Every Single Minute

By Rajeshwar Upadhyaya By the time one realises the difference between tirelessly wanting power and then living with power alone for all your life, the damage has already been done.. Marlowe, a famous Elizabethan playwright, may perhaps have surpassed Shakespeare but did not live long enough. He is credited with reintroducing the concept of High Tragedy to the European thought for the first time since the ancient Greeks. Doctor Faustus is his most famous and enduring play dealing with a learned man who sold his soul to the Devil in return for power and knowledge. The good doctor already has ample knowledge; he feels exhausted with the gigantic amounts he already knows in many schools of wisdom. He also feels they are arid and not really of value, rejecting in turn, Logic, Law, Medicine and Theology as being incomplete and unsatisfying. In his hubris of being the most learned man of his time, one who has literally reached the limits of each field, Faustus decides to learn Magic an

We first need to assess if there is an opportunity and if there is a real need. If you look at both perspectives, the answer is yes; but the question is who has this need? Both the government and the industry need people to be skilled. The Government ought to leverage India’s demographic dividend but currently there are several segments which are not a part of the India’s growth trajectory such as the tribal groups, majority of rural population and BPL(Below Poverty Line) youth in both rural and urban areas. I am sure this serves the interest of the industry as well since industry has a pressing need of finding people with adequate skills to fulfill their growth plans. Therefore, there is a huge opportunity for multiple players to provide solutions. The challenge this industry faces is that this exercise has never been done before to the scale and size that India needs today. We are targeting 500 million people to be skilled by 2022. There are two issues: firstly, how do we mobilize t