While blaming students is easy, one must not forget that they are a part of society and hence act as a mirror to what is happening around us.
As is commonly known, change is the only permanent thing. Systems, such as those in the higher education domain that claim to encourage critical thinking and desire to further scientific temper, should be open to implementing changes in their existing thought patterns and actions.
In this context, the current state of the technical education system in India needs a serious relook. Not a day passes when one comes across media reports stating that the vast majority of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates are virtually unemployable.
Unemployability may be due to a lack of rigour in the teaching pedagogy, or even possession of skill-sets that do not meet the immediate requirements of a growing economy. This aspect is quite alarming when one confronts the fact that India produces one of the largest pools of STEM graduates and yet falls short of quality manpower to propel our R&D and manufacturing growth.
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) capture the imagination of the Indian middle class, who yearn for avenues to enhance their economic prospects and social status. Other than the IITs, there are several other successful education hubs that cater to this demand. Unfortunately, a certain form of stagnancy has begun to shackle this education ecosystem, and the ‘elite’ IITs have not been spared from this morass.
The IIT system and such similar institutions follow the teaching pedagogy of their highly successful Western counterparts. There exists a tacit assumption that a serious student first needs to be taught theoretical aspects whose practicality are not immediately apparent. This type of training makes a student first spend significant effort to analyse the underlying deeper mechanisms of real-life problems before coming up with a solution.
On the other hand, the modern industry prefers to hire vast numbers of educated workers who are expected to quickly come up with workable solutions.
This creates a dichotomy. That the vast majority of the STEM graduates do not need to use much of their theoretical knowledge is borne out by observing the methods employed by capable mechanics, electricians, etc. This has led to the university degree being viewed as no more than a ticket to a more prosperous future; the space for those interested in science for the sake of science and for purely enhancing their knowledge has shrunk tremendously.
Consequently, students have begun to question the need for spending their time, effort and money for an education pedagogy that does not cater to their career goals.
Education institutes in the US have responded feebly to this by awarding higher grades in spite of significantly reduced effort. This has come to be known as ‘grade inflation’, an aspect that is observed in India as well. A recent case is where a professor of a premier US university was fired for supposedly being too strict and awarding lower grades to students, thereby hindering their academic prospects for which they had paid high tuition fees.
Mirroring all this, the Indian higher technical education system is also languishing. In my teaching experience at IIT Jammu, I have noticed a marked decline in the analytical abilities and academic interest of students across all degree programs. We have noticed a strong correlation between classroom attendance and performance in the examinations. My colleagues in other IITs also report similar behaviour.
While blaming students is easy, one must not forget that they are a part of society and hence act as a mirror to what is happening around us.
Coupled with the falling basic education standards, there is a sense of apathy and arrogance towards traditional classroom teaching. Spending more time honing their skills through online education platforms such as Coursera, Unacademy, Udemy and so on is considered to be more useful. All this has led to a disconnect between the expectations of students and of faculty.
The disruptions from COVID-19 merely accelerated this process; one should not look at it as having initiated the process. Social media and online gaming addiction are factors, but by considering only these two, one would miss the actual socio-commercial changes that have taken place.
A way forward
Being witness to the academic system of an IIT, I am proposing some strategies that may be pursued to tackle this crisis. Some of these proposals may initially be unsettling for some faculty, since, as part of their duties, they are straddled with multiple administrative and research responsibilities that take up a significant portion of their time. Hence, managements and governing bodies must reassure the faculty that their support in adopting this new methodology will be appreciated and reflected in their career growth.
First and foremost, let us acknowledge that the attention span and concentration of students have reduced due to the advent of social media platforms. To address this, we can reduce the time of lectures from 50-55 minutes each per lecture into smaller slots of 30-35 minutes each. This is relatively easy to implement.
Next, to address the students’ anxiety towards industry-relevant curricula, we may envisage two types of BTech programs of the same four-year duration, viz. a BTech Practicum program and a BTech Honours program.
The latter will stick to the traditional approach of high emphasis on theoretical aspects and will cater to a minority of students who have such an orientation. The former program, which requires restructuring the current teaching methodology, can be tailored to appeal to the majority of students aspiring for a more industry-relevant curriculum.
Let us examine the proposals that can make this feasible:
i. Technical institutes of repute, including the IITs, have a vast pool of alumni who are leaders as well as employees of various core industries across the world. We should utilise their experience and invite them to suggest appropriate models that are representative of real-life scenarios.
For example, someone in the petroleum industry may require the student to know how fluids behave as they flow though pipes. The student may then be exposed to this and asked what he needs to know to be able to address it. Once the student understands the relevance of the fundamental concepts required to tackle such scenarios, it will be easier to convince him of the relevance of the corresponding laboratory experiments.
In this way, theory and laboratory classes can be directly interfaced with such experiential teaching-learning aspects. This will also result in a reduction in the disconnect between faculty and students.
ii. One may implement the above idea in a virtual reality (VR)-based framework. The medical industry has had considerable success in implementing this. Their students are exposed to multiple case studies in a virtual environment. Thus, when an actual medical emergency arises, they are not ill-prepared to handle it.
The adoption of this strategy has the potential to be a game changer in technical education. Industry-oriented problems can be embedded in such a virtual environment and the same can be presented to the student to address. This VR framework would need to be embedded in the curriculum. Otherwise, students will eventually seek it from other sources and neglect classroom teaching.
iii. Many IITs have begun hosting technology incubation parks in a bid to promote start-ups. They can set up an enabling framework that will encourage investors to fund such VR-based teaching-learning modules.
In collaboration with industry experts, our own students can assist in the design and validation of the technologies and laboratory experiments. This would not just invigorate and excite the student community, but also create a market-ready product that could infuse life into moribund syllabi and methods of teaching.
Finally, whatever the preferred method may be, it must be set against the realisation of the significance of revamping and reimagining the teaching-learning curriculum. In its absence, it is unlikely that we would be able to rekindle interest in the minds of our youth.
Samrat Rao is an assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering at IIT Jammu.
India’s industrial strategy under Atmanirbhar Bharat needs to ensure that financial incentives are extended to sectors or firms that foster strong domestic inter-sectoral linkages and facilitate industrial upgrading.
The Union government’s decision to impose a licensing requirement on the import of laptops has received considerable traction in the industrial policy discourse. Now, there is news that the government will not impose a licensing requirement but will introduce an import management system to regulate the imports of laptops in the country.
Frequent changes in policy decision not only contribute to policy uncertainty but significantly undermine its international reputation as a reliable trading partner. There are speculations that it may impose similar import management system on cameras, printers, hard disks, parts of telephonic and telegraphic devices.
This has heightened the debate in the country regarding the nature of industrial policy that India is pursuing under its self-reliant India, or Atmanirbhar Bharat, initiative.
The contemporary debate on industrial policy is centred around production-linked incentives (PLIs), trade policy, and non-tariff measures. The extensive use of these instruments falls into the broader industrial policy sphere and aims to augment the capacity, competence, and capabilities of domestic manufacturing with the objectives of reducing imports, creating jobs, and mobilising investments.
The nature and design of industrial policy undoubtedly needs intense debate for informed industrial policy choices. The key question for a country embarking on a path of industrialisation is whether it should use policies that conform or defy its comparative advantage. Conforming strategies eschew government interventions and limit the role of state to a facilitator, while defying strategies advocate government interventions and support infant industry protection for industrial upgrading.
The contemporary debate on industrial policy needs to examined along these lines. The industrial policy practice in India is by and large supporting the defiance of strategies, given the usage of policy instruments such as import tariffs, licensing requirements, quality standards, import restrictions, and subsidies to protect and support the domestic manufacturing industry. The justification of using trade policy as an instrument for industrial upgrading is based on the concept of dynamic comparative advantage and the infant industry argument, as well as other reasons such as market failure, economic nationalism and national security concerns.
The industrial policy practice through the PLI scheme is biased towards capital-intensive industries such as automobiles, pharma, advanced battery cells, telecom equipment, speciality steel among others. Despite having comparative advantages in labour-intensive manufacturing activities, India’s policy priorities have resulted in the commodity composition of exports becoming biased towards capital and skill-intensive products.
A semiconductor chip. Photo: VCU Capital News Service/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED)
This is particularly true in the case of semiconductor manufacturing, where it more effectively contributes to the “design” segment of the semiconductor manufacturing value chain given its large pool of qualified engineers. This does not mean that India should not focus on chip manufacturing but it needs to identify specific areas in the semiconductor value chain where it has comparative cost advantage and can contribute efficiently. This requires making the industrial policy coherent with optimal industrial structure that is inherent to the country’s endowment in terms of the relative abundance of labour, skills, and capital.
There is a need to develop a coherent industrial policy that aims at increasing the domestic value-addition within the economy, creating links between the foreign firms and domestic suppliers, and facilitating technological upgrading and spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI). It is important policymakers expand the scope of the PLI scheme and include labour intensive sectors such as leather, garment, light engineering goods, toys, and footwear. This is critical to scale up the domestic manufacturing in these sectors and generate employment and build industrial capabilities.
The role of government is to foster an enabling environment to ensure that the economy is embarked on this endogenous process of upgrading so that firms and sectors are able to leverage the country’s comparative advantage. This naturally allows firms to advance organically. As firms become more competitive, they make efforts to capture market share, generate maximum economic surplus through profits and earnings, and reinvest to earn the highest possible return, given that the industrial structure is consistent with the endowment structure. Such a strategy enables the economy to amass physical and human capital, thus contributing to the upgrading of the endowment structure. This gradually makes domestic firms more competitive, subsequently venturing into capital intensive manufacturing.
India’s industrial strategy under Atmanirbhar Bharat needs to ensure that financial incentives are extended to sectors or firms that foster strong domestic inter-sectoral linkages and facilitate industrial upgrading. These sectors or firms will generate a real economic surplus for the broader economy which will also contribute to the effective utilisation of the factor of production as well as their advancement for upgrading industrial structures. Such a strategy will ultimately deepen domestic manufacturing capabilities, thereby creating possible opportunities to plug in global production networks.
If done strategically, PLIs could foster domestic champions, but it is important for Indian policymakers to make sure that the sunset clauses are clearly stipulated in the PLI scheme with a reasonable timeframe. There is also a need to revisit industrial policy stance, particularly with respect to the use of policy instruments and making it more coherent with the comparative cost advantage that lies in its factor endowments.
Surendar Singh is an Associate Professor at FORE School of Management, New Delhi, Karishma Banga is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, UK. Views are personal. They can be contacted at drsurendarsingh@gmail.com and k.banga@ids.ac.uk.
For nearly two months, hundreds of farmers are protesting against the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority demanding better compensation from the authority in return for land it took from them.
Hundreds of farmers are protesting against the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority (GNIDA) in front of its office. The protest has almost completed two months, but the farmers are yet to receive any assurance from the authority.
The farmers are demanding better compensation from the authority in return for land it took from them for industrial development purposes. They are also asking the GNIDA to fulfil other promises it made while taking their land.
The Wire reached the protest site to understand the farmers’ concerns. They told The Wire that many of them have been jailed by the police for protesting against the GNIDA and are yet to get bail.
Despite an easing of COVID-19 restrictions, growth in the service sector failed to rebound as meaningfully as many would have expected, the survey said.
Bengaluru: Growth in the services industry picked up less than expected in February despite an easing of COVID-19 restrictions, a private survey showed, while price pressures led firms to shed jobs at the quickest pace since July.
Those inflationary effects will likely intensify as the survey was conducted before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is driving a surge in oil prices – India’s biggest import.
The Services Purchasing Managers’ Index, compiled by IHS Markit, increased to 51.8 in February from January’s six-month low of 51.5.
Although above the 50-mark that separates growth from contraction for a seventh month, it was well short of the 53 expected in a Reuters poll.
“Growth in the service sector failed to rebound as meaningfully as many would have hoped given that COVID-19 cases receded considerably from January’s new wave and restrictions were lifted,” noted Pollyanna De Lima, economics associate director at IHS Markit.
“Looking at the anecdotal evidence supplied by survey participants, inflationary pressures, input shortages and the local elections dampened growth.”
Although new business expanded at a slightly quicker pace in February, it remained tepid. Foreign demand marked two years in contractionary territory and last month’s rate of decline was the sharpest since September.
That suggests Asia’s third-largest economy, which lost momentum last quarter, might struggle to regain its stride.
Meanwhile, services firms reduced their workforces for a third month and the rate of layoffs was the quickest in seven months.
Despite a slower rate of increase in input prices compared to January, inflationary pressures remained elevated and firms were only able to transfer a small portion of that burden onto customers. Prices charged rose at the weakest rate in five months.
Surging inflation on one hand and rising uncertainties over the economic impact of the Russia-Ukraine crisis on the other might make it difficult for the Reserve Bank of India to decide on policy.
“Business optimism among services firms remained muted relative to its trend, despite improving from January, owing to pandemic-related uncertainty and inflationary pressures,” added De Lima.
Still, an improvement in services activity and an acceleration in manufacturing growth meant the composite index increased to 53.5 in February from 53 in January.
The revised law, notified on November 6 and to be implemented from January 15, has made changes to provisions regarding the classification of domiciles, salary thresholds for the law to applicable and the setting up of new units.
New Delhi: With major industrial confederations and associations warning that the Haryana government’s private job quota policy could lead to a large scale exodus of industry and business from the state, the BJP-JJP government has relaxed some of the key norms pertaining to the new reservation law, set to come into effect from January 15 next year. According to realtors, some businesses have already started looking for alternative locations, including in the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The job quota was an election promise by the JJP
Providing 75% reservation in private jobs to Haryana’s youth was one of the promises made by the Jannayak Janata Party (JJP) in the 2019 Assembly elections. After the formation of the BJP-JJP government following the polls, deputy chief minister and JJP leader Dushyant Chautala pressed for the implementation of the law.
Though the reservation policy was approved as an ordinance by the Haryana cabinet in July 2020, it was reserved by the governor for the consideration of the President. The ordinance was subsequently withdrawn by the cabinet in October after the Union labour and employment ministry examined it and advised the state government against enacting such a law.
The Manohar Lal Khattar government, however, went ahead with the quota law and the Haryana assembly passed the Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Bill on November 5, 2020. It was subsequently granted assent by the governor on March 2, 2021.
Legal experts said overwhelming domicile requirement was unconstitutional
The Wire had earlier reported how the original Act was flagged by legal experts on the ground that it violated the constitutional rights of equality and those related to residing and working in any part of the country.
The Haryana government had announced that the Act would provide reservation to “local people in private sector jobs that offer a salary of less than Rs 50,000 a month.” The law was to cover all private companies, societies, trusts and partnership firms in the state. In its statement of objects and reasons, the law notes that, “…giving preference to local candidates in low-paid jobs is socially, economically and environmentally desirable and any such preference would be in the interests of the general public.”
The Act also provides that 10% of the recruitment by a company would have to be from the district in which it was located while the rest may cover other districts.
While legal experts had stated that the new law was not constitutional or legal and argued that the domicile requirement cannot be so overwhelming, – that 75% of the employees domiciles of the state of Haryana – industry had also cautioned that it would result in a mass migration of business out of the state.
In fact, in March, 2021 itself, a petition was filed in the Punjab and Haryana high court challenging the new job reservation law. The petition, filed by Rohtak-based firm AK Automatics, stated that that the job quota law was “an attempt to introduce a domicile methodology for securing jobs in the private sector rather than on the basis of a prospective employee’s education skills and IQ, which will create chaos in the current industrial employment structure.”
It also stated that, “…the law is an infringement on the constitutional rights of the employers because private-sector jobs are purely based on skills and an analytical bend of mind of employees, who are citizens of India having constitutional rights on the basis of their education to opt for jobs in any part of India.”
Furthermore, the petition argued that the law was an “act of unfair competition between deserving employees and local residents claiming to have a right as an employee on the basis of local residence”.
However, the petition was later was withdrawn after the bench observed that the government was yet to enforce the Act and, as such, industry was not adversely affected by the law at that stage.
New Act notified on November 6, to come into force from January 15, 2022
In view of the objections raised by industry at large, the Haryana government has now changed some of the key provisions of the reservation law. Following the framing of the rules, the Act was notified by the labour department on November 6.
In the notification, the department said: “In exercise of the powers conferred under section 3 of the Haryana State Employment of Local Candidates Act, 2020 (3 of 2021), the governor of Haryana hereby specifies the 15th day of January, 2022 for the purpose of said sub-sections.”
Rules pertaining to domicile, salary limit, new units relaxed
Later, Chautala, who is also the minister for industries and commerce, labour and employment, spoke of the key changes that have been made to the law to address the issues raised by industry. He said that information technology (IT) units and start-ups that are set up after January 15, 2022 would be exempted for two years from hiring local candidates under the quota law.
In order to ensure that jobs requiring high skills levels are not impacted, the Act – which will be in force for ten years – will now only cover jobs where the gross monthly salary of the employee is less than Rs 30,000, revised down from the earlier upper limit of Rs 50,000.
Chautala also said that under the new law, it would no longer be mandatory for the employer to hire eligible local youth from one district only. Moreover, he noted that ‘domiciles’ have to have only lived in the state for five years, relaxed from the earlier threshold of 15 years in order to provide flexibility to private companies in hiring locals.
‘All skills not available in Haryana, let industry decide who they want to employ’
Though Khattar claimed that an effort has been made to create a harmonious environment for industry as well as the youth, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), in a statement, cautioned against such a reservation policy. It said that, “At a time when it is important to attract investments at the state level, governments should not impose restrictions on the industry. Reservation affects productivity and industry competitiveness.”
Incidentally, there are several big industries operating out of Haryana, including Maruti Udyog Limited;, which the new law could have a considerable impact on. In July last year, while speaking about the need for job reservation in Haryana, Chautala had toldNDTV that, “Maruti doesn’t even have 20% staff from Haryana”.
Several industry associations in Haryana have also criticised the move. The IMT Manesar Industrial Association said in a statement that industry may have to move the high court once again. Its general secretary, Manoj Tyagi, said in the statement that, “The associations had gone to the high court against this law before, but the court had said that let it be a gazette notification, after which the court will hear the matter.”
Another office bearer of the association cautioned that large industries – which provide employment to 10,000 or more people – avoid setting up units where such regressive laws are applicable. Members of the association also pointed out that all kinds of technical skills were not available in Haryana and therefore it should be left to the industrialist to decide on who they would like to employ for a particular job.
Some businesses have started scouting for land in other states
Meanwhile, the impact of the new law is already beginning to be felt in several parts of Haryana, including Faridabad and Gurugram, which have a large number of industrial and business units. Here, realtors insist that a lot of offices have already started moving, either to Delhi or to Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh.
“The reason is that business is wary of the reservation policy and also, right now, the land rates in Delhi NCR are pretty low. Many therefore feel that this is the right time to make changes. Already you can see a large number of IT offices have moved to the Noida expressway. This has also resulted in a sharp correction in commercial and residential property prices in various parts of Gurugram and Faridabad,” said Ramakant Sharma, a realtor who operates out of Old Gurugram.
Alexei Stakhanov’s extracted an extraordinary amount of coal in a single shift in August 1935. The work ethic he embodied then – which spread all over the USSR – has been invoked by managers in the west ever since.
One summer night in August 1935, a young Soviet miner named Alexei Stakhanov managed to extract 102 tonnes of coal in a single shift. This was nothing short of extraordinary (according to Soviet planning, the official average for a single shift was seven tonnes).
Stakhanov shattered this norm by a staggering 1,400%. But the sheer quantity involved was not the whole story. It was Stakhanov’s achievement as an individual that became the most meaningful aspect of this episode. And the work ethic he embodied then – which spread all over the USSR – has been invoked by managers in the west ever since.
Alexey Stakhanov on the cover of Time magazine.
Stakhanov’s personal striving, commitment, potential and passion led to the emergence of a new ideal figure in the imagination of Stalin’s Communist Party. He even made the cover of Time magazine in 1935 as the figurehead of a new workers movement dedicated to increasing production. Stakhanov became the embodiment of a new human type and the beginning of a new social and political trend known as “Stakhanovism”.
That trend still holds sway in the workplaces of today – what are human resources, after all? Management language is replete with the same rhetoric used in the 1930s by the Communist Party. It could even be argued that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite enthusiasm is even more intense today than it was in Soviet Russia. It thrives in the jargon of Human Resource Management (HRM), as its constant calls to express our passion, individual creativity, innovation and talents echo down through management structures.
From the mid-1990s, we charted the rise of a new language for managing people – one that constantly urges us to see work as a place where we should discover “who we truly are” and express that “unique” personal “potential” which could make us endlessly “resourceful”.
The speed with which this language grew and spread was remarkable. But even more remarkable are the ways in which it is now spoken seamlessly in all spheres of popular culture. This is no less than the very language of the modern sense of self. And so it cannot fail to be effective. Focusing on the “self” gives management unprecedented cultural power. It intensifies work in ways which are nearly impossible to resist. Who would be able to refuse the invitation to express themselves and their presumed potential or talents?
Stakhanov was a kind of early poster boy for refrains like: “potential”, “talent”, “creativity”, “innovation”, “passion and commitment”, “continuous learning” and “personal growth”. They have all become the attributes management systems now hail as the qualities of ideal “human resources”. These ideas have become so entrenched in the collective psyche that many people believe they are qualities they expect of themselves, at work and at home.
The superhero worker
So, why does the spectre of this long-forgotten miner still haunt our imaginations? In the 1930s, miners lay on their sides and used picks to work the coal, which was then loaded on to carts and pulled out of the shaft by pit ponies. Stakhanov came up with some innovations, but it was his adoption of the mining drill over the pick which helped drive his productivity. The mining drill was still a novelty and required specialist training in the 1930s because it was extremely heavy (more than 15 kg).
Once the Communist Party realised the potential of Stakhanov’s achievement, Stakhanovism took off rapidly. By the autumn of 1935, equivalents of Stakhanov emerged in every sector of industrial production. From machine building and steel works, to textile factories and milk production, record-breaking individuals were rising to the elite status of “Stakhanovite”. They were stimulated by the Communist Party’s ready adoption of Stakhanov as a leading symbol for a new economic plan. The party wanted to create an increasingly formalised elite representing the human qualities of a superhero worker.
Such workers began to receive special privileges (from high wages to new housing, as well as educational opportunities for themselves and their children). And so the Stakhanovites became central characters in Soviet Communist propaganda. They were showing the world what the USSR could achieve when technology was mastered by a new kind of worker who was committed, passionate, talented and creative. This new worker was promising to be the force that would propel Soviet Russia ahead of its western capitalist rivals.
Soviet propaganda seized the moment. A whole narrative emerged showing how the future of work and productivity in the USSR should unfold over the coming decades. Stakhanov ceased to be a person and became the human form of a system of ideas and values, outlining a new mode of thinking and feeling about work.
It turns out that such a story was sorely needed. The Soviet economy was not performing well. Despite gigantic investments in technological industrialisation during the so-called “First Five-Year Plan” (1928-1932), productivity was far from satisfactory. Soviet Russia had not overcome its own technological and economic backwardness, let alone leap over capitalist America and Europe.
‘Personnel decides everything’
The five-year plans were systematic programmes of resource allocation, production quotas and work rates for all sectors of the economy. The first aimed to inject the latest technology in key areas, especially industrial machine building. Its official Communist Party slogan was “Technology Decides Everything”. But this technological push failed to raise production; the standard of living and real wages ended up lower in 1932 than in 1928.
The “Second Five-Year Plan” (1933-1937) was going to have a new focus: “Personnel Decides Everything”. But not just any personnel. This was how Stakhanov stopped being a person and became an ideal type, a necessary ingredient in the recipe for this new plan.
On May 4, 1935, Stalin had already delivered an address entitled “Cadres [Personnel] Decide Everything”. So the new plan needed figures like Stakhanov. Once he showed that it could be done, in a matter of weeks, thousands of “record-breakers” were allowed to try their hand in every sector of production. This happened despite reservations from managers and engineers who knew that machines, tools and people cannot withstand such pressures for any length of time.
Regardless, the party propaganda needed to let a new kind of working class elite grow as if it was spontaneous – simple workers, coming from nowhere, driven by their refusal to admit quotas dictated by the limits of machines and engineers. Indeed, they were going to show the world that it was the very denial of such limitations that constituted the essence of personal involvement in work: break all records, accept no limits, show how every person and every machine is always capable of “more”.
Stalin’s booklet on the benefits of the Stakhanov movement. Photo: Bogdan Costea, Author provided
On November 17, 1935, Stalin provided a definitive explanation of Stakhanovism. Closing the First Conference of Stakhanovites of Industry and Transport of the Soviet Union, he defined the essence of Stakhanovism as a leap in “consciousness” – not just a simple technical or institutional matter. Quite the contrary, the movement demanded a new kind of worker, with a new kind of soul and will, driven by the principle of unlimited progress. Stalin said:
These are new people, people of a special type … the Stakhanov movement is a movement of working men and women which sets itself the aim of surpassing the present technical standards, surpassing the existing designed capacities, surpassing the existing production plans and estimates. Surpassing them – because these standards have already become antiquated for our day, for our new people.
In the ensuing propaganda, Stakhanov became a symbol burdened with meanings. Ancestral hero, powerful, raw and unstoppable. But also one with a modern, rational and progressive mind which could liberate the hidden, untapped powers of technology and take command of its limitless possibilities. He was cast as a Promethean figure, leading an elite of workers whose nerves and muscles, minds and souls, were utterly attuned to the technological production systems themselves. Stakhanovism was the vision of a new humanity.
‘The possibilities are endless’
The Stakhanovites’ celebrity-status offered enormous ideological opportunities. It allowed the rise of production quotas. Yet this rise had to remain moderate, otherwise Stakhanovites could not be maintained as an elite. And, as an elite, Stakhanovites themselves had to be subjected to a limitation: how many top performers could really be accommodated before the very idea collapsed into normality? So quotas were engineered in a way which we might recognise today: by the forced distribution or “stack ranking” of all employees according to their performance.
After all, how many high-performers can there be at any one time? The former CEO of General Electric, Jack Welch, suggested 20% (no more, no less) every year. Indeed, the Civil Service in the UK operated on this principle until 2019 but used a 25% top performer quota. In 2013, Welch claimed this system was “nuanced and humane”, that it was all “about building great teams and great companies through consistency, transparency and candour” as opposed to “corporate plots, secrecy or purges”. Welch’s argument was, however, always flawed. Any forced distribution system inextricably leads to exclusion and marginalisation of those who fall in the lower categories. Far from humane, these systems are always, inherently, threatening and ruthless.
And so Stakhanovism is still flowing through modern management systems and cultures, with their focus on employee performance and constant preoccupation with “high performing” individuals.
Something that often gets forgotten is that Stalinism itself was centred on an ideal of the individual soul and will: what is there that “I” am not able to do? Stakhanov fitted perfectly this ideal. Western culture has been telling itself the same ever since – “the possibilities are endless”.
This was the logic of the Stakhanovite movement in the 1930s. But it is also the logic of contemporary popular and corporate cultures, whose messages are now everywhere. Promises that “possibilities are endless”, that potential is “limitless”, or that you can craft any future you want, can now be found in “inspirational” posts on social media, in management consultancy speil and in just about every graduate job advertisement. One management consultancy firm even calls itself Infinite Possibilities.
Indeed, these very sentences made it on to a seemingly minor coffee coaster used by Deloitte in the early 2000s for their graduate management scheme. On one side it said: “The possibilities are endless.” While on the other side, it challenged the reader to take control of destiny itself: “It’s your future. How far will you take it?”
Insignificant though these objects may appear, a discerning future archaeologist would know that they carry a most fateful kind of thinking, driving employees now as much as it drove Stakhanovites.
But are these serious propositions, or just ironic tropes? Since the 1980s, management vocabularies have grown almost incessantly in this respect. The rapid proliferation of fashionable management trends follows the increased preoccupation with the pursuit of “endless possibilities”, of new and unlimited horizons of self-expression and self-actualisation.
It is in this light that we have to show ourselves as worthy members of corporate cultures. Pursuing endless possibilities becomes central to our everyday working lives. The human type created by that Soviet ideology so many decades ago, now seems to gaze at us from mission statements, values and commitments in meeting rooms, headquarters and cafeterias – but also through every website and every public expression of corporate identity.
Stakhanovism’s essence was a new form of individuality, of self-involvement in work. And it is this form that now finds its home as much in offices, executive suites, corporate campuses, as in schools and universities. Stakhanovism has become a movement of the individual soul. But what does an office worker actually produce and what do Stakhanovites look like today?
Today’s corporate Stakhanovites
In 2020, the drama series, Industry, created by two people with direct experience of corporate workplaces, gave us a glimpse into modern Stakhanovism. It is a sensitive and detailed examination of the destinies of five graduates joining a fictional, but utterly recognisable, financial institution. The show’s characters become almost instantly ruthless neo-Stakhanovites. They knew and understood that it was not what they could produce that mattered for their own success, but how they performed their successful and cool personas on the corporate stage. It was not what they did but how they appeared that mattered.
The dangers of failing to appear extraordinary, talented or creative were significant. The series showed how working life descends into unending personal, private and public struggles. In them, every character loses a sense of direction and personal integrity. Trust disappears and their very sense of self increasingly dissolves.
Normal days of work, normal shifts, no longer exist. Workers have to perform endlessly, gesturing so that they look committed, passionate and creative. These things are compulsory if employees are to retain some legitimacy in the workplace. So working life carries the weight of potentially determining a person’s sense of worth in every glance exchanged and in every inflection of seemingly insignificant interactions – whether in a board room, over a sandwich or a cup of coffee.
Friendships become impossible because human connection is no longer desirable since trusting others weakens anyone whose success is at stake. Nobody wants to fall out of the Stakhanovite society of hyper-performing top talents. Performance appraisals that may lead to dismissal are a scary prospect. And this is the case both in the series and in real life.
The last episode of Industry culminates in half the remaining graduates getting sacked following an operation called “Reduction In Force”. This is basically a drastic final performance appraisal where each employee is forced to make a public statement arguing why they should remain – much like on the reality TV series The Apprentice. In Industry, the characters’ statements are broadcast on screens throughout the building as they describe what would make them stand out from the crowd and why they are worthier than all others.
Reactions to Industry emerged very quickly and viewers were enthusiastic about the show’s realism and how it resonated with their own experiences. One YouTube channel host with extensive experience of the sector reacted to each episode in turn; the business press too reacted promptly, alongside other media. They converged in their conclusions: this is a serious corporate drama whose realism reveals much of the essence of work cultures today.
Industry is important because it touches directly on an experience so many have: the sense of a continuous competition of all against all. When we know that performance appraisals compare us all against each other, the consequences on mental health can be severe.
This idea is taken further in an episode of Black Mirror. Entitled ‘Nosedive‘, the story depicts a world in which everything we think, feel and do becomes the object of everyone else’s rating. What if every mobile phone becomes the seat of a perpetual tribunal that decides our personal value – beyond any possibility of appeal? What if everyone around us becomes our judge? What does life feel like when all we have to measure ourselves by are other people’s instant ratings of us?
We asked these questions in detail in our research which charted the evolution of performance management systems and the cultures they create over two decades. We found that performance appraisals are becoming more public (just as in Industry), involving staff in 360-degree systems in which every individual is rated anonymously by colleagues, managers and even clients on multiple dimensions of personal qualities.
Management systems focusing on individual personality are now combining with the latest technologies to become permanent. Ways of reporting continuously on every aspect of our personality at work are increasingly seen as central to mobilising “creativity” and “innovation”.
And so it might be that the atmosphere of Stakhanovite competition today is more dangerous than in 1930s Soviet Russia. It is even more pernicious because it is now driven by a confrontation between people, a confrontation between the worth of “me” against the worth of “you” as human beings – not just between the worth of what “I am able to do” against what “you are able to do”. It is a matter of a direct encounter of personal characters and their own sense of worth that has become the medium of competitive, high-performance work cultures.
The Circle, by Dave Eggers, is perhaps the most nuanced exploration of the world of 21st-century Stakhanovism. Its characters, plot and context, its attention to detail, bring to light what it means to take up one’s personal destiny in the name of the imperative to hyper-perform and over-perform one’s self and everyone around us.
When the ultimate dream of becoming the central star of corporate culture comes true, a new Stakhanov is born. But who can maintain this kind of hyper-performative life? Is it even possible to be excellent, extraordinary, creative and innovative all day long? How long can a shift of performative work be anyway? The answer turns out not to be fictional at all.
Stakhanovism’s limits
In the summer of 2013, an intern at a major city financial institution, Moritz Erhardt, was found dead one morning in the shower of his flat. It turns out that Erhardt really did try to put in a neo-Stakhanovite shift: three days and three nights of continuous work (known among London City workers and taxi drivers as a “magic roundabout”).
But his body could not take it. We examined this case in detail in our previous research as well as anticipating just such a tragic scenario a year before it happened. In 2010, we reviewed a decade of the Times 100 Graduate Employers and showed explicitly how such jobs can embody the spirit of neo-Stakhanovism.
Then in 2012, we published our review which signalled the dangers of the hyper-performative mould promoted in such publications. We argued that the graduate market is driven by an ideology of potentiality which is likely to overwhelm anyone who follows it too closely in the real world. A year later, this sense of danger became real in Erhardt’s case.
Stakhanov died after a stroke in Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, in 1977. A city in the region is named after him. The legacy of his achievement – or at least the propaganda that perpetuated it – lives on.
But the truth is that people do have limits. They do now, just as they did in the USSR in the 1930s. Possibilities are not infinite. Working towards goals of endless performance, growth and personal potential is simply not possible. Everything is finite.
Who we are and who we become when we work are actually fundamental and very concrete aspects of our everyday lives. Stakhanovite models of high-performance have become the register and rhythm of our working lives even though we no longer remember who Stakhanov was.
The danger is that we will not be able to sustain this rhythm. Just as the characters in Industry, Black Mirror or The Circle, our working lives take destructive, toxic and dark forms because we inevitably come up against the very real limits of our own purported potential, creativity or talent.
Bogdan Costea, Professor of Management and Society, Lancaster University and Peter Watt, International Lecturer in Management and Organisation Studies, Lancaster University.
The H1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise.
Washington: The US Chambers of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and several other organisations have filed a lawsuit against the federal government, asserting that recent H1B regulations will undermine high skilled immigration into the United States.
Early this month, in its interim final rule, the Department of Homeland Security announced to narrow the definition of speciality occupation as Congress intended by closing the over-broad definition that allowed companies to game the system.
It also requires companies to make real offers to real employees, by closing loopholes and preventing the displacement of the American worker. And finally, the new rules would enhance the department’s ability to enforce compliance through worksite inspections and monitor compliance before, during, and after an H1B petition is approved.
Filed on Monday in the Northern District of Columbia, the lawsuit alleges that “harmful and haphazard rules on H1B visas” if left in place, would affect hundreds of thousands of American-based workers and disrupt manufacturers’ ability to hire and retain critical high-skilled talent.
“The rules being implemented by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Labor undermine high-skilled immigration in the US and a company’s ability to retain and recruit the very best talent,” said US Chamber CEO Thomas J. Donohue.
If these rules are allowed to stand, they will devastate companies across various industries, he said, adding that these measures will discourage investment, diminish economic growth, and impede job creation in the US.
The H1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows US companies to employ foreign workers in speciality occupations that require theoretical or technical expertise. It is most sought-after among Indian IT professionals.
“We need high-skilled innovators now more than ever, and the administration’s attempt to rush these rules forward without properly considering their impact on thousands of people on the front lines of developing vaccines and treatments and making critical supplies, as well as saving lives in our hospitals, could have devastating consequences at a critical moment in our history,” said NAM senior vice president and general counsel Linda Kelly.
Rewriting laws through a “dark-of-night-style” rulemaking leads to dangerous policy outcomes, and this pair of interim final rules is an illegal attempt to dismantle legal immigration by rendering the H1B visa programme unworkable for hundreds of thousands of American-based workers who are essential to the recovery and renewal of the industry and the economy, Kelly said.
China’s Foreign Ministry branch in Hong Kong said on Wednesday that the club should “immediately stop meddling with Hong Kong affairs on the pretext of press freedom”.
Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) said on Thursday a move by police to narrow the definition of “media representatives” allowed at public events such as protests could limit scrutiny on law enforcers.
The guidelines, officially changed on Wednesday, now exclude recognition of press passes issued by local media associations such as HKJA and Hong Kong Press Photographers Association (HKPPA), while accepting journalists from 205 bodies registered with the government and international media.
News associations say the move could limit the work of and raise the risks of arrest for freelancers and student reporters, who have captured some of the most striking scenes of the pro-democracy protests that roiled the city last year, including a video of a police officer shooting a demonstrator in October.
Police are suspicious of student reporters, who fit the age group of the most ardent protesters, and say they have discovered fake media badges and been attacked by fake reporters.
“All the police want is to limit us,” said HKJA chairman Chris Yeung, appearing next to representatives of HKPPA and six other media unions.
“Journalism students are the future of our industry,” he said, speaking in front of a banner reading “Defend the truth, no government vetting.”
Some students who said they were reporting for their student union publications have been arrested at protests for suspected crimes including rioting.
Late on Wednesday, Security Secretary John Lee said freedom of the media remained intact.
The change to internal guidelines meant that recognised reporters will be allowed in cordoned zones where media is not usually allowed and could also be offered interviews at the scene, which has also been rare, he said.
Lee said the guidelines do not attempt to change the definition of journalists who can conduct reporting outside cordoned areas.
The Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC) said on Wednesday the move was “another step in the erosion of Hong Kong‘s once cherished pressfreedom as it would give the police — rather than reporters and editors — the power to determine who covers the police“.
The FCC expressed concerns that journalists not recognised under the new guidelines risked being arrested for unlawful assembly and rioting.
China’s Foreign Ministry branch in Hong Kong said on Wednesday that the club should “immediately stop meddling with Hong Kongaffairs on the pretext of press freedom”.
“The truth is not to be distorted,” it said. “By anxiously whitewashing the fake journalists, FCC Hong Kong is attempting to endorse the rioters and condone their ‘burn with us’ violence, thus sowing more trouble in the city.”
Pro-democracy protests have been smaller and fewer this year due to coronavirus restrictions on gatherings and since the introduction of a national security law on June 30, 2020. There are calls for protests on October 1, 2020, China’s national day.
In an interview to Karan Thapar, the chairman of Maruti, R.C. Bhargava said the attitude of Indian industrialists and their unwillingness to change their lifestyle and the way they treat their workers is at the heart of many problems.
In an interview to mark the launch of his recent book Getting Competitive: a Practitioner’s Guide for India, which also expands to cover how he views the state of the economy today and the way in which Prime Minister Narendra Modi should respond to the COVID-19 crisis, the chairman of Maruti has sharply criticised the attitude of Indian industrialists.
Whilst advocating the Japanese way of working, where management and workers are considered a single team, R.C. Bhargava says unfortunately the success of Maruti has not been emulated by other industrialists. He says they are averse to the Japanese model because they are enamoured of western style consumerism and extravagance. Speaking of such industrialists he said: “Top management cannot lead a life of luxury and opulence…they cannot continue to treat their companies and industries as personal assets.”
In a 42-minute interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Bhargava said that he was surprised the Maruti success story, which in his book he says is based upon the Japanese model of working, has not been emulated by other industrialists. He said he was astonished that “such a success story has not led many others to follow what we’re doing”. The problem, he explained, is the attitude of Indian industrialists and their unwillingness to change their lifestyle and the way they treat their workers. This is also holding back India’s manufacturing growth.
In the interview, Bhargava was also sharply critical of bureaucrats even though he has himself spent 25 years in the IAS. He said, though they advise on manufacturing policy and then implement it, they are essentially administrators who only know how to maintain law and order. They are risk averse, follow precedents and become inflexible in their thinking. Consequently, they do not understand the requirements of business and industry and the importance of policies that facilitate cutting the cost of manufacturing goods. As he put it: “Manufacturing growth can only accelerate if the cost of manufactured goods is kept as low as possible while quality keeps improving.” Bureaucrats don’t understand this and, therefore, don’t facilitate it.
He said bureaucrats need to be trained and taught about the needs and requirements of manufacturing. He also advocated a specialist cadre of such officers for the economic ministries.
Bhargava called for industry and manufacturing-oriented education of bureaucrats. He said this is not necessary at the level of the IAS academy in Mussoorie but it is certainly required five or six years later, particularly for those civil servants who show some understanding of entrepreneurship and industry.
Speaking about the impact of the health crisis, Bhargava said this was “an excellent opportunity to completely restructure the economy”. He said government must “re-look at policies that impact industry and ask whether they have the wrong impact on the cost of manufacturing”.
In one particularly pointed response he said: “government must in writing tell officers that the job of government is to facilitate private industry competition”. He particularly emphasised that oral instructions would not be enough. This has to be done in writing.
Speaking more widely, Bhargava told The Wire he believes Prime Minister Modi is the sort of conviction-laden politician needed to completely restructure and rethink the economy. He says he’s known Modi for 10 years and believes he understands the critical importance of boosting manufacturing and also that poverty cannot be tackled using methods used in the past. Manufacturing growth is necessary to create employment and jobs.
The problem, Bhargava said, is that the system is not letting Modi act. By the system he means not just the opposition in parliament but also members of Modi’s own government.
Bhargava also said India doesn’t have economists who can guide and advise Modi on how to boost manufacturing. Consequently, the prime minister understands the need to do this but is unable to act because of the obstacles placed in his way.
IBhargava also spoke about Maruti. He said production had increased manifold in June compared to May and he expected it would rise further in July. However, production in July this year compared to July 2019 would be lower but, he added, “not by too much”.
He said there was significant pent-up demand, created both by the lockdowns and by the economic situation of 2019-20, as a result of which demand was “higher than this time last year”.
The above is a paraphrased precis of R.C. Bhargava’s interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire. Please see the full interview for further details.
While it is easier with large manufacturing plants, there must be a planned long-term vision for institutionalising public health standards while getting the informal labour force back to work.
What started as a health crisis is now turning into a ‘black swan’ event for the global economy and society. Staring at an uncertain future of work, the lockdown has rendered the workforce, in particular the vulnerable informal workers, stranded and without any stable source of income.
This crisis offers us an opportunity to think both short and long term to ensure that a resilient economy emerges which respects labour as a critical factor of production.
As per estimates by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), around 400 million informal workers are at a risk of falling into deeper poverty levels in India. In such a situation, how does India ensure that the drivers of its economy do not become collateral damage of a pandemic?
With the imposition of a sudden lockdown, there has been no effort by the state for the safe and smooth transit of migrant workers from their workplaces to their homes. At the same time, there is a lack of basic necessities in their workplaces or where they are stranded. As economic activities remain at a standstill, the workers are forced to be contained in an economic and emotional discomfort.
To add to that, already vulnerable workers are also victims of information asymmetry. The Bandra railway station incident in Mumbai in mid-April is a testimony to this.
On the industry front, imminent economic losses are instigating enterprises, large and small alike, to rework their business and work structure. This leaves the workers in an abyss of uncertainty regarding the future of their work. Further, the industry oriented COVID-19-induced relaxations in labour laws, that have been introduced in several states including Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Punjab are likely to make working conditions harsher, lay-offs easier and monitoring less stringent.
This raises a pertinent question. How do we rapidly reinstate the informal workforce in a post-COVID-19 scenario and at the same time ensure sustainable economic well-being for them in order to build their resilience?
To tackle this situation, a multi-pronged solution can be thought of with immediate, short term and longer term manifestations. However, along with these structural interventions, immediate relief measures that are being provided by the state, such as direct cash transfers and food supplies need to be effectively and efficiently administered to ensure maximum coverage and optimum impact. The focus should be on containing the public health crisis while reducing the damage that it has caused to the economic fabric of the country.
How many workers are needed?
The first challenge will come in ensuring that factory and other labour-intensive operations perfectly implement social distancing principles. As an immediate measure, a strategy needs to be carefully planned for the institutionalisation of public health and other safety protocols before industrial operations resume.
In order to achieve this, the state, in consultation with experts and union representatives, can prepare the number of workers per unit area of factory floor required for safe operations at a given capacity, across different manufacturing sectors. Such a benchmark can help the state in assessing the optimal requirement of workers in different industries in the wake of social distancing and health standards. The nodal agency for preparing such a database can be the respective state’s industries and labour department, and its decentralised machinery in different districts and zones.
While business operations resume, simultaneously a database of workers needs to be created which will comprise information about the migrated workers including last-drawn wages, work experience, previous place of work, skill levels, training and educational qualifications and place of origin. This database should be created through a concerted effort of enterprises and the government, in particular the labour and skills department at the Central and state level. Also, necessary provisions should be made for self-enrolment of workers in the database.
To ensure transparency, continuity and efficiency in the process of database creation, technological resources can be leveraged. State resources such as existing databases and the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile (JAM) trinity can also be roped in for this process. To undertake this exercise, the administrative capacity of the state can be enhanced by steering the local governments to the forefront and bringing on board grassroots volunteers including Common Service Centres. However, such an exercise would also require adequate data privacy safeguards to ensure protection of the workers’ data.
In the short term, the database so created can feed into an ‘employment exchange’ model for informal workers. Such a model will ensure a temporal match of enterprise’s demand for workers with supply of labour, with the state potentially assuming the role of a de facto contractor. In other words, if needed, the state could be empowered to execute the allocation of workplaces to enrolled workers.
Furthermore, the state can utilise this platform to ensure that certain conditions of work are being adhered to. For instance, the state can ensure that wages are fixed at pre-COVID-19 or minimum wage levels, provisions of necessary protective equipment are met and safety protocols are followed. Once these conditions are fulfilled, the state can allot a suitable working place for each of the enrolled workers. This exchange can be integrated with the ‘Digital India’ vision of the government of India by using ICT solutions as the means of implementation. The state can gradually transfer this exchange model to the market, where it can be facilitated through aggregator business models.
In the longer term, a much needed behavioural transformation should be brought about wherein the State adopts a hands-off approach while the industry treats its workforce as a ‘human asset’ rather than a ‘cost of production’. In order to facilitate this transformation and build workers’ resilience, there should be a focus on ensuring adequate social security and skill development for them through the exchange model.
Finally, to regain the trust of the workers, there should be an emphasis on elimination of fear and stigma from the minds of workers and their community members by using sensitisation and capacity-building measures. This may be facilitated through grassroots-level volunteers and civil society organisations at the source locations of the workers. Similarly, at the work destination, this can be ensured through effective implementation and monitoring of public health protocols at the enterprise level.
While such structural reforms in the informal labour realm have been in the pipeline for quite some time, it is a humanitarian crisis that has made it imperative for speedy and sustainable implementation of the much-needed reforms. After all, necessity supersedes idealism and the drivers of the Indian economy are no exceptions to this phenomenon.
Pradeep S. Mehta, Sarthak Shukla and Trinayani Sen work for CUTS International, a global public policy research and advocacy group. Prashant Tak, Amol Kulkarni and Bipul Chatterjee of CUTS contributed to this article.
