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Sunday Reading
New Delhi, 21 November 2009
Hi-Tech Advances
KNOWLEDGE IS MONEY
By Dharmendra Nath
(Retd. IAS)
Till yesterday knowledge was power, today it is solid money.
A look at the Forbes list of billionaires, whether of Asia
or the world - be it Azim Premji or
Bill Gates - shows that we have nearly arrived in the age where knowledge is big
capital. Maharajas, money magnates, even petrodollars have taken a beating. Thanks
to it, J K Rowling (of Harry Potter fame) is a billion dollar writer. Earnings
are no longer physical-asset intensive.
Time was when capital was the most important and scarcest
factor of production. It commanded the highest price and dictated the terms.
Today it has been displaced by know-how and technology. Ever more efficient and
user-friendly technologies are replacing outdated ones and making vast fortunes
with first-to-be-there advantage. How promptly Windows Vista has been replaced by
Windows 7 within a matter of months. That partly smacks of a trick but,
nonetheless, we lesser mortals have to accept it. Let us recall how our
computer tapes, floppies, CDs and even pen drives were and are being replaced
over the years. Every step of the way has involved massive creation and
transfers of wealth.
Peter Drucker popularized the term knowledge worker in the
fifties. But it is coming into its own now. The money which knowledge commands
is mind boggling. It is paid for as R and D and technical fees, shares and
salaries etc. The property about whose safety we are increasingly worried is
not physical property but intellectual property. We are in a knowledge race.
In the context of the knowledge worker there is little scope
for exploitation of labour. The boot is rather on the other leg. The worry is
excessive attrition and how to retain a worthwhile work force. Besides knowledge
is an appreciating asset. It grows.
Gone are the days when employees could be taken for granted.
There is a shortage of skilled workers and they are poached upon. You employ
intelligence agencies to keep track and take timely corrective steps at your
end. Otherwise you lose your precious employees.
These days able-minded workers are harder to come by than
able-bodied ones. This being so, the quality of education and skill-development
assumes a key importance. To meet the demands of the knowledge age, we need an
education that is creative, not just mechanical. To use Alvin Toffler’s
language, we need ‘third wave’ education which comes not by learning by rote
but by fostering creativity and capability for self-growth. At its core is the development
of mental power.
Such education requires patience and a supportive
environment. It develops cognitive faculties of the mind and the capacity to
brainstorm or to withhold judgment as necessary. It needs to be conducted in a
multicultural or even international context so that it is prejudice-free and
inculcates right outlook and correct perspective.
The uneven and even unacceptable quality of a lot of our early
education and the wasted years which it implies constitute one of the worst
drains on our limited resources. There is need to get over that fast if we
would not like to be left behind.
We should seek to justify financial support for this inevitably
costly education in terms of economic return on intelligence rather than merely
as an item of expenditure on a social service. That will put things in a better
perspective. That input-output ratio will beat that of most other investments.
Just think how the world began to take notice of us? It was our
performance as knowledge workers, our nuclear tests and our IT competence. But
there is a long way to go yet and we have to multiply the number of worthwhile knowledge
workers many times. Our eleventh Plan envisages setting up of seven IIMs, eight
IITs and 30 Central
Universities. The target
for IITs has perhaps subsequently been revised to 20. That is a step in the
right direction and so is the target of gross enrolment of 15 per cent of class
twelve-pass outs into higher education (up from 10 per cent). We will have to
go a long way in that direction and raise it to 50 per cent or more, as it is
elsewhere in the progressive world.
Besides, institutions like All India Council of Technical
Education (AICTE) Medical Council of India (MCI) and National Council of
Teacher Education (NCTE) will have to be tolerated with much more teeth than
today, if we mean serious business. So far they have played a very docile role
– amply commented upon by our courts – toeing the government line rather than
guiding it. The regulator should have the strength and should be in a position
to assert itself against unfair pressures. Otherwise, we will have as much of a
surfeit of politically powered institutes of higher learning – some of it
already in evidence - as we have of them at the school education level already.
Turning out unemployable knowledge workers would be a tragedy.
As pointed out above, our school education deserves a lot
more attention. Looking to the size of our economy much more needs to be done
in the less glamorous but altogether more crucial field of school education.
That is the intervening make-or-break stage. We must particularly investigate
educational practices which work well with underprivileged children. Commenting
on the U S educational scene in 2007 Baumol and others say ‘Our educational
practices are much like health care was before the 19th century when doctors proceeded without
evidence and resorted to little more than bloodletting and cupping as the
universal remedies for most illnesses’. How true that sounds for us too!
Knowledge happily is a highly competitive and also a democratic
commodity. Despite intellectual property rights, which assure a minimal return
to the originator it does not allow for extended monopoly nor for excessive concentration
in a few hands. New ideas and new concepts replace old ones and they can spring
up anywhere. Knowledge is not heritable either. In fact, today it is at the
fingertips of anyone with an access to Google. It is all lying out there.
Knowledge capitalism of the sort that is coming into
evidence is capable of solving the riddle of capital-labour dichotomy too. It
can usher in an era of social harmony which has only been dreamt of till now. That
conflict belongs to the industrial society. It need not be there in the
information society.
Today’s capitalists are yesterday’s knowledge workers.
Having made money, they employ others in a widening circle of prosperity and in
the end many of them even bequeath large portions of their massive wealth to
charities for general welfare thus giving it back to the society. Is knowledge then
our threshold to a new Atlantis?---INFA
(Copyright,
India News and Feature Alliance)
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