Making vocational training work

By N Sathiya Moorthy

Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya needs to be congratulated and thanked for taking constant and continuous interest in her ‘substantive’ portfolio as Minister of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education. Very few Prime Ministers before her had held a ‘substantive portfolio’, that too in an area of their inherent experience and interest.

As an academic and activist in her earlier avatar even when she was a National List MP of the then three-member JVP-NPP parliamentary group, she had evinced a great interest in these sectors along with women and child welfare. Now, as Prime Minister first and subject minister alongside, she has had both the opportunity and challenge to make her dreams for the ‘future or Sri Lanka’ work on the ground.

Yes, present-day children and youth constitute the future dream of the nation, and very few ministers in her place have shown the kind of dedication that she has shown in the said fields in her past months as subject minister or line minister.

Taste of the pudding

No week, if not day, passes without PM Amarasuriya holding talks with one group of education experts or another. Not a week passes without her receiving a team of international experts, including from the World Bank and organisations such as UNICEF.

In meetings with the Prime Minister in her capacity as Education Minister, visiting delegations and foreign envoys in Colombo constantly underscore the need to equip the nation’s youth and tap their latent potential for the development of the nation. Some of them keep saying it in public fora where they are invited to deliver a speech.

But the taste of the pudding is in the eating. PM Amarasuriya needs to take time off from her meetings and conferences to draft some kind of a ‘forward-looking policy’ – in every sense of the term – and make it happen. It should go beyond ensuring that school children are better-fed than since the post-Covid days and that girl children in particular do not drop-out of schools because their families could not afford to send all children to school under their prevailing economic circumstances.

Before the incumbent JVP-NPP regime of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, then government leader Gotabaya Rajapaksa, for instance, rolled out an ambitious scheme for vocational education. His government’s last budget, presented by his brother and former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, had a detailed prescription for ending joblessness in the country – or, to improve the employability of the nation’s youth.

It goes without saying that nothing came out of it. One can blame it all on the economic crisis that fiscal, followed by the epoch-setting Aragalaya protests, which led to the successive exit of the two Rajapaksas from the offices they held. While the stop-gap successor dispensation of President Ranil Wickremesinghe focussed near-exclusively on economic recovery, the government almost at best ignored or over-looked the social sector – which also included health and education beyond food.

Like the Rajapaksas before her, Prof Harini Amarasuriya too seems to focus on the first step, still – that is to impart vocational education to the younger generation. Alongside, she has to ensure that her government creates more job opportunities for those youth when they come out of those institutions – jobs that are better-paying.

Translated, it means that the Government has to interact with the domestic industry and also foreign investors as to their requirements and the required skill-sets. It is not known if, for instance, the Prime Minister discussed these aspects during her interaction with a visiting delegation of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), one of the apex industry bodies in the neighbourhood.

It is incidental that there are greater chances of Indian investments, big and small, flowing into the country, owing mainly to the distance and consequent logistics, overall. The Indian politico-industrial ethos is also more conducive to inducting local talent in big numbers – and ensuring higher family incomes in this era of joblessness and income-deficit.

Jobless growth

In comparison, for instance, over the past decade-plus, large-scale Chinese investments in the country – incomparable in many ways – created ‘jobless growth’, if it was so. Later-day economic crises show that the development was also a sham in economic terms, whatever the optics in terms of expressways and the like.

Yes, the Chinese firms did not provide any jobs to Sri Lankans, qualified, under-qualified or not-qualified. In comparison, AI-driven western investments and industries create more local jobs than what the Chinese have been doing wherever they put their moneys in the name of investing in local development of the host country.

Of course, Sri Lanka still has a robust trade union movement, which incidentally can put off foreign investors. The ruling alliance being a product of trade unionism, among other aspects of social-levellers in the post-Independence era, should take a closer look at it all.

Also, when the government has acquiesced to the inherited IMF conditionalities after criticising it tooth and nail when in the Opposition, the ruling combine should take a pragmatic view of trade unionism. It cannot afford foreign investors to run roughshod over local labour, nor can it allow trade unions, including their own professional trade unionists, to run amuck in an era where people want jobs and incomes, not always the kind of income that they had aspired for all along.

Pragmatic height

All of it takes the discourse to another level. Are the Sri Lankan youth ready to shift gears and set their sights at a pragmatic height? It is not exclusive to the country, but is true of all Third World nations, including all of South Asia.

The second and third-generation post-colonial population won’t take up jobs requiring vocational training. They would not settle for anything less than an engineer’s job, or a chartered accountant or a management expert.

That is because when successive governments were sleeping, and dictating terms on university admissions for those that had cleared A-Level, private entrepreneurs in the field of education introduced courses in accounting and management – with the affiliation-tag coming from the UK or another European nation. As Education Minister, Amarasuriya needs to take a closer look at it.

It is not unlikely that as and when jobs become available for those having undergone vocational training, families could persuade their younger siblings and cousins to follow suit. It means that the Government should have medium and long-term programmes, and not just policies on paper, to roll out those jobs systematically, year on year.

It is another matter that the first batch of youth may have to be psychologically tutored to accept the ground reality – and convince them it is all about dignity of labour, coupled with earning capacity, and not in the designation that may follow. They should be made to realise that their present-day aspirations flow from those of their parents, who did not have even this much of opportunities – hence could not aspire for themselves but only for their children.

For this to happen, the Government should interact with counterparts and industries in nations like Japan, Germany and others where factory-floor jobs are not held less dignified and less paying than that of a ‘qualified’ engineer or an administrative manager. Maybe, there are skill-sets that would equip and motivate the Sri Lankan youth to do better – and also do it inland, and not fly overseas as half the qualified doctors in the country may have done to greener pastures, post-Aragalaya.

That all is saying a lot, yes. And that is also asking a knowledgeable Prime Minister, enthusiastic in her chosen field and professional career, with more than what she may already be doing, and what she may actually be interested in doing!

(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)