From Degrees to Ideas

When LG Manoj Sinha told the gathering at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University's 23rd Foundation Day that institutions must ask not "what should we teach?" but "what problems must we solve?", he was articulating a shift that India can no longer afford to postpone. His call is not merely another Government slogan; it echoes PM Narendra Modi's Independence Day announcement of a Rs one lakh crore research fund. It is a recognition of a crisis that is uniquely Indian in scale and uniquely urgent in timing. No other country faces India's particular arithmetic problem: a vast, young, increasingly literate population chasing a shrinking pool of conventional jobs. Two generations ago, a simple bachelor's degree alone was a passport to a secure Government post. As literacy spread, ambition shifted to engineering and technical education, promising better prospects through specialised skills. Jammu and Kashmir's own trajectory tells this story in miniature: for decades, REC Srinagar (now NIT Srinagar) stood as the region's sole engineering college. Today, engineering colleges have mushroomed across Jammu and Kashmir and neighbouring states to the point where thousands of seats go unfilled every admission cycle. The aspiration then moved again, towards an engineering degree paired with an MBA, the presumed formula for a good job. That formula, too, has quietly broken down.

The uncomfortable truth is that a technical degree no longer guarantees employability. Government recruitment cannot possibly absorb the number of graduates each year. The private sector, particularly the IT services industry, which once seemed inexhaustible, is shedding rather than adding entry-level roles; its business model of routine service delivery is increasingly automatable. The artificial intelligence revolution now under way is not creating demand for the old streams of rote-learned coding and process work; it is eliminating it. A generation trained to seek employment is arriving at a moment when employment, in its familiar form, is disappearing.

This is precisely why the Lieutenant Governor's emphasis on research and innovation deserves to be taken seriously rather than filed away as ceremonial rhetoric. India's problems are not in short supply, from rural healthcare to urban congestion to climate resilience, and each is a potential seedbed for the kind of small, sharp innovation that can become a livelihood in itself. The last decade has already offered proof of concept. Indian youth have driven remarkable advances in defence and space technology, with young private players stepping in to solve complex technical glitches, supply critical components, and patent original solutions in domains once considered the exclusive preserve of large public institutions. This was not accomplished by rote knowledge. It was accomplished by young people who learned to identify problems and build solutions.

Rote knowledge has, in fact, become close to worthless. Every fact a student might memorise now sits a thumb-swipe away. Platforms such as Claude and ChatGPT can walk a curious mind through almost any technical problem, in any field, at any hour. The scarce resource is no longer information; it is the capacity to ask the right question, adapt quickly, and apply knowledge to a real, local problem before someone else does. A university's historical prestige counts for very little in this environment. What matters is whether it cultivates in its students the instinct to build rather than to apply. This is the cultural shift universities and colleges must now instil, and time is not on their side. Curricula still largely reward memorisation and examination performance over problem-solving and iteration. Faculty incentives still favour publication counts over patents and start-ups. Government schemes for research-oriented projects exist in abundance, as LG pointed out, but abundance of funding means little without a calibrated, focused institutional approach to identify students with genuine ideas and walk them through incubation.

The choice before Indian higher education is stark. Continue producing graduates trained to seek jobs that are steadily vanishing, or begin producing young people equipped to create the jobs India actually needs. The window for that transformation is closing as fast as the old job market itself. There is no more time to lose.