Where does human behaviour figure in our arguments????

So here's an interesting read in the newspaper... the author of the article moans about the apparent lack of people going in for civil engineering or mechanical engineering which are so important for building infrastructure... his viewpoint, there are just 12000 civil engineers being churned out evey year in Indian while we require around 70000 of them. He then goes on to offer a simplistic solution: build more engineering colleges to teach civil engineering... the logic being that more seats will guarantee more engineers... however i believe the author has forgotten to consider a very important factior here... that of human behaviour... and more specifically that of Indian behaviour...

The current state of the country is not a balanced one... There are three layers to it.. 1) the very rich business class... these thrive on family owned businesses which are still allowing them to live in great luxury. This also consists of the politicians, IAS, IPS, actors, sportspersons etc... 2)The upper middle class.. Somehow in India the upper middle class has always been the ones who studied well and got into services. Since time unknown their biggest strength has been their knowledge. .Like mercenaries they have studied and trained and gone into fiel;ds which would benefit them the most... Be it medicine , IT , Telecomm it doesnt matter as long as it keeps this section well fed and safe with not necessarily the biggest homes or cars but nevertheless pretty decent sized cars and houses.... and then you have the remaining people... they never have enough... they do not get the basics. they are so busy worrying about the next meal that they do not have time to plan and strategise for the future. Their kids are sent to mediocre schools with mediocre teachers... the mediocrity of the teachers also stems from the fact that in India for most teacher's they are not in the profession by choice. They are in teaching beccause they couldnt fit in anywhere else. I am not saying there are no good teachers in nda/... Of course there are god teachers too but they are too few to be able to cater to such a huge population. Plus they have too gone where they can bring in the most profits in terms of hefty salaries...
So the people the good teachers are most likelyu to reach is the urbanised, upper middle class and rich sections who are the only ones who can afford them. So the middle class and poorer sections under the current scheme of affair can most definitely be wriiten off. Without access to good teachers and guidance from their parents, there is very little they can dio except live life as it comes. most of them will go into the same line of work as their parents, be it farming, wotking ad menial labourers or doing chotta-mota sarkari jobs,. That leaves us with the rich and upper middle class.
The rich obviously do not need to do much in India except inherit their parent's businesses and as is being seen nowalso their constituencies in the case of prominent politicians... Yes siree... in this largest democracy in the world, what really exists is good old monarchy, be it politics or business... So they are not going to becme the civil and mechanical engineers we are so desperately praying for...
So now the obvious answer id these engineers will come out of the highly urbanised, educated upper middle class... no matter how small their size is in comparision to the rest of the population, they can definitely spare 70000 young bright minds to take on this task...So the author's suggestion is absolutely bang on... build more colleges which focus on civil and mechanical engineering... but wait a moment what is that you say??? Indians are brilliant people, they have amazing analytical minds... they are perfect for doing the donkey work of coding complex business applications for the American and European companies for why one-fourth , even one-tenth the price of getting Amewricans and Europeans to do it... really??? Lets outsource the jobs there.... Now the kids who were going to be our heroes, see these IT, ITES and telecomm jobs as higher paying jobs, They will help you buy your dream home in half a decade max, you will also be able to buyu your dream car in a couple of years... What do the manufacturing jobs offer these same young engineers in comparision?? what would he get for actually taking up the government job of building roads and bridges across the country without resorting to corruption.... And that is the question the author should really try to answer... What will keep these young mercenaries home... Hey I don't blame them... Heck I even confess to being one of them... What will you offer me to make me stay????

There is a lot happening in India... due to the IT boom it has really caught the eye of the developped naions. they want to invest here... we need better infrastructure to make them invest here... the returns will be manifold... can the government not offer better opportunities in terms of well paying jobs which are at least on par with the jobs offered by the IT companies to encourage the children to stay... I am sure many people are interested in building the roads that we require... pretty sure a lot of young minds would want to be part of it too... but they need to be given some incentive to work for you... I wouls therefore say the solution is not as simple as building more engineering colleges... hell a lot of seats in the Maharashtra engineering colleges go empty every year due to lack of students(Ex given from experience) Why are you putting money where it is not needed? intead give the existing colleges better research projects which will capture the minds of our young engineers... give them a chance to experience what they are studying first hand.... let them suggest solutions to your engineering problem, give them decent salaries... and see how many of them actually stay back...

The biggest problem with our country is that we do not address the root cause.. we are too afraid of reality.. we live too much in the short term... here's another queston to ponder over... when the remaining Asian countries catch up with us in terms of similar proficience in English(one of our biggest advantage so far as the IT services indutry is concerned) and the Americans find it cheaper to go there.... Where are the huge force of IT engineers we built up going to go and what are they going to do??? This scares me the most... We are so much into IT services too that if these projects were pulled out of Indian IT companies and sent out to these other locations... we would be screwed big time./...It's about ti,e India stopped being a service provider ONLY but that is a different story....

The need of the hour is stop finding stop gap solutions like building more colleges and start taking a more holistic look at what we have... and what we need... We have to learn to optimise.... we carry out such wastage that..... words cannot express my anger for it..... Indian's basically lack pride in their country... they lack the spirit of oneness that exists in other countries... its the biggest example of a ship about to sink where the captain has given the oirder every man to himself... But FYI , if we abandoned this attitude we would see that we were never touched by any icceberg and there really is no hole in this ship that we cannot plug... And we need better policy makers who have the vision to look beyond their five year terms and the confidence to start work on such long term plans...