TOWARDS A KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY

THE NATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY SERVES AS A CATALYST FOR TRANSFORMING INDIA'S EDUCATION SYSTEM IN 2025, DRIVING INNOVATION, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND SOCIETAL PROGRESS

- DINESH SINGH

IF I were to name the single most important challenge that India must tackle in the coming decades, it would be the need to build a true and robust knowledge economy. Why do I lay such emphasis on this one realm of human endeavour? Some very useful learnings can be imbibed from looking at some successful economies across the globe. My point shall be best illustrated by some specific examples and figures. A few years ago, I had looked at the earnings of the IT firm that runs Google, for one specific quarter. At that point in time, Google was about 10 years old and had a global strength of 10,000 - odd employees. I also looked at the combined earnings of India's top three IT corporations, which together had an employee strength of more than 150,000. What the three corporations together had made in a whole year was less than what Google had made - all by itself - in a single quarter. The simplest explanation for this is that Google's search engine runs on a knowledge idea stemming from the corridors of undergraduate life at Stanford University. I call this knowledge in action. The Google search engine makes very practical use of elegant undergraduate-level mathematics combined with some very ingenious coding. On the other hand, our IT companies have been essentially running on brawn.