A case for an earn-while-you-learn education policy | Economic Times

Visuals of migrant labourers as they were homeward bound during the national lockdown moved many of us. Sadly, they are the children or grandchildren of migrant labourers who ran away from home looking for greener pastures. I feel a certain emotional bond with these migrants because I am myself, the son of a migrant labourer.My father “ran away from home” as a teenager before Independence and reached Bombay from Udupi. He was fortunate to create wealth and educate his nine children. What my father did cannot be reproduced today because the labourer without a college degree cannot get rich, his children cannot afford a college degree.Post-Independence educational policies, including reservations, helped children from lower-income families of all castes to secure themselves an education. Education was a guaranteed ticket to rise from poverty.However, 100 million households of labourers were left out of this big story.Now is the time to right this wrong.An alternate college education system must be created for the children of labourers without disturbing the successful mainstream education.Fifty-year-old labourers are dependent on their 16-year-old children. The picture will be clear if we visualise ourselves as the 16-year-old child of migrant labourers. The ground reality today is rampant child malnutrition in rural India – because school midday meals stopped after Covid. Labourers send their children to school for food, not for education.Governments must allow workplaces like hospitals, hotels, construction firms, and manufacturing industries to offer education and training in-house. Industries should provide the contents of formal education in an informal way for specific jobs.Companies will get skilled hands into these industries at an affordable cost. Trainees can earn enough to cover living expenses and save something to send home. The duration of training should be at least for two years. Certificates issued after passing examinations conducted by a government body should have a high market value. It can also be a passage to join the formal education system if these students so desire.Let me explain this based on training of auxiliary nursing midwives (ANMs) that starts after class 10. Every Indian hospital with 200 beds should be permitted to conduct ANM and GNM (general nursing and midwifery) courses to train home healthcare providers and nurses. Interestingly, ANMs are an important part of the National Health Service of the UK.Nurses with higher qualifications should be deployed to treat patients along with doctors. Support services for patients can be offered by ANMs. ANM students should work for seven hours as nursing assistants and attend two hours of online classes daily and take online tests quarterly. Then they can appear for final exams after two years and join the lucrative home healthcare sector. The medium of education must be English. Those prepared to graduate as GNM nurses should be given the passage to continue their education free of cost while earning a basic stipend.GNM training should be four years instead of three for ANM.Undoubtedly the best place to train an ANM or a nurse is within the hospital, a software engineer at a software company, and a civil engineer on a construction site. Students can work as assistants to seniors and simultaneously attend online classes.Our government cannot pay for the college education; however, it can create a parallel college education system for the poor and authorise industries to offer blended courses through the online route. A surgeon’s training leading to FRCS degree in England has no classrooms or professors, doctors work under senior surgeons for three years and when ready appear for the FRCS exam.I have no doubt diploma holders in nursing, engineering and software will become star performers because of hands-on training and the fire in their bellies.Remember, these are the children of migrant labourers, and it is children of migrants that built America. China became wealthy by dominating the manufacturing industry. India has an opportunity to dominate the service and knowledge industry by training the globally most skilled and hungry pool of knowledge workers.Let me give two examples on minor intervention in education giving amazing rewards. Few years ago, when my children joined medical college, I wanted 2,000 children from the villages of West Bengal to join a medical/professional college like my children.We ignited their ambition to become heroes in real life. We gave Rs 500 per month to parents to refrain them from pulling out their children from attending school, and it worked – 429 students from classes 8 to 12 were given scholarships, 54 students joined medical college and the rest joined engineering and pharmacy. One of the first students was Dr Subodh Biswas, who earlier sold pens on local trains.My daughter convinced us to send 22-year-old fresh graduates from her nursing college, which trains many poor students, to work in our hospital in the Cayman Islands. She assured us that these girls are extremely skilled since they worked in our cardiac ICU for over two years as student nurses. Today there are 113 young Indian nurses at our Cayman hospital. It is heartening to see each one sending home over one lakh rupees a month.To fulfil the Prime Minister’s dream of a $5 trillion economy, children of labourers should learn while earning, while learning is for free.I trust our government will launch a parallel college education system for the poor, enabling them to educate themselves out of poverty.Devi Shetty is a cardiac surgeon and Chairman and Founder, Narayana Health