India’s Fascination with Planning
The sky is falling, the sky is falling - India is going to run out of engineers soon!
Here is a news item Projected shortage of engineering manpower rings alarm bells which is projecting forward the current boom in IT recruitment in India and raises concern that India will run out of engineers, particularly in non-IT industries.
And the proposed solution?
| Quote: |
|
Academic sources suggest a major planning and development initiative in the next couple of years. The dean of a premier institution and a placement officer in a private engineering college near Chennai came up with the same idea — industry bodies such as NASSCOM and CII must set up a task force, in collaboration with universities and institutions, to project the entire industry’s manpower needs over the next five to ten years. They can evolve a strategy to meet those requirements and identify specific branches of study they need to promote. The force can put in place a strong industry-institute framework to foster collaboration between in the overall interest of education and industry. |
Yes, that will do it. We will invite wise men to sit around a table, and project the entire industry’s (no less!) manpower needs. Humble little people like me cannot even project a small team’s staffing needs over, say, the next 6 months, but of course, these worthies can project demand 10 years ahead for the entire industry. (Technical note: No, there is no law of large numbers that lets you get away with it here - the demand for staffing is at least partly scale invariant because a few large companies constitute so much of the demand, so you are adding very dissimilar random variables to get the total demand).
In the post-independence socialist era of India, an omniscient government ministry, ably assisted by the Planning Commission of India used to project demand and react ahead of time. And that kind of foresight led to … an awesome per capita GDP of somewhere around $300 by 1990 and the famed Hindu rate of growth.
Old habits die hard.