Bridge industry-academia gap: Police Commissioner

Updated on: Monday, October 25, 2010

Though India produces almost seven times the number of B-school graduates the United Kingdom does, only half of the 84,000 candidates being produced by the 1,400 approved B-schools in the country are “fit to join work,” Commissioner of Police T. Rajendran said here on Saturday.

Quoting from a recent McKinsey report, he said that though three million youngsters are being hired every year by the Indian industry, only 0.5 million can be considered qualified enough to join an international corporate office.

“There is a serious shortage of employable talent in India,” he said. Mr. Rajendran was speaking at a seminar on the ‘Paradox of the great Indian talent pool: The employability challenge,' organised by the Bharathiar School of Management and Development of Bharathiar University, Coimbatore.

He said that the evolution of the MBA degree as a minimum job qualification seems to be the corporate sector's attempt to work around the flaws in the university system. “Shackled by State budgets, India's notoriously under-funded universities have become functional teaching shops rather than being institutes of creative thought and research. Whereas, an MBA curriculum by its very nature demands innovative thinking and case study approach, both of which the university curricula rarely encourages,” he added. According to him, the paradox of an acute shortage of employable manpower amid the surplus of graduates being produced in the country will continue “unless the industry-academia gap is bridged and the curriculum becomes more practical”.

G. Ramprasad, CEO, Tata Teleservices (Tamil Nadu Circle) said the challenge was to effectively manage the transition from the ‘educated' to the ‘employable'.

Vice-Chancellor of Bharathiar University C.Swaminathan spoke.

Bridge industry-academia gap: Police Commissioner

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