Indians at the fore

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Indians at the fore

Saturday, 01 February 2020 | Pioneer

Indians at the fore

Another Indian leads a global tech company. We must not forget that he, too, had to leave India to achieve success

Arvind Krishna, an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, has been chosen to lead IBM Corporation, one of the oldest names in American technology. This is yet another feather in the cap of engineers from India who have taken over the reins at leading American corporations after Satya Nadella at Microsoft and Sundar Pichai at Google. It is a matter of immense pride to see India-educated engineers and managers take leading roles at global corporate behemoths. But there are a couple of points that must be raised. First is the inability of India to create leading global companies and the opportunities that follow, which effectively forced thousands of young Indian men and now increasingly, women, to go to the US to make their fame and fortune. None of the three men mentioned above holds an Indian passport anymore, having sworn allegiance to the US.

There is, however, another problem right now, which is India’s declining standards of higher education. While the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, at least the older ones, might still make some global rankings, the plain and simple fact is that most Indian institutes of higher education are not ranked in the top 1000 universities of the world. One of the surprising facts that has emerged from the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan is that there are thousands of Indian students studying in China despite medical and engineering seats going abegging in India. Most likely that is because the education imparted in India has drastically declined, evident in the number of people who blindly believe WhatsApp posts. China has made it a point of pride to lift its colleges into the global rankings. This particularly hurts given that India has one of the youngest populations in the world. If we are to take advantage of our demographic dividend, we need to ensure we have top-notch centres of education. We must not forget that quality matters just as much as quantity. So while we must celebrate the success of these three men and the countless other Indians who have become successful in the US and elsewhere, we must ask what we are doing to ensure that Indians keep climbing to the top across the world and how we are going to create success inside our shores. Right now, things are plainly not going too well.  

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