by Vinod Rai
Table 5: No Overarching Law—The Fate of Regulation
Source: Adapted from Nalin Mehta, India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Changed the Ways We Think and Act. New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2008, p. 120.
Each time a minister sought to bring in a big-picture law to regulate the new broadcasting realities in their entirety, their impulses were draconian, threatening to severely clip freedoms private networks had so assiduously carved for themselves. The last such draft of a law in 2007, for example, would have made it illegal for private channels to do live interviews with anyone in India without prior permission from a bureaucrat.
The incomplete transition of the controlling superstructure has translated into wide areas of legal uncertainty on broadcasting. It has meant severe infighting for control between overlapping arms of the state, resistance by new economic actors and the judiciary and the state governments taking on interventionist roles as arbiters in periodic crises over broadcasting. In practice, this has meant low predictability on the goalposts of the playing-field. It translated into governance by administrative notifications based on the whims and fancies of incumbent bureaucrats in control and an even larger role for the courts. Almost every order is legally disputed and quite often reversed or modified by the courts.
In all major liberal democracies, a single regulator runs all aspects of broadcasting. In India, the problem has been that even though TRAI was to create a level playing field for the new economy, the information and broadcasting ministry, which was the custodian of television in the days of socialist monopoly, never fully transferred its ownership. The old one remained with the new regulator, building tensions in the system and ensuring they remained in the fight for control. As a former TRAI chairman points out:
The regulator there [in other countries] is in a way a single regulator . . . In India there have always been two regulators: one is the department and ministry and the other is TRAI because some functions are still with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and Department of Telecom. After all, DoT issues licences and manages spectrum, the Information and Broadcasting Ministry is responsible for the issue of licence of the DTH . . .
We had a regulator earlier, which was regulating monopoly, then you got a new regulator to create a level playing field but the original regulator remained. So the ownership never got fully transferred. The endowment was not made, ownership was not transferred. So there is always a limited role for TRAI when compared to the FCC [in the USA] or [the UK’s] OfCom.16
In the overlapping haze of regulation that is broadcasting, as many as ten different government institutions are legally empowered to issue directions on broadcasting: the I&B ministry as policymaker and final arbiter of content oversight, TRAI as a regulator of technical issues like carriage and pricing, the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal for appeals against decisions, the Ministry of Communications for licencing, transmission equipment, satellites, Internet protocol TV, and district-level committees that can monitor and censor ‘certain programmes in the national interest’.17
Even the humble neighbourhood post office is involved in the regulations. All that is required to start a cable network is to fill a hundred-rupee form and register at a post office. There is no centralized system to track licenced cable operators and post offices are not even mandated to keep any record of renewals.
How many got renewed, how many did not get renewed. No one knows. So you have a huge chunk of cable operators spread all over in the districts . . . also having a lot of political local interest for their business expansion. Most of them had some kind of an invisible hand who was taking care of all sorts of activities with muscle power.18
Digital Will Drive Media but Its Business Model Is Still Emerging
With the number of Internet-enabled mobile phones crossing 300 million in India, data costs spiralling downward after the entry of Reliance Jio, and the ubiquity of personal devices, everyone agrees that the future of the Indian media lies in the mobile and digital space.
The 2017 IPL auction for five-year broadcast and digital rights for 2018–22, which was won by Star India at a whopping Rs 16,347.5 crore (Rs 54 crore per match), illustrated how the media game is changing. ‘For the first time in this country we are seeing a phenomenon where—for a media property—media, telecom and global technology and social media companies were bidding. A few other global e-commerce companies also examined it very closely. The competition was so diverse that it is anybody’s guess at what prices these things will go.’
In 2014, Hotstar bought IPL digital rights for roughly Rs 300 crore. In 2017, for five-year digital rights, Facebook was willing to pay Rs 3,900 crore. ‘Look at the multiples of growth. These companies have very different ways of looking at the commercial value of rights. It’s a totally different mix now. The media is being buffeted by different forces.’19
While the future is mobile and bandwidth may be the new oil, the challenge is that viable business models are still emerging. Technology and social change has disrupted the old media. Yet, it is still an open question on how to make good money sustainably from the new media.
What companies from e-commerce to media are doing currently is to invest essentially for the long run, by throwing money to build audiences in the hope that one day these communities will be monetized. Even as the new media has created a personal revolution of sorts where everybody can now be a content creator, it has also created an uncertain landscape, where aggregators and platforms like Google and Facebook are positioned to have the bulk of revenues. Ultimately, profitability is crucial for making sustainable good content and as India’s media companies change shape to digital-first models, the big question they all face is simple: how to make money from digital? How they answer it will reshape our information landscapes for the next decade.
XXII
New India Needs a New Model for Skill Development
Pawan Agarwal
India’s large young population presents it a unique opportunity to become ‘the human capital of the world’. The challenge, however, is to utilize the high proportion of young Indians, particularly the educated that are unemployed or underemployed. This is regardless of industry and businesses reportedly facing shortages of trained workers.
To address this paradox, the country’s education and training system must develop and align with both domestic and overseas demand for qualified people. Vocational education and training (VET) and skill development (SD) should be central to India’s development strategy. Developing a robust skill development ecosystem would better integrate education with the labour markets and act as an insurance against poverty.
This essay reviews the current scenario, making a case for a new approach and strategy to build a robust ecosystem for skill development for ‘New India’. It then lays down the key elements of a new model and institutional arrangements required for skilling in India. It also takes a holistic view of the country’s formal education and training system in order to build a synergy between the two.
Current Status
The formal VET system in India is small and underdeveloped. Merely 5.4 per cent of the country’s existing workforce has formal vocational training compared to 68 per cent in the UK, 75 per cent in Germany, 80 per cent in Japan and 96 per cent in South Korea.1 This does not include skill acquisition through informal channels, which is quite significant. In the formal sector, there is some vocational stream in schools, vocational training in Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) for workmen, in polytechnics for skilling a supervisory workforce, and professional education as a part of the country’s higher education system.
Skill Acquisition through Informal Channels
In India, skills are often ‘inherited’ and passed on from generation to generation, enabling individuals to carry on ancestral trade or occupations such as carpentry, plumbing, etc. Alternatively, some marketable expertise or skills are also acquired through apprenticeship to an ustad or skilled craftsman, enabling
the individual to enter the large informal sector. Usually, skill acquisition takes place through informal channels with little or no emphasis on general or academic skills. Such people are mostly self-employed or are in low-paying jobs with little prospect of economic advancement. The formal sector, which is often better paying, requires skilled people with not only vocational but also at least basic academic skills.
VET at School Level
Vocational education at school level is small in India. There have been attempts to introduce the vocational stream over the past few decades, but these have failed to make much of an impact. Currently, only 6120 against 250,000 senior/senior secondary schools in the country offer vocational courses.2 These together enrol less than 1 per cent of the students at the 10+2 level compared to over 50 per cent in China and 55 per cent in Japan. In addition, about 13,350 ITIs offer vocational courses after Class X (a few courses are after Class VIII and Class XII) in various trades. Total intake in such courses is about 1.4 million, which is less than one-tenth of the students passing out of Class X.3 Courses offered by the ITIs are not entirely aligned with the job opportunities available. A large majority of enrolment in ITIs is in the manufacturing trades that account for nearly two-thirds of all courses, while there are more job opportunities in the services sector. Further, the quality of vocational education and training provided both in the schools and ITIs is of poor quality, which is a major issue.
Vocational/Professional Education in Higher Education
After Class XII, students join universities and colleges for bachelors’ degrees. There are 800 universities and 39,000 colleges enrolling about 34.6 million students in the country. Two-thirds of these students pursue general or academic education. The remaining ones are professional courses, largely confined to engineering and education. In addition, about 12,000 stand-alone institutions outside the university system offer two-year diploma courses.4 These include polytechnics for engineering, nursing institutes and institutes for teacher education. Overall, higher education is skewed in favour of general or academic courses and vocational/professional studies are confined to some fields, such as engineering, IT and medical education, with fewer options in other fields. The quality of professional courses and mobility between degree and diploma courses are concerns. Certificate and diploma courses in polytechnics are often dead-end courses with no scope for further upward mobility and hence these are considered inferior qualifications.
Other Modes of Vocational Education and Skill Development
Apprenticeship training and short-term skilling are other major modes of vocational training and skill development in India. Apprenticeship, the preferred VET model globally, is grossly underdeveloped. Currently there are just about 300,000 apprentices in the country5 compared with more than 20 million in China. Recent reforms that provide for increased flexibility, enhanced compliance and higher stipends for apprentices are likely to increase the numbers. But far more coordinated efforts are needed to scale up apprenticeship significantly.
Recognizing the growing importance of skill development, Central and state governments have begun a plethora of skill development initiatives. Skilling courses range from a few weeks to a few months across many trades. The entire funding for such skilling comes from the government. Many private companies have emerged to deliver these training courses.
With a view to boost private initiatives in the training sector, the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) was set up in 2009. NSDC provides soft loans (and in some cases grants) for the purpose. It has also incubated setting up of industry-led Sector Skill Councils (SSCs) for creating national occupational standards (NOSs) and qualifications by job roles in various sectors. So far, forty SSCs have been established. A National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF) to facilitate mobility across skill levels is also in place.6 There have been efforts to consolidate the highly fragmented short-skilling space after the formation of a separate Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship in 2014.
Recent developments address some of the institutional issues but are mainly confined to short-term skilling. These have not had much impact on either the legacy VET system or on the formal education and training. VET reforms require a comprehensive approach and strategy that view it in conjunction with the formal education sector.
New Approach and Strategy
VET in the country is highly fragmented and underdeveloped and faces multiple challenges. In India, less than 10 per cent in the higher secondary classes (fifteen–sixteen years’ age group) pursue vocational education. At the undergraduate level in higher education, about 30 per cent of students pursue a vocational/professional stream. The remaining students pursue academic education. This is very low compared with advanced and industrialized countries, where often three-fourths of all young people pursue vocational/professional or skill-oriented education and training in all age groups. Apart from the size of the VET sector, multiplicity in names of institutions is confusing and distorts public choice. There is also a mindset issue where VET is taken as an ‘inferior’ qualification. Thus, this sector requires a new strategy and approach. Five areas (summarized below) require attention:
1) Capacity and public spending—Consistent with India’s demographic, economic profile and high growth performance, the VET sector has to grow rapidly. While the private sector dynamism could be leveraged, much of the investment must come from the government as VET often caters to the poorest and the most disadvantaged people. India spends less than one-tenth of its overall education spending on VET. But in many countries VET takes the lion’s share, often exceeding 60 per cent of the overall public spending. There is also the opportunity to use idle capacity or overcapacity of the formal sector, for instance, engineering colleges for VET courses.
2) Curricula, pedagogy, assessment and certification—For the VET sector, curricula, pedagogy and assessment require an approach different from the academic stream. It is more practice-oriented and aligned with job roles, making a strong industry-connect a ‘must’ for this sector. The teaching-learning methodology should involve less lecturing, note-taking, and more hands-on activities to allow for experiential and interactive learning. Industry-led SSCs that provide the basic building block for curricula, pedagogy and assessment now address this issue to some extent, but more and better alignment is needed, particularly in the context of the old legacy system and formal education. Apprenticeship fosters practical intelligence and enables better orientation for employability, compared to a single-track education system that leads to more youth dropping off the mainstream. Assessment and certification should not only establish equivalence between general and vocational education, but also provide for recognition of prior learning (RPL). This is particularly important for India since many people acquire skills informally. Finally, a unified qualification and credit framework is required to establish seamless link, between the VET sector and general education.
3) Professional development and cadre of VET teachers—There is a large gap in the demand and supply of trained vocational teachers. Currently, there is limited capacity for their training and professional development. In the absence of a separate cadre and limited career progression, the VET sector has failed to attract talented faculty. Systems and practices of hiring experienced practitioners and industry professionals should be streamlined in this respect and require a huge effort.
4) Institutional framework—Various types of VET institutions have little coordination among themselves. These have developed independent of each other. For instance, general education in schools and vocational training in ITIs are separated. So are vocational/professional training in polytechnics and stand-alone institutions vis-a-vis professional/technical education in universities and colleges. These are organized in silos with each having their own institutional arrangements for setting curricula, assessment and examination, teacher education, funding, regulation and governance. Thus, the institutional arrangements need to be rapidly overhauled.7
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sp; 5) Demand and cultural shift—There is a preference and attraction for white-collar jobs and an aversion to working with one’s in India. Thus, not surprisingly, general or academic education is preferred over the vocational option, resulting in lack of demand for VET education. Issues of societal perception and attitudinal bias are complex and do not have easy solutions. However, the fact that VET graduates find jobs or become self-employed more easily as compared with others is changing public attitudes towards this sector and contributing towards its credibility. Further demand for professional/skill certification can be generated by making provision for the same in the recruitment rules for public sector employment and conditions of contract for public works. Regulatory bodies can also make skill training and certification mandatory to not only create demand for qualified people but also to raise productivity and economic performance. The private sector can play a supporting role in this regard.
A New Model
The desired model framework for skill development through vocational education should provide opportunities for truly academically minded students to pursue education in mainstream academics while allowing others to be educated in applied streams, vocational and professional areas as per their choice. VET should be fully integrated with education at all four levels, cover apprenticeship and continuing education and training (CET) through short-term skilling courses. The larger move should be towards a unified National Qualification and Credit Framework (NQCF) to cover both general and vocational/professional education.