The global and local paradigms of the job market are undergoing a seismic and rapid transformation, yet we remain obstinately shackled to our archaic system of education and qualifications. Even the vocational provisions enshrined in NEP 2020 are too meagre, too peripheral and too insufficient to truly enable and empower our youth with relevant and market-ready skills. We have merely undergone a cosmetic change from " Mera Naam Wali Hai " to " My name is Wali ". And with profound irony, we have the audacity to call this modern education. In truth, our system of education has become thoroughly obsolete, redundant and irrelevant. Consequently, the monster of unemployment continues to swell unchecked. If our college and university degrees have indeed become extraneous and purposeless, then why do we hesitate to replace them with relevant and purposeful ones ? It may sound harsh but the time is more than ripe for a radical and comprehensive overhaul of the entire system.
How tragic is it that a B.Tech graduate is reduced to selling snacks from a cart, a Phd scholar is forced to sell dry fruit by the roadside, and a university postgraduate has no option but to run a small business for survival ? If our degrees, diplomas and years of academic toil have become so irrelevant in the job market, why do we still cling to them ? Why not discard this obsolete system and replace it with education that actually equips our youth to earn a dignified livelihood ? The dynamics of the job market have undergone a sea change, and our academic institutions must evolve with it. Our curricula calls for a complete overhaul. Decades-old educational system is failing miserably to meet the demands of the modern economy. We must, therefore, have the courage to discard the obsolete and outdated subjects, and empower our children with relevant and market-driven skills.
We are loosing the battle on another crucial front : Our admission policy. The bizarre and illogical approach to drive children into colleges and universities is impeding our progress terribly. And it is high time to revisit our admission policy. Entry into higher education must be selective, not indiscriminate. You can not make a fish climb a tree, an elephant fly, or a willow tree bear apples. Genius lies in the right match. Forcing Sachin Tendulkar into medicine would have given us a bad doctor and robbed us of a legend. Sending Ronaldo to NASA would have deprived the world of an iconic footballer without making him an astronaut. A good Mason and a skilled carpenter don't need to be scholars, they need to be masters of their respective crafts. Foundation of three Rs -- reading, writing and arithmetic must be mandatory for everyone. And then let them flourish where their true talent lies.
A billion dollar question teases every brain - What is the absorption of our government sector for the ever growing army of postgraduates in Urdu, English, Zoology, Botany, History, Education and other conventional disciplines? The paradigm of employment and the skill-set it demands has been fundamentally redefined over the last five to six decades. An overproduction of degrees in subjects like Urdu and Persian has little to no correlation with the realities of the contemporary labour market. We must pivot from our obsession with traditional academic pathways, and realign our educational priorities with the evolving needs of a new economy. Let's take the example of our tourism and hospitality sector. Responsibilities that were once indispensable viz the tourist guide, the translator, the navigator, have been rendered largely obsolete by Artificial Intelligence and automation. The human interface in these services has been minimized, and with it, the opportunities for traditional degree holders have shrivelled. The tragedy is that while employment avenues for these archaic qualifications are contracting, our universities and colleges continue to operate in a time warp, mass-producing thousands of graduates and postgraduates each year who are left to navigate a market that has no place for them, ultimately struggling even to make both ends meet.
The leviathan of unemployment has assumed corpulent proportions, and our union territory is in the throes of a profound job famine. The root of this crisis lies in our collective failure to synchronize our education system with the demands of modern technological and digital fluency. Consequently, our youth are left academically qualified but practically incapacitated, with negligible real- world exposure. Opportunities for industry-integrated apprenticeship programmes, mandatory internships, live projects and field based learning remain abysmally scarce for our students. It is exigent that we recalibrate our educational architecture to be in consonance with the digital and technological imperatives of 21st century.
The solution lies in bringing vocationalism to the school threshold itself. Trades confined to ITIs viz carpentry, plumbing, tailoring and other allied skills, must be introduced at the school level. The early vocational orientation will not only tap into the innate aptitudes of students but also provide meaningful direction to their natural inclinations. Such a systemic intervention would serve as a crucial sieve, filtering and channeling students at the formative stages of their academic journeys. This, in turn, would arrest the indiscriminate and unchecked mass production of generic graduates. I mean the legions of BAs, B.Scs and B.coms who flood the job the job market each year. We must transcend the myopic vision of preparing our children merely to compete for a dwindling pool of government job vacancies with baseline academic credentials. Instead, our ambition should be to skill and empower them for the vast, competitive expanse of the global and international market.

Email:--------------------------mushtaqhurra143@gmail.com