DailyPost 2601
DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND TO NATIONAL LIABILITY
Indian politicians have gained an uncanny knack of picking up any fanciful topic and make it sell. The gullible people have always believed in them and continue to do the same. God knows if it is Stockholm Syndrome – a crazy sentiment of the victim towards the captor. It might range from Bangalore being made Singapore or bullet trains crisscrossing the nation or the very old ones of poverty being eliminated and quality health care being ushered in as a fundamental right. And it is endless. In the same vein we have leaders after leaders vouching for democratic dividend and how that would transform the nation.
It has not happened so far and by any stretch of logical imagination is not likely to happen in the foreseeable future. Certainly not by the present lot of leaders and the present ecosystem which can under no circumstance become a master human resource enabler. Let’s first have some clarity on democratic dividend itself. Democratic dividend is “the economic growth potential that can result from shifts in a population’s age structure, mainly when the share of the working-age population is larger than the non-working-age share of the population.” The qualifying word is “potential” whereas as the Indian leaders presumed it to be an automatic phenomenon.
The presumption was nearly magical. You have a young population in the initial working age bracket and the country zooms into growth and prosperity. The ones who were* mandated to transform the young population,* supposedly fit to work, into demographic dividend for the nation had absolutely no idea, as to how it could be done. They did not have any idea of anything beyond the rabble rouser type war cry of demographic dividend. Amongst them might be one group which thought that just the war cry would make happen, no effort needs to be put in, there was certainly another a more devious group which was selling this idea for personal and political party’s gains.
Whatever may be the predilection, the proven reality is that it has failed with no signs of recovery of it ever happening in the direction of the democratic dividend. What are enablers of democratic dividend, does the leadership and planners are not aware of? Do they have no idea how Israel became a HR machine through conscription? Does the demographic dividend’s direct connect with quality of education, the expertise which the youngsters carry remains unknown? How human resources have been scaled to become deliverables the world over need not be taught to people, who sermonize supposedly knowing everything under the sun. Why don’t they start with universal best quality education, everything else will fall in line in a decade? The soothsayers of demographic dividend have been the harbingers of national population liability.
CREATING A GREAT WORKING CLASS CANNOT HAPPEN WITH SLOGANS AND SERMONS.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.