India graduates almost a million engineers every year, but the largest employer (IT industry) hires less than 20% of them. While the quantity is high, the quality of these graduates is highly suspect, and companies struggle to find high-quality talent to fuel their growth. If India has to deliver on the promise of being a product nation and reap the demographic dividend, this chasm needs addressing. Students, institutions, and industry are responsible for the poor quality of talent, and this is a systemic problem. Motivated students need to enter the stream, institutions need the right faculty and curricula to produce quality graduates, and the industry needs to focus on ongoing upskilling to push the quality higher. 

The education ecosystem is intertwined with the social fabric. The demographic dividend (a very high percentage of the young, working population) has to balance with the ageing population (which will grow three times over the next 30 years), and unless there is equitable and inclusive development, the country can’t sustain the growth trajectory. We need to tackle the challenge of elderly care in India, urban habitat designs, and healthcare for all, in addition to education for all.

We need to design our social structures for our scale, and our unique challenges and this requires systems thinking to address the problems and policy skills to propose solutions that are balanced and implementable at scale.

We want to reimagine education, reshape careers, and renew society. Let’s engage and collaborate!