Imparting skills in our ITIs
WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
D. N. Bezboruah
The latest Union budget seems to have gone down very well with the entire
country except for the stock exchange. The Sensex has tumbled about 2,000
points since February 29, and there is hardly any indication of any recovery in
the next two weeks or so. But then the bearish sentiment of the stock exchange
itself is a clear indication that the budget must be good for Bharat if it is
not so palatable for the money market. As for me, I am particularly happy that
the Finance Minister should have given a hike of 17 per cent to higher
education and 20 per cent to elementary and secondary education. This has
resulted in an allocation of Rs 38,703 crore for education, which is about Rs
14,500 crore more than last years allocation. This also brings the allocation
for education to five per cent of the GDP from last years allocation of just
four per cent. While this is laudable, we have still not managed to allocate
for education what developed countries regard as the bare minimum:
six per cent of the GDP. However, the Finance Ministry and the Human Resource
Development Ministry must address themselves to one major aberration of the
education scenario in the country, namely, the problem of drop-outs. The
greatest tragedy of our education system is that only about four per cent of
the children who join the primary schools of India get to appear for the school
final examinations. And yet, so little has been done to provide any worthwhile
vocational training for the millions who drop out of schools and have to face
the world with no skills or abilities that could enable them to earn a decent
livelihood.
While the high rate of drop-outs is indeed unfortunate, it would be unrealistic
to imagine that the drop-out rate can be brought down appreciably in a few
years. We still have a large number of single-teacher rural primary schools
which obviously cannot be of any earthly use to the children who have to attend
them. In our own State we have situations where the school watchman has to
conduct the morning assembly because the school has no teacher at all on some
days. Given this scenario, we have to be pragmatic and provide skills to as
many adolescents and youths in vocational training centres so that our school
drop-outs can make a living. It is obviously for this reason that our Prime
Minister and the Chief Minster of Asom have given so much importance to our
industrial training institutes (ITIs) and to the need for upgrading them to
centres of excellence for imparting skills in the next few years. Our Prime
Minister has expressed his confidence that with the support that
the government intends to provide to the ITIs, they could become nodal centres
for vocational training and for imparting useful skills. One has only to look
at the ITIs of Asom to realize that at least in the case of this State the
existing ITIs can only be the foremost saboteurs of vocational training and the
imparting of useful skills. This is not because there is anything wrong with
the idea itself, but rather because greedy men and women of straw have so
ruined these institutions over the years as to make them unrecognizable as
institutions that impart any kind of skills.
There are 29 ITIs in Asom, out of which four are exclusively for women.
Regardless of the entrance qualification set for admission to the ITIs, there
are even some graduates attending these ITIs so serious is the unemployment
problem of the State. These ITIs receive regular grants from the State
government and the Centre, and of late there have been grants even from
international financial institutions like the World Bank. Recently, the World
Bank allocated Rs1.064 billion against 10 schemes to be implemented in 13 of
these ITIs. And yet wonder of wonders most of the ITIs do not even have
blackboards that are black any longer. Quite often, the instructors do not have
chalk to write with unless they have bought some with their own money. In some
cases, blackboards have even been repainted by instructors with their own
money. Most of the ITIs are in a dilapidated condition and the hostels are even
unsafe for human habitation. The cooks and other staff meant for hostels
are engaged in other work (as admitted by the Craftsmen Training authorities
in their replies to questions raised under the Right to Information Act). We do
not know what other work keeps the hostel cooks occupied, but given the
all-pervading corruption that prevails in the management of the ITIs, it is
safe to infer that the personnel appointed are made to work in ITI officers
homes. As a result, trainees in the hostels often have to cook their own food!
Not surprisingly, some hostels have just about four inmates. However, these are
mere peccadilloes compared to the other acts of rampant corruption that
characterize the administration of the ITIs.
Perhaps the most outstanding act of social injustice is that hundreds of ITI
trainees in all the 29 ITIs of the State have not been paid their stipends for
months together. Likewise, many instructors have had to leave because they were
not paid their salaries for months. And to cap it all, there are clear
indications that corrupt practices have taken away whatever resources remained
so as to turn the whole business of imparting vocational training into an empty
ritual and a hoax. Take, for instance, a situation where practical classes are
not held for months because the materials required for practical classes have
not been supplied. In April 2006, some former trainees of ITI, Guwahati
addressed a complaint to the Principal Secretary, Labour and Employment
Department of the Government of Asom about corrupt officers of the ITI,
Guwahati spending money on very sophisticated equipment for the ITI that have
never been tested or used and will never be used for training. Such
equipment (like an American computer that runs on solar energy) has remained
in the crates in which they were delivered without anyone having opened the
crates even to check or test the equipment. As far as the ITI is concerned, the
equipment is no better than very expensive junk that will never get used. And
when do people acquire such expensive junk costing lakhs or crores of rupees of
public money? Obviously they do so when the supplier does not know what to do
with some defective equipment and some institution has lots of grants that can
be siphoned off by acquiring crates of junk that never need be opened.
Obviously, there is much of the live-and-let-live philosophy at work if
superior officers can allow such brazen misappropriation of public money
without any monitoring at any stage. And yet, there is hardly any room for
surprise when such authorities of the ITIs refer to the trainees of their
institutes as street children.
It does not matter how many of our leaders regard the ITIs as centres of
excellence or the nodal institutions for the development of skills. Unless
there is a concerted effort to root out corrupt practices that have ruined
these institutions, we are likely to remain where we are in the matter of
imparting the required skills and abilities. Our cherished institutes will
remain the dumping grounds of defective training equipment that are not needed
by the trainees and for which corrupt officers have paid out crores of rupees
from the exchequer. True, such officers do not leave telltale fingerprints. But
the very fact that they are prepared to buy equipment that institutions in
their charge do not need should be proof enough that they play such diabolic
games because they too are the beneficiaries of such deals. But the corruption
of the corrupt does not end here. It extends to extreme vindictiveness against
anyone who seeks to expose them. They harass such people, transfer
them and even take away their jobs. It is this aspect of corruption that is
far more corrosive because it reduces the number of crusaders that we need so
badly by wearing them out. The strategy is similar to what the criminal
terrorists do when they want to eliminate all opponents. They just scare the
daylights out of them. However, it is the other facet of rationalization of
corruption that is most pernicious. It has to do with the warped attitude of
the corrupt. The corrupt individual rationalizes his/her wrongdoing as
something inevitable and legitimate in a corrupt world. This is a way of making
others also believe that in the world of the corrupt only the corrupt can
survive. It is this kind of rationalization that makes corrupt souls refer to
ITI trainees as street children, the implication being that no one should
make a fuss about street children being deprived.
If we really believe that this country needs employable people with
well-developed skills, the corrupt lords of the ITIs will have to be dealt with
first of all, their misdeeds made public and the guilty sacked and sent to
jail. Thereafter we shall need to identify the kind of skills that are of value
in todays world skills like welding, plumbing, masonry, carpentry, silk
screen printing, electronics, baking, tailoring and so on and to identify the
power tools of the 21st century that will enable people to use their skills
more efficiently, ensure quality work and increase turnover. Without a total
cleaning up of the ITIs and a review of the training they provide, we shall
merely replicate the rituals and the fraud that have gone on for years in the
name of craftsmen training and the imparting of useful skills. Merely calling
the ITIs centres of excellence will get us nowhere at all.
(The Sentinel,SUNDAY 9 MARCH 2008 )
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