression of a man who is on a mission to quickly make the India of his dream a reality. His last initiatives broadly tell us how he expects India to catapult into the digital age and become a HR superpower of the world. The Prime Minister’s proposed trip to the Silicon Valley in September and the plan for a MSG-type rockstar reception will provide him a high impact making public platform to announce India’s resolve to become a digital superpower right in the digital capital of the world. 

In essence, Modi’s Digital India aims at creating an information superhighway and making government and public services available at fingertips for any ordinary mortal of the country. No doubt, his desire for an India without a digital divide between the haves and have-nots is certainly a laudable one. It may be quite logical to presume that the Prime Minister, who is keen to invest so much of public and private resources to realise his dream, has done his homework on how and why his new digital initiatives will take India to the desired destination. People, who have brought him to the high office with so much of expectations, certainly do not want to see him ultimately validating the age-old adage that says, road to hell is paved with good intentions. 

Available data suggest that the economic divide automatically does not go away with the creation of an information superhighway or by making digital technology available to everyone. If we look at the US, where digital revolution has surged much ahead than in most other nations – both in its spread and depth – we find that the country has not only failed to reduce the gap between the haves and have-nots, but on the contrary, widened it further. In 2011, the US mean income was $63,000 whereas the median household income was only $50,054; more and more people have been falling behind. Decreasing income means availability of fewer resources for everything, including education and healthcare that are of key importance for removing the digital divide. A study shows that up to 50 percent of U.S. households are now living in an unenviable situation; if an emergency struck, they could not come up even with $2,000 within 30 days! Probably, Modi should re-examine his assumptions that by simply introducing digital technology and information superhighway he would be able to remove the digital divide and make every Indian better off.  

Unlike the increase in the number of people who keep falling into the depressing side of the divide, a small number of highly educated workers tend to disproportionately benefit from the digital revolution. This is because the digital economy is skill-biased and does not treat people with low-level of education well. The growing income inequality in the US among people with college degrees and above vis-à-vis workers without such education is a clear reflection of this reality.  In the digital era earnings of workers with higher education have been surpassing those without a college degree.

Peter Drucker once mentioned that in the knowledge society upward mobility was available to everyone who had the knowledge required for a job and that knowledge could be acquired through formal education. Thus, knowledge has become a real “means of production” and the ability to produce and use it for wealth creation is now a vital skill essential for individual’s growth in the new economy. Hence, the education system must be designed to create this skill and for this to happen, reforming the formal education system must receive topmost priority. Unfortunately, Modi so far has not given any indication of his intention to do this. His choice of the current HRD minister and her deputy only confirms the importance he provides to education. 

In his seemingly visionary statement during the launch of Skill India initiative, Modi gave an idea about what kind of knowledge power he wanted to rely upon for making India a digital superpower. He said, “In the last century, we were known globally for the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology). But this century, our need is for ITIs (industrial training institutes)”.  

It is probably naïve to think that India can be skyrocketed to the driver’s seat in the knowledge economy riding on the ITIs. As the US data show, the digital economy has less demand for people without higher education. The wage gap between the workers with graduate degrees and above has been growing compared to those who do not have college degrees and who are school dropouts. The Indian Labour Bureau’s 2014 survey also shows that among those with training from ITIs, the unemployment rate is as high as 14.5per cent against the overall average of 2.6per cent. By shifting the focus from IITs to ITIs Modi will only scale up this national misery. In the second machine age instead of introducing radical reforms in our formal education system, singular focus on mass-level vocational training institutes, which receive trainees from India’s largely dysfunctional secondary schools, will lead to catastrophic consequences. 

It is important to recognise that in the skill-biased digital economy knowledge per se is important. What matters is high-end knowledge capable of performing complex technical and cognitive tasks. The digital transformation requires a greater pool of skilled STEM-proficient (science, technology, engineering and technology) workers. Creating mere degree granting institutions for providing commoditised knowledge is certainly not a solution.  The knowledge-era education system must be based on economy’s requirement for inquisitive mindsets and creative problem-solving skills. The “end” of education cannot be reduced to only acquisition of a fixed body of knowledge or a degree.

The government must acknowledge the fact that high performing higher education system cannot be built on a weak foundation of primary and secondary education. Starting from the initial years of schooling, when children are most creative and inquisitive, the education system must develop students’ ability for convergent and divergent thinking that must get further refined as the learners move up in pursuit of advanced education. The instructors at all levels will be also much better placed to manage the creative mindset development process if trained to contemplate the limitations of their knowledge and the uncertainties they need to navigate under high-rate of knowledge obsolescence. 

The on-going digital revolution provides a great opportunity for India to bypass a whole era of public education and put our millions of primary and secondary schools in every nook and corner of the country on cutting edge of education. Modern information infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT), big data, etc. has made it a real possibility. It would be a mistake to look at the problem of quality school education only through the traditional prism of non-availability of good buildings, top-quality learning resources and instructors. Using technology India must figure out how to leverage the available information and pedagogical resources – both within the country and globally – and share it with every student and school effectively for the intellectual growth of everyone. At a very reasonable cost it is possible to continuously collect and share data among Indian schools, colleges and universities on different instructional techniques used by these institutions and even by individual instructors. Say for example, if the students of a school are demonstrating better performance in language or mathematics, the teaching and learning techniques used in that school by the instructor(s) can be shared with other schools. There is no reason why, with today’s communication technology, the actual classes and teaching techniques of teachers receiving national awards every year cannot be shared with other schools all over the country to improve the quality of the teaching-learning process everywhere. 

Since the Indian Prime Minister is planning to undertake a visit to the Silicon Valley very shortly, hopefully he will attempt to maximise the utility of this visit for developing India’s knowledge-power. MSG-type rock-star performance may be high on optics, but low on substance, though it might be difficult for Modi to avoid such a show considering his penchant for mega publicity events. Also, many successful knowledge-based businesses, some headed by NRIs, will surely try to exploit this visit for promoting their narrow corporate interests in India. 

Silicon Valley is densely populated with many iconic and game-changing knowledge-based companies and institutions like Google, Stanford University, Coursera, Khan Academy, Facebook, Cisco, etc. They are involved in various types of exciting innovative activities that are fast transforming the education sector. Khan Academy’s path-breaking instructional material have already impacted in a big way how we learn mathematics and other STEM subjects, benefitting millions of students all over the world. A few high-profile executives of some Valley-based companies have even set up their own educational institutions that have the potential to create the foundation for a new education system of the knowledge era. For example, former Google executive Bharat Mediratta and Max Ventilla have set up AltSchool, which is a network of schools with an interdisciplinary team aimed at offering experimental learning. 

Instead of only inviting the Valley-based companies to come to India for producing their products and services here showing India’s advantage of skilled knowledge worker (availability of which is very much overhyped if compared with millions of poorly literate or totally illiterate population of employable age in the country), Modi must explore the possibility of engaging those organisations for bringing a total revolution in the education sector. That can help in realising his dream of making India a HR superpower in the coming decades. In fact, the Prime Minister can also request his friend Barack to share his experience of involving the Silicon Valley based organisations in his far-reaching initiatives to make the American school education system innovation-driven.