I think merit is a hazy concept. What we call merit need not be its worth. Our analysis of merit is biased. Our education system needs a cleansing process at the earliest. We Indians are making the bias of merit deeper by caste based reservation system. It’s becoming more and more serious. As a nation we are still ‘developing’ so what if we got independent in 1947? We are yet emerging as developing nation. Our inertia for progress is known in world.

It’s high time we take some proactive steps to curb the demon of reservation. Actually the system is nothing but a mockery. We live in a free country and this freedom is a gift of democracy to us. Our constitution gives us the right to freedom and most importantly to exercise this freedom in an equitable manner. The state is responsible to ensure that parity prevails in all sections of the society. Most reserved candidates hail from good economic backgrounds and yet they are provided with additional scholarships and the like. They enjoy all privileges at minimum qualifications. Why can’t we use the reservation parameter based on merit and economic criteria rather on the basis of caste? It’s such a joke to still give importance to caste and creeds that too in this age where people hardly about it any longer.

The point of reservation was discussed in the round table conference and provisions were made in Communal Award of 1935; it is worth a recall that Mahatma Gandhi had opposed the reservation. Dr. Ambedkar was appointed as member of Viceroy’s Executive Council and he submitted a memorandum titled ‘on the grievances of the schedule castes’. The schedule castes were allowed 8.5% reservation in central services and other facilities for the first time in the history of India in 1942. Let’s not forget the reservation system was to be followed for limited time, but our politicians have used the tool for their own benefit, for divide and rule and for creating ‘vote banks’.

What we need to examine is does India really need reservation today? What the reservation system hopes to achieve? What about equality of opportunity and sovereignty? Number of disadvantaged people who have access to education and jobs; how many people benefit from reservation every year? Are those beneficiaries genuine?  Has reservation changed anything in terms of caste distribution of the poor? Has reservation system improved quality & educational performance? What is the future of reservation? The Government has to own responsibility of taking some firm steps in this regards. Government cannot play ‘Robin hood’ at the cost of the national wellbeing.

Abolition of reservation will help diminish the frustration and discouragement level among the deserving candidates. Reservation system has corroded the merit of the society. Undeserving teachers, undeserving researchers, undeserving engineers and doctors have spoilt the social fabric already. Because of the reservation the middle class is the worst sufferer. They can’t beg and they have no doors to turn to; any chances of reservation for them?

The past century has been exemplified by a massive worldwide educational expansion. Lot of innovation has taken place in most parts of the world. Each nation is struggling with increasingly complex economic challenges and these challenges can obviously be faced with logical and scientific educated workforce. Moreover, in a globalized world culture, developed nations are calling shots and developing and under developed nations have to rely on buying outdated patents from the developed nations. It’s shame on us that we are piggybacking on reverse engineering and outdated patents from the West. Educational expansion is the need of hour. While we need explicit affirmative action in the education, we first need to suspend thorny issue of reservation from the system. We have been diluting the essence of education since long.

Rote learning has plagued our system so much that students study only to score marks in exams. Marks are everything. Students can go to any length for the sake of marks. Poor quality teachers please students by giving undeserving marks.  Reservation has played havoc; we have the most undeserving academicians and administrative heads in the most significant posts in the universities, colleges and schools. This is how the entire educational system has gone to the dogs. The colonial masters introduced education systems in India to create clerks and civil servants, and we have not swerved much from that pattern till today. If once the youngsters prepared en masse for civil services and bank officers exams, they now prepare to become engineers. If there are a few centers of educational excellence, for each of those there are thousands of mediocre and terrible schools, colleges and universities that do not meet even minimum standards. The entire system is being dragged by terrible inertia and corruption.

Let us at least be aware that our education system is terribly flawed; we do not care for the originality of a student.  Memorizing only gets marks. Thinking is discouraged, risk taking is mocked. Look at those pathetic PhD theses in most state run Universities – students have earned PhDs by cut, copy and paste from Internet and many have earned PhD by changing only titles, rest is somebody else’s work.

Our testing and marking systems need to be built to recognize original contributions, in form of creativity, problem solving, valuable and original research and innovation. If we can do this successfully Indian education system will have a positive change overnight. Thousands of terrible teachers all over India are wasting valuable time of young children every day all over India. Their thinking and questioning is killed at the primary level of schooling itself. They are killing the very learning spirit of the students. Appalling teachers are producing appalling output from schools, colleges and universities. These youngsters are not fit for the jobs. The industry is demanding creative and innovative youngsters but, we are unable to provide them. Therefore, our labor pool is also of poor standards. We have created a vicious cycle and we need to break it as soon as possible.

In my opinion, we need to redefine our education system by deregulating the rules and regulations. We have the biggest number of engineering graduates in the world, but that certainly has not resulted into much technological innovation, why is it so? Rather than producing some world-class products, we are busy running the call centers of the rest of the world in which we are using our engineering students. What a pity? How many entrepreneurs as a nation have we produced? The goal of our new education system should be to create entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers and writers who can establish the foundation of knowledge based economy rather than the low-quality service provider nation that we are turning into. We will soon be labeled as ‘call center nation’.

We are seeing big number of politicians and corrupt autocrats entering the education sector to hide their black monies. These people are earning hefty profits from education; yes, education is a big business in our nation. These shoddy educationists are amassing hefty profits through clever structuring of fees and donations and thus sidestepping the rules. The loopholes in the system are such that people are making money left, right and center. There is an urgent need for effective de-regulation of Indian education sector so that there is combination of sufficient capital and those who provide or create extraordinary educational products or services are effectively rewarded.

Coming back to the reservation point – we need to use the rationing system; though this is not a permanent solution. If we want to emerge as a country built on a knowledge economy, and drive it by highly educated people, we need to make high-quality education universally available so that reservation will lose its meaning automatically. We don’t see reservation in online education because it depends on scales. You can access to the notes and lectures online of the top universities of world. Already many students are opting for various courses online. Virtual classrooms are the future of education and I think this is the how we could beat reservation and make it insignificant. Let’s accept that merit and creativity has no caste, creed and gender.

Creative destruction is a process through which something new brings about the termination of something existed before it.  Creative destruction is required for progress of society. Until we discard the old, new cannot be brought in. It is a term in economics which has since the 1950s become most readily identified with the Austrian American economist Joseph Schumpeter. The term is used in almost all walks of life including economics, corporate governance, product development, technology, distribution, supply chain management, human resource development and marketing. In product development, for example, creative destruction is roughly synonymous with unruly technology. Often to describe creative destruction the common example is of the smart phone, which almost killed the market for not only regular cell phones but also PDAs, MP3 players, point-and-shoot cameras, wrist watches, calculators and voice recorders- among other things. So, even if smart phone killed market of so many gadgets, it brought with it creativity hence the term “creative” is used.

Creative destruction is inevitable. We are living in a world of constant climatic change, constant trend change, constant cultural change which is so threatening at times. The social fabric itself is changing. All that we can to is accept it, if we cannot control it. Aren’t we all abandoning our old way of living and thinking in order to fit and live in today’s self-absorbed world thinking more effectively and profitably?

In advertising, every new creative ad for an existing product/service is an excellent example of creative destruction. It targets at newer markets, while risking isolation of an existing one. Medical science is another great example of creative destruction. Creative destruction is constantly changing the modern medicines. Besides new drug delivery system, newer molecules, new operative methods it is changing the average human’s everyday life.  The medical discoveries are designed for groups. The interactions of drugs, patients, and diseases are unpredictable; clinical trials are population based and do not account for personal idiosyncrasies and much less medical histories. What if your cell phone helps detect cancer? Did this take you back? It seems beyond reading email and surfing the Web, it will soon be checking our vital signs. It sounds terrifying yet, handy. It will constantly monitor our heart rhythm, blood glucose levels, and brain waves even while we sleep. The miniature ultrasound imaging devices fixed in smart phones will soon replace the icon of medicine – the stethoscope. So friends we never know new innovations might bring such drastic changes in our lives, which are indistinct and unimaginable at the moment.

Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian-American economist, developed the concept of creative destruction from the works of Karl Marx, in reference to capitalist development and the business cycle. According to Schumpeter’s theory, creative destruction will lead to the eventual failure of capitalism as an economic system. In current business use, the term is more likely to refer to unpleasant choices that are considered necessary for sustainability. It will fail capitalism because the creativity and innovation finally will reach the lowest stratum of business – the micro, cottage and small businesses.

As the economist Schumpeter saw it, creative destruction is a positive force, which drives away weaker companies to disappear and be replaced by more innovative and competitive ones. The Austrian American economist himself wrote in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, it’s a process that “incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, relentlessly creating a new one. This was the time when the world was facing the World War II. It involved the vast majority of the world’s nations.  It included all of the great powers; which eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly involved more than 100 million people, from more than 30 different countries. Schumpeter’s creative destruction theory was shaped in the background of a changing world – cruelty, competition and destruction.

In today’s world competition is constantly driving prices and lowering margins resulting into commoditization of products. How much ever marketers dislike commoditization, it is helping the economically weaker sections of society. Similarly, the digital revolution hit the computer makers first; driving companies like IBM, Infosys, Microsoft and HP into a restructuring which cost these companies scrapping a millions of jobs, but it connected the world. The power of ever-cheaper computing then moved on to attack other companies too, because it enabled smaller companies to arrange the computational resources that only big ones previously had. This truth abruptly removed major barriers to entry. Companies all over the world could lower their operating costs, increase their IT capabilities, and improve their own business models by creating better products and services at lower prices. Though new technologies play havoc sometimes, they are the change drivers. Look it positively – it gave the same computational powers to the smaller companies that only big corporations used to have! This is the beauty of creative destruction. The revolution in social media gave the world new platforms; today the world has really become a global village. The social media has made it possible for people anywhere in the world to instantly connect, share information, and create communities. The conventional media was crashed by the new-found social media; hats off to creative destruction in media business.

The revolution in IT and social media brought in the wake of globalization. Making competition inevitable globally; competitors can now come from any part in the world, no matter what the product is, market or industry is.

Often one thought annoys everybody’s mind that is we are now living in an unsettled world of economic upheavals, territorial and religious disputes, shifting demographics, and a very rapid rate of change. And, all of this paradoxically contributes to running faster to stay in place. Globalization has affected every sphere of society and human living. To keep pace with other countries of the world, all aspects of the technology and its usage need to be brought in education. Knowing the application of technology and technological systems and concepts is not likely to solve the whole problem unless we will be able to sensitize the students to real time issues. Updating the teaching-learning process is a compulsive requirement.

Globalization is having a major impact on education in several ways – in financial terms, in historical terms and in sociological terms.  Most governments are under pressure to reduce their spending on many other heads to expand their educational systems. The quality of national education systems is increasingly being compared internationally. This has placed increased emphasis on mathematics, science and the humanities curriculum, standards, and assessments. Globalization has made nations and people increasingly interdependent. This interdependence materializes in increased international flows of goods and services, of financial funds, labour and ideas. The aspect of increased international flows of ideas is the most relevant one for growth of developing nations. Changing educational policies is of paramount importance. Let me put it this way – education requires creative destruction constantly. Many countries increasingly aim at preparing pupils for a globalized world. Education needs to style the young minds in becoming entrepreneurs. In countries like German, France, England, America, China swift and spiky educational policies are put in place to shape and mould the innovative potential of teens in the schools. These progressive nations are debating on how to make education proactive for facing the ever changing world.

Let us seriously look at our education standards; only theoretical knowledge, mugging up, and higher grades is not leading us anywhere. Emphasizing on humane aspects as the core of an education system for skill development and its application is the need of the hour. The future of the country largely depends on the qualitative learning system.This, keeping in mind that half of India’s population will be below 30 years of age by 2020. Knowledge should be application oriented with changing times. Are the policy makers listening?