[Assam] Imparting skills in our ITIs-D. N. Bezboruah (The Sentinel, SUNDAY 9 MARCH 2008 )

Sun Mar 9 15:35:31 CST 2008

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 year’s allocation. This also brings the allocation for education to five per cent of the GDP from last year’s 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 today’s 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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