2024-09-10 06:10:31
Washington: Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi has stressed the need for India to focus on production, saying that China dominates global production and hence it is not facing unemployment while Western countries including India and the US are facing the problem of unemployment. While interacting with students at the University of Texas at Dallas on Sunday, Gandhi said that there is no dearth of skills in India and if the country starts preparing itself for production, it can compete with China. Referring to the ‘ideological capture’ of the education system, he stressed the need to encourage vocational training so that the gap between the business system and the education system can be bridged. Gandhi is on a four-day informal visit to the US. During this, he will visit Dallas, Texas and Washington and interact with people of Indian origin and youth. During his visit to Washington starting on Monday, he also plans to meet US lawmakers and senior government officials there.
Indian Americans welcomed
He arrived in Dallas on Saturday night and was welcomed by a large number of Indian-American community members led by senior Congress leader Sam Pitroda and Indian National Overseas Congress, USA president Mohinder Gilzian. Gandhi said, “Western countries have employment problem. India has employment problem… But many countries of the world do not have employment problem. China certainly does not have employment problem. Vietnam does not have employment problem.”
He said, ‘If you look at America in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, this country was the center of global production. Whatever was made, (be it) a car, a washing machine (or) a TV, everything was made in America. Production in America started decreasing. It turned to Korea and then Japan. Ultimately, China became the center of production. If you look today, China dominates global production.’ He said that Western countries, America, Europe and India have ‘given up the idea of production’ and have handed it over to China.
Gandhi said, “The act of production creates employment. What we do, what the Americans do, what the Western countries do, is to organise consumption… India has to think about the act of production and organising production….” Gandhi said, “It is not acceptable for India to simply say that okay, manufacturing, whatever you call manufacturing or production, will be reserved for the Chinese. It will be reserved for the Vietnamese. It will be reserved for Bangladesh.”
Emphasis on increasing production
He stressed the need to encourage manufacturing. He said, ‘Unless we do that, we will face massive unemployment and clearly this is not sustainable. So you will see that if we continue on this path of forgetting manufacturing, you will see massive social problems in India, America and Europe. This is why our politics is polarized…’ According to the Leader of Opposition, there is no shortage of skills in India. He said, ‘Many people say that India has a skill problem. I do not think there is a skill problem in India. I think… there is no respect for people with skills in India.’
Gandhi said there is a need to connect the education system with the enterprise system through vocational training. “It is important to bridge this gap or connect these two systems, skills and education, through vocational training. I think the biggest problem with the education system at present is the ideological capture of it, where ideology is being nurtured through it…,” he said.
He said he was confident that India could compete with China if it moved towards manufacturing and started respecting skills. “I am fully convinced of this. States like Tamil Nadu have already done this. It is not that Indian states have not done this. Pune has done it. Maharashtra has done it. It is being done but not at the scale and coordination that is needed,” Gandhi said.