India's 1.2 billion population is its biggest asset. Visit any Indian city today and you'll be overwhelmed by the energy of its youthful population, their hurry to live the good life, make the most of the new Indian story unfolding. It's an exciting narrative that a vast majority of older generations of Indians could only dream of but seldom realize. For them life was not about choices but chance. In sharp contrast, for today's 50 percent of the country's population, who are below 25 years of age, there are education and career choices galore. In the big cities, jobs are available at every turn – walk in, work at home, work your way up, or just work wonders with your academic qualifications. Ambitious employers offer many easy options as they compete to build capacity in one of the fastest growing economies in the world. By 2020, India's workforce is expected to expand by a 100 million, making the country one of the most prolific talent providers in the world, accounting for 25 percent of the global workforce. Yet serious challenges remain in ensuring that India's youth bulge does not outsize its promise. While the Right to Education Act (RTE) passed on April 1, 2010 guarantees basic elementary education to every child, up to 1.2 million teachers are needed to effectively implement it, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of schools that have to be built. No doubt, the Act is well-intentioned and timely, especially considering that the 2009 Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum had ranked India at an abysmal 101 (out of the 133 countries evaluated) for its primary education. But school education alone won't help. As of now, only one out of every eight school going child in India manages to get a college degree (the US ratio is five out of eight). As a result, only 12 percent of the roughly 509 million workers currently employed in India are skilled, according to the Education Ministry. Moreover, the higher education infrastructure remains grossly inadequate despite the government's recent move to allow foreign universities to operate in the country.While there has been a spurt in higher education facilities across the country in recent years, the system still remains badly compromised. A NASSCOM report says that a whopping 75 percent of the fresh engineering graduates in India are unemployable. And no less depressing in all this is the continued exclusion of a majority of India's approximately 160-million-strong Muslim population from the country's new-found will to widen the reach of education and qualify more people for employment. Nearly one-third of India's Muslims live on less than Rs. 550 (SR46.5 or $12.3) a day, according to a recent survey conducted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER). The survey found that the plight of Muslims in rural areas was only slightly better than that of the Dalits and tribal adivasis who occupy the lowest rung of the majority Hindu community's vile caste structure. It revealed that Dalit, adivasi and Muslim children are far less likely to enroll in schools and more likely to drop out than others. NCAER's report came amid raging debate across the country on reservations in jobs and educational institutions for Muslims. The issue had come to the fore after a recent Supreme Court interim order upheld the validity of 4 percent job and educational reservations for “backward members” of the Muslim community in Andhra Pradesh state. Understandably, the Muslim community itself is divided over reservations for its so-called “backward members” – mainly those who were formerly low-caste Hindus – because Islam does not recognize such categorization. A more pertinent argument in the debate is the fact that Muslims in the south Indian states are far better of than their northern counterparts. Kerala state has 12 percent job reservation for Muslims, Karnataka four percent, and Tamil Nadu 3.5 percent. But it isn't job reservations alone that is helping these southern Muslim communities, including those in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. In these states, the Muslims tend to get automatically streamlined into the educational and job mainstreams mainly because they speak the mother tongue – Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada or Marathi. Contrast this with the plight of Muslims in the Hindi heartland in the north, comprising the “cow-belt states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, etc. Here, the state governments have unrealistic requirements for providing even elementary education in Urdu for Urdu-speaking Muslim children. Worse, university education in Urdu is virtually not made available to them beyond the narrow confines of Urdu language and literature, for which there are very few jobs available at present. Ironically, while Urdu appears to be neglected in the north, the language, thanks largely to the wonderful lyrics of popular Bollywood songs, is undergoing a revival elsewhere across the country. The National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language (NCPUL) which had until recently around 350 centers now has 662 centers, each with 30 or more students. The new centers are mainly in the northeast, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. NCPUL's students reportedly include Bollywood actors Amir Khan and Esha Deol, and also former minister Jaswant Singh who was dumped by his Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party for penning a laudatory book on Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's Quaid-e-Azam. For Urdu lovers everywhere, the opportunity has never been so ripe for reviving their long-standing demand that Urdu must be officially made a potent, mainstream Indian language. This still remains the first major step to be taken to uplift the plight of India's Muslims as a whole, who presently rank substantially lower than their share of the population on every index of development – from income, education and health to share in government services, share in private enterprise, role in self-employment, and membership in parliament and legislatures. – SG Feedback: [email protected] __
