In a country which invests barely 3% of its GDP in education, we have education departments buying smartboards, tablets and smartphones, when they can’t even pay salaries to their teachers. Why do we need tutoring apps for children? With different types of tutoring, education will no longer be a means for upward social mobility. True education has to be through personal interaction and we are being stupid falling prey to these apps, which can prepare students for examinations and tests but not for life.
A large portion of our economic growth in the last four decades has been in the services sector, predominantly the IT sector. Barring some of the large companies, most IT startups are platforms for aggregation of services, which essentially produce nothing. Their claim to bring in efficiency and provide services at cheaper rates actually pushes down the earnings and wages of the workers, forcing them to work on inhuman terms, while at the same time cutting into the profit margins of enterprises engaged in real, physical economic activity. The question here is: Who are these cheaper prices for? Is it really for the people who can afford to pay more, even at the cost of fair wages and humane working conditions for the deprived? It is the latter who need more money, to buy more and kick-start the economy. A little redundancy is actually good. It not only generates jobs, but it also ensures better conditions for our working people.
Do we know who bears the cost of frauds in the banking sector? While financial institutions aim to cut their transaction costs by employing less people, the cost of frauds is transferred to the customers who end up paying larger processing charges and get lower rates of interest on their deposits. Once again, we are pushing more money into the hands of those who have enough and grabbing it from the smaller man whose job has been taken away under the guise of technology. Worse, there is a whole new breed of criminal entrepreneurs who make insane amounts of money by compromising sensitive data and communications. In the US, companies are now quietly paying off hundreds of thousands of dollars to organisations that trace, negotiate and settle stolen money. Security frameworks are becoming more difficult with cloud services bringing in enormous complexity and security challenges. It has become a scary war of wits between nation states and crime syndicates playing for big bucks. The criminals invest unimaginable amounts of money in finding vulnerabilities and writing algorithms to break passwords and even compromise OTPs.
In a country which invests barely 3% of its GDP in education, we have education departments buying smartboards, tablets and smartphones, when they can’t even pay salaries to their teachers. Why do we need tutoring apps for children? With different types of tutoring, education will no longer be a means for upward social mobility. True education has to be through personal interaction and we are being stupid falling prey to these apps, which can prepare students for examinations and tests but not for life.
Am I against technology? No, I am only saying that we have to be awake and clear about our priorities. Our priority today is to create jobs for millions, not to bring in technology to enrich a few. Yes, we must master the latest technology but also use it judiciously for high-end research and innovation, not for reducing jobs and making people poorer.
When it comes to innovation, my first observation is that all the major inventions and discoveries like electricity, telephony, the internal combustion engine, thermionic valve, transistor, LCD, LED, etc, had been made before the 1960s came to an end. Since then, the game has been to scale up processor speeds and integration to keep increasing computing power. New research is expensive and time-consuming and, with state funding drying up, meaningful research has taken the back seat. The result is that we are seeing more applications than inventions and discoveries.
There is also the growing realisation that these technologies, if you can call them that, are playing havoc with social equilibrium. Countries are concerned over the concentration of power in the hands of companies like Apple, Amazon and Google. What is also worrisome is that IT and social networking are perpetuating stereotypes, reinforcing perceptions and prejudices, instead of challenging them. Emerging infotech is fuelling global inequality, while increasing social tension and dividing humans into hostile camps. They are doing a tremendous disservice by pushing people into pigeonholes where they can be classified and controlled.
It is sad to see that many of our bright engineers can only think of apps when considering ideas for startups. The super efficiency promised by these apps is a chimera—it is bad for society. Can we use human-scale technology, in sync with nature, without being obsessed with efficiency? Fair wages for employees, humane working conditions, social security, education, health and shelter for the families have to be a part of the human cost, not forgetting a component of leisure, recreation and upgrading of skills. Check why American farmers are increasingly opting for old-fashioned tractors, like the John Deere Model D of 1923, instead of modern fuel-efficient models. They want machines which are simpler to maintain with no proprietary software and expensive spares. Also, we can no longer shut our eyes to the ecological damage, destruction of biodiversity, fatal addictions, malnutrition, organ damage, violent conflicts, inhuman working conditions, suppression of wages and profiteering which are being normalised by many oil companies, pharmaceuticals, fast food chains, armaments, financial institutions and rating agencies.
We have world-class technology institutes. They should be leading an industrial renaissance. But instead of that, 80% of our graduates are becoming coders for the software industry. Even our ITI-trained turners and fitters refuse to work on the shop floor. Should we blame them? No, not as long as a stock broker earns more than an engineer, typing code is mistaken for technology and governments do not amend antique labour and land laws. A correction here can be a game-changer. I am reminded of how Bajaj Auto emerged as a world leader in building the 100-cc engine motorcycle. They started by offering more attractive packages than the software-wallahs to suitable students from good engineering colleges. These were students with a passion for engineering. Bajaj Auto built a formidable R&D capability with these engineers and, together with TVS and Hero, they are now global leaders in the motorcycle market. We also saw how Sundram Fasteners became one of the top ancillary manufacturers for General Motors and Mukand became a major stainless steel manufacturer. There are many such stories of what can be achieved if leaders in positions of authority can get the big picture. Let us do it now.
The writer is an Indian civil servant and a former Chairman of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC). The views expressed are personal. This is the third of a five-part series that will appear over a period of time.