ET2018 ⁽¹²⁾

January 15, 2018 The Economic Times Read full article Nothing explains India’s job creation challenge better than a comparison between Reliance Industries (RIL) and Shahi Exports. While RIL is a familiar name to nearly all, most readers would not have heard of Shahi Exports. If we are to solve our jobs problem, this needs to change. The RIL reports $110 billion in assets and 250,000 employees across its various ventures. Therefore, it employs five workers for each $2.2 million in assets. Shahi Exports, which is India’s largest apparel exporter, has assets worth $185 million and employs 106,000 workers in its apparel factories. Therefore, it employs 1,260 workers for every $2.2 million in assets. For the same investment, Shahi Exports creates 252 times the jobs that RIL does. Jobs that Shahi Exports creates are what India needs most today. Its factories can take someone with fifth-grade education and impart necessary training in just six weeks. On average, these workers earn Rs 15,000 a month. About 60% of Shahi Exports employees are women. If we could rapidly multiply what Shahi Exports does, we could begin expanding formal-sector jobs…

Parliament h​as a historic opportunity to not only save medical education from “total collapse” but also bring about a renaissance in the field. For the good of the nation, let us hope it successfully meets the challenge.Read full article When Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed a committee under my chairmanship to draft a new regulatory bill to transform medical education in India, he was responding to a clarion call from Parliament. In March 2016, a report by the Rajya Sabha-led Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare described in detail the rot that had set into medical education in India under the aegis of the Medical Council of India (MCI). It went on to call upon the government to bring about wholesale change in the way medical education is regulated. The concluding paragraph of the Standing Committee Report is worth recalling here: “To sum up, the Committee observes … that the need for major institutional changes in the regulatory oversight of the medical profession in the country is so urgent that it cannot be deferred any longer. The Committee…