The sense of responsibility that
flows from the statistic is overwhelming. By 2020 an average Indian youth will
be aged 29 years. This would be the
lowest in the world. And India will have a surplus youth population of 47
million. The average age of the Indian youth is expected to be 29 years by
2020, the lowest in the world. For the same year 2020 world will experience a
shortage of young population by around 56 million.
In other words India will become
the youth hub of the world. Then what we will do? We can provide cheap labor –
however glorified- to the world. Or we can become the pioneers of global
change. For the former all we have to do is run the educational institutions as
we run today. Bereft of creativity, conditioning the minds to become mechanical
automatons, ultimately lacking the ability to think, enquire and empathize – we
can create an army of youthful zombies for world corporate who would need
toiling young bodies and brains. Or we can create youths who would take the
responsibility of transforming the world into a better place with more freedom,
more care and more love. To create such a youthful global leadership the
educational institutions should dramatically change the way they function and
teach. Education should be seen as a great tool to set the human intelligence
on fire – in terms of quest for truth as well as justice.
For the last three centuries
Indian educational institutions have become completely colonized. The
indigenous educational system – the proverbial beautiful tree- had been
systematically destroyed. The indigenous educational system valued local
knowledge systems and was a great vehicle for transmitting this traditional
local knowledge system to the coming generations. Once the local knowledge
based roots are cut off, the children were taught to devalue their own cultural
roots. Swami Vivekananda pointed out this negative feature of our present day
education:
A negative education or any training that
is based on negation, is worse than death. The child is taken to school, and
the first thing he learns is that his father is a fool, the second thing that
his grandfather is a lunatic, the third thing that all his teachers are
hypocrites, the fourth that all the sacred books are lies! By the time he is
sixteen he is a mass of negation, lifeless and boneless.
The result is that we lack
originality. With the loss of originality we can be good obedient laborers,
glorified corporate slaves, or even thinking slaves to ideologies that are
fashionable in the global context. But we cannot be original thinkers and hence
original leaders of thought or community. Yet the coming years will demand from
the youth thought leaders. The
educational system needs to be revamped at a war footing to create a network of
local leaders in every discipline – from physics to psychology; from sociology
to nanotechnology. These youth leaders should be domain experts with their
roots well anchored in local traditions and problems. Once educated Indian
youths start evolving our own indigenous models and tools to solve our
problems, whether they are social or ecological, psychological or
technological, India will become a strong base for quality youth force that
will be sought after by the world community for solving their problems. Swami
Vivekananda envisioned this long back:
Each one of you has a glorious future if
you dare believe me. Have a tremendous faith in yourselves, like the faith I
had when I was a child, and which I am working out now. Have that faith, each
one of you, in yourself — that eternal power is lodged in every soul — and you
will revive the whole of India. Ay, we will then go to every country under the
sun, and our ideas will before long be a component of the many forces that are
working to make up every nation in the world. We must enter into the life of
every race in India and abroad; shall have to work to bring this about. Now for
that, I want young men… This is the time to decide your future — while you
possess the energy of youth, not when you are worn out and jaded, but in the
freshness and vigour of youth. … Rouse yourselves, therefore, or life is short.
There are greater works to be done than aspiring to become lawyers and picking
quarrels and such things.
Creating the quality youth power
that will take over the planet’s future has fallen on the shoulders of India.
We cannot shrink away nor fail this historical opportunity. The current budget
focuses on the youth aiming to transform them from ‘job seekers’ to
‘job-creators’. The scheme to enhance ‘the employability of rural youth’ which
is also considered ‘the key to unlocking India’s demographic dividend’ has been
rightly named after the great indigenous thinker and nationalist Pandit Deen
Dayal Upadhyay as ‘Deendayal Gramin Kaushal Yojana’ and Rs 1,500 crore has been
set apart for this scheme. If we succeed in creating such a self-confident,
rooted, national youth power by 2020 then we can be rest assured that the
coming century from 2020 shall be that of India’s. It will not be an empire of
commercial exploitation or religious expansionism. It will be the empire of the
mind and soul. India will be a great harmonizer validating the diverse
spiritual and cultural traditions of humanity and through the age-old process
of Samanvaya India will make planetary humanity achieve its full potential. As
historian Arnold Toynbee rightly pointed out decades ago the only way left for
humanity to survive and flourish is by adapting the Indic civilization – not in
outer form but through its core values. Indian youth in the coming years shall
be the cultural and spiritual ambassadors of the Indic values. The question is
then have we made our educational institutions take up this mighty
responsibility of the coming years?
Aravindan Neelakandan
YB-ET
