The Hindu Business Line : Pai passion

Mr T.V. Mohandas Pai, Director, HR, Infosys, spoke with a lot of passion at the Business Line Club talk, with several witticisms thrown in, leaving the audience in splits.

Here’s a sample: While talking about the dearth of educated and skilled manpower for different sectors in India, Mr Pai said, “West Bengal graduates about 14,000 engineers, Tamil Nadu does 75,000, Andhra Pradesh about 70,000, Karnataka 38, 000, Maharashtra 70,000 and Kerala about 20,000.”

At which point Anna University Vice-Chancellor, Dr D. Viswanathan, interjected to say Tamil Nadu has one lakh engineering students to which Mr Pai responded, “One lakh entrants… not graduates! I follow that very well, because we come and pick up these people!”

Continuing, Mr Pai said the real tragedy was that of West Bengal, which only graduates 14,000 engineers a year. “A few years ago I saw a newspaper photo in which Ms Mamata Banerjee was flagging off two trainloads of people to Bangalore to write the CET exam and I was shocked to tears because Kolkata was the place where the earlier generation went for higher education… but now they have no capacity.”

PhDs & poor faculty pay

India, said Mr Pai, produces only 50 PhDs in computer science. Infosys offered to give 10 PhD fellowships for three years at Rs 25,000 per month to students but some of the universities turned it down saying that their faculty gets paid less and they couldn’t pay students more.

Be civil

Mr Pai referred to an interaction he had with Dr Ramdas Pai of the Manipal group of institutions. Dr Pai said that a large group came to the college and hired the entire class of civil engineers (“they are in demand now, not IT pros”). After two days they came back and asked if they have any more people to hire, to which Dr Pai said that they only had faculty, “and please don’t take my faculty”, recalled Mr Mohandas Pai to a huge roar from the audience.

Who becomes faculty?

Dr D. Viswanathan, Vice-Chancellor, Anna University, made a telling comment while responding to Mr Pai’s comments. “After software companies like yours finish with their hiring, the rest stay on to do their post graduate programme. Again, after their PG, if they are not hired, they stay on to do their doctorate, and then become faculty!” he said, referring to the debate about poor quality of faculty that colleges battle with.

Over to sociologists

Interjecting in a debate among the audience on today’s social mores, Mr Pai asked, “Are we creating a civilisation of morons where aspirations are a beauty parade? Where the inspiration is to wear revealing dresses to class and keep sending SMS. There is something happening… intellectual activities are coming down, the vigour of an intellectual debate is coming down. Are there no great thoughts, no great ideologies, are we becoming a consumerist society? It’s a good research topic for sociologists.”