Advances in Developing Human Resources 2004 Rao 288 96

10.1177/1523422304266075Advances in Developing Human Resources August 2004Rao / HRD IN INDIA

Human Resource Developmentas National Policy in India

T. V. Rao

The problem and the solution. Although India took the leadin the Asia Pacific region, setting up a full Ministry of HumanResource Development , the Nat ional human resourcedevelopment concept in India has largely been limited to educa-tion and culture. The complexity of the country perhaps makesit difficult to have integrated HRD systems at the national level.Networking and learning from each other among various minis-tries and institutions and from the corporate sector will, how-ever, go a long way in effectively evolving and implementingNHRD policies.

Keywords: education; HRD policy; India

Any national human resource development (NHRD) policy must be basedon the country’s population. Hence, it is necessary to understand the struc-ture of the nation, its demographics, and its other characteristics.

With a population of 1.027 billion people, India is the largest democracyin the world and the second largest country in terms of population. Thesepeople are distributed among 34 geographic units, with 28 states and 6 unionterritories. They live in more than 550,000 villages and 200 towns and cities.Literacy rates in 2001 were 65% (female literacy, 54.16%; male literacy,75.85%). The gender ratio was 933 females per 1,000 males. Infant mortal-ity in 2001 was 70 per 1,000 births, and life expectancy at birth was 62.3years. Almost 40% of Indians are younger than 15 years old, and about 6%are older than 60. Over thousands of years of its history, India had rulersfrom the Iranian plateau, Central Asia, Arabia, Afghanistan, and the West.Indian people and culture have absorbed and changed these influences toproduce a remarkable racial and cultural synthesis.

Religion, caste, and language are major determinants of social and politi-cal organization in India today. The government recognizes 18 official lan-guages with Hindi as the most widely spoken. Although 83% of the peopleare Hindu, India also is the home of more than 120 million Muslims—one ofthe world’s largest Muslim populations. The population also includes Chris-

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tians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Parsis. The caste system reflects Indianoccupational and religiously defined hierarchies. Despite economic mod-ernization and laws countering discrimination against the lower end of theclass structure, the caste system remains an important source of social iden-tification for most Hindus and a potent factor in the political life of the coun-try. The caste system, superimposed with religious, socioeconomic, and lin-guistic differences, leads to issues of classification and conflict. It createsdivisiveness and poses the biggest human resource development (HRD)challenge.

Challenges for HRDIndia entered the 21st century with global recognition that it is an eco-

nomic power, having recorded sustained growth between 5% and 6%. Indiaachieved self-sufficiency in food within the first three decades of its inde-pendence. Despite reasonable growth over the past two decades, India can-not boast about its poverty alleviation or HRD. Thus, effectively deployingits resources to alleviate poverty and ensuring social development in termsof universal literacy, health facilities for all, safe drinking water, rural roads,and marketing infrastructure remain the challenges (Government of India,2003). Agriculture remains the bedrock of the Indian economy. Seventypercent of the population depends on rural income and agriculture. Devel-oping the competencies of people to enhance their longevity, ensure health,improve food and nutrition, and provide a decent quality of life are the mainfocal points of HRD. In this context, the approaches offered by the UnitedNations Development Program’s (UNDP) human development reports throughthe Commonwealth Secretariat’s working group on HRD become more rele-vant and provide appropriate frameworks for examining the HRD policiesof India (Commonwealth Secretariat, 1993; see Rao, 1996, for a discussionof UNDP reports and approaches).

Given the size and nature of the population, education, which is the chiefprovider of literacy and the skill base for millions of people, becomes thefocal point of NHRD policies. It is for this reason that India became the firstcountry in the Asia-Pacific region to reconstitute its Ministry of Educationas the Ministry of Human Resource Development in 1985.

National Education PolicyIndia has 259 universities (including 146 general, 18 science and tech-

nology, 5 for women, 8 open, 30 agricultural, and 17 medical). There are11,089 colleges. Of these, there are 550 engineering colleges, 600 manage-ment colleges, and 170 medical colleges, with an enrollment of about 7.5million students. About 74,000 are enrolled for research, and every yearabout 10,000 are awarded Ph.D.s.

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The Ministry of HRD announced in January 1985 that a new educationpolicy would be formulated for the country. A comprehensive appraisal ofthe existing educational scene was made, followed by a countrywide debate.The views and suggestions received from different quarters were carefullystudied (Ministry of HRD, Government of India, 1992). The perspectivedeveloped in the policy is similar to what other countries like Korea havedeveloped for formulating their NHRD policy (see Cho & McLean, 2002).

The need for a literate population and the provision of elementary educa-tion was envisaged as a crucial input for nation building in the National Edu-cation Policy of 1986 and the Program of Action of 1992. Both of these poli-cies were envisaged to provide education of satisfactory quality to allchildren up to 14 years of age. As a result, enrollments in primary educationhave gone up to 95% by 2000. The number of schools increased to 839,000,and the number of teachers rose to 3,217,000 by the end of 2000. The 83rdconstitutional amendment bill, introduced in 1997, made the right to educa-tion for children from 6 to 14 years old a fundamental right. The target ofuniversalizing elementary education has been divided into three broadparameters: universal access, universal retention, and universal achieve-ment. As a result, 94% of the rural population has been provided with pri-mary schools within 1 kilometer and 84% with upper primary schoolswithin 3 kilometers (see Govinda, 2002, for a detailed discussion).

At present, there are 292,000 nonformal education centers running in thecountry for those who cannot go to school, and they educate 7.3 million chil-dren. Of these, 58,788 centers are run by voluntary agencies. By 1998, therewere 110,000 secondary schools preparing children for entry into highereducation with an enrollment of 27.8 million students (of them, 10.1 millionare girls), with 1.5 million teachers.

The education policy addressed the basic needs of HRD and is the onlycomprehensive NHRD policy available to date. It dealt with the structure,systems, internal processes, implementation issues, and envisaged internalreview mechanisms. It aimed at children, youth, illiterate adults, out-of-school youth, women, teachers, educational administrators, the handi-capped, and all categories needing education and skills development. It alsofocused on institutions at various levels, content of education, managementof education, implementation issues, monitoring of education, and so on. Ittook cognizance of the existing strategic institutions doing research andpromoting the tools of HRD.

HRD in the Corporate SectorSince the first dedicated department of HRD was established in 1975 in

Larsen & Toubro (L&T), an engineering company, many corporations have

290 Advances in Developing Human Resources August 2004



established HRD departments to promote employee development, organiza-tion development, and culture building. Human resource development wasviewed in an integrated way, and it was defined as a set of systems and pro-cesses to promote the development of individuals as persons, individuals inrelation to their roles, dyadic relationships, teamwork and productivity,organizational culture, and capabilities (Rao, 1985)

By the mid-1980s, HRD had become an accepted role, and most organi-zations had changed their personnel, training, and other related functions toHRD. Human resource development has come to mean new expectations, anew body of knowledge, and a new function. The establishment of the Cen-tre for HRD at XLRI, a premier Management School in the eastern part ofIndia; the formation of the National HRD Network in 1985; the initiation ofthe Indian Academy of HRD in 1990; the inauguration of a doctoral pro-gram in HRD by AHRD India and XLRI; and so on are highlights of HRD inIndia (for a detailed discussion of these, see Rao, 2003).

The public sector in India, which has been the largest employer of people,also had success stories in its HRD policies and implementation. Corpora-tions like Hindustan Machine Tools, Bharat Heavy Electricals, HindustanAeronautics, State Bank of India and other public sector banks, SteelAuthority of India, and Coal India had extensive experiences with HRD pol-icies and experimented with innovative HRD and OD practices.

Thus, HRD in the corporate sector may be viewed as a success story interms of new conceptualizations, networking, and learning from each other.As a result of the National HRD Network and other professional bodies,such as the Indian Society for Training and Development and the NationalInstitute of Personnel Management, the knowledge base of HRD has spread,and many corporations have learned from each other (see Rao, 2003, for adetailed discussion of the accomplishments of Indian HRD).

The benefits of the lessons of HRD did not, however, flow from the cor-porate sector to the National HRD Ministries, through either their ministriesor the thousands of educational institutions that are managed in similarways to the corporate sector. Perhaps one of the reasons for this failure isthat various departments in government operate as independent entities, andthere is reluctance to learn from each other. For example, based on a reviewof the work of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Adminis-tration a few years ago, I conclude that the educational administrators in theministry have mostly felt that the principles that govern the management ofindustry are different from those of education. Added to the complexity ofthe country, absence of a single policy-making body to look at NHRD policyand reluctance of the educational policy makers to learn from within or fromoutside have resulted in India not getting the best out of its own humanresources.




HRD in Other SectorsAlthough the Ministry of HRD takes care of the HRD of the population at

large, in a country like India, the development of those who develop othersalso plays a critical role. The teachers, curriculum builders, educationaladministrators, and educational leaders are developed by the respectiveteacher training colleges, the National Council of Educational Research andTraining (NCERT), and the National Institute of Educational Planning andAdministration (NIEPA). The HRD of other agents and agencies is takencare of by the respective ministries. The Ministry of Personnel takes care ofthe HRD of all civil service agents and formulates the recruitment policies,training interventions, and train-the-trainer programs. Each ministry has itsown respective training facilities. Each state also has its own training setupsfor its civil service staff (often called Officers’Training Centres). For exam-ple, the MCR Institute of Human Resource Development in the State ofAndhra Pradesh is known for its innovative work on leadership develop-ment and improving excellence in government through training and inputsto policy formulation. Each of the town administration setups also has itsown HRD departments, usually called HR departments. Some still carrytheir old identities as personnel departments and establishment sections.The hospitals, medical centers, agriculture departments, railways, revenuedepartments, and so on all have their own departments of training andpolicy-making bodies. In all of these sectors, however, HRD remainedlargely limited to continuing education and training. There is very little indi-cation of the impact of the HRD success stories from the corporate sector.There is also no uniform NHRD policy that influences all of these institu-tions. The various agencies and agents that serve the public and provide stafffor various public services have benefited little from the developments inHRD in the corporate sector. Knowledge dissemination is poor, and a largepart of it is due to the complexity of the country and the absence ofmechanisms that facilitate learning and networking.

Role of HRD Ministry and HRD InstitutionsIn establishing the new Ministry of HRD, the young prime minister,

Rajiv Gandhi, at that time had a vision for the country, and he saw HRD as anessential tool for achieving that vision for the country. A senior minister inhis cabinet was assigned to this new ministry with the hope that he wouldprovide leadership to it. P. V. Narasimha Rao, who later became the primeminister of India, was put in charge of the Ministry of HRD. The HRD Min-istry consisted of the Departments of Education, Youth, Culture and Sports;Women’s Development; Integrated Child Development; and others. It wasduring this period that the New Education Policy (NEP) was formulated in1986 (Ministry of HRD, Government of India, 1992). It is not referred to as




NHRD policy, but essentially it is the only policy available to guide thedevelopment of a large part of the human resources in the country; it coverschildren, youth, and adults in terms of various forms of development (liter-acy, numeracy, skills, technical development, and functional development).

The process followed in formulating the policy is noteworthy. The entirecountry spent about a year debating and discussing the various issues in edu-cation. An analysis was done by various groups of people, experts, commu-nities, schools and colleges, and various bodies throughout the country todiagnose what was wrong with education, what was needed, and whatshould be done. Expert committees were appointed, a series of seminars andconferences were held throughout the country, many issues were raised, andsuggestions were made, debated, and discussed.

The Department of Education included nonformal education (meant forout-of-school youth who had not had the opportunity to complete their edu-cation or school dropouts), adult education (to provide literacy, numeracy,and other functional aspects of literacy), primary education, secondary edu-cation, higher education, technical education, medical education, agricul-tural education, and education in other specialized subjects, although therespective ministries also participated in enhancing the standards. All ofthese institutions involved in the development of education and educationalpolicy were also part of the Ministry of HRD.

Subsequent to this, however, the Ministry of HRD did not perform muchof an integrating role. Perhaps, given the country’s size, diversity, and com-plexity, such integration was not easy. Very understandably, therefore,NHRD policies were limited to the public at large and normally coveredadult education, preprimary and primary education, secondary education,and higher education. The concerns of NHRD policies centered on integra-tion of the country into one nation in spite of its diversity. Common syllabior curricula; common values; common cultures; learning about the country,its heritage, and its leaders; learning the dominant official language, whichis necessary to integrate the country; and learning to be tolerant of eachother due to many castes and religions have all been the focal points ofNHRD policy.

The education policy also had to occupy itself substantially with theadministration of such a large system of education. Therefore, the concernsfocused on maintaining standards of education. Thus, new bodies thatensure standards of education were brought in. Fund-giving bodies werealso brought in to promote research and development. The NCERT focusedon the development of curricula and on providing educational support ser-vices through its research, experiments, dissemination, and programs. TheCentral Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) was the body to set stan-dards at the school level, the University Grants Commission at the univer-sity level, and the All-Indian Council for Technical Education (AICTE) at




the technical education and management education programs level. Theopen universities provided continuing education for the masses.

Gaps in the NHRD PolicyTo understand the gaps in NHRD policy, it is essential to understand the

structure of the government, which is the main and perhaps the only com-mitted and obligated agency for NHRD in the country. The labor force in thecountry was 406 million in 2000. Of these, 19.41 million worked in the pub-lic sector and 8.70 million worked in the private sector. The distribution ofthis complete workforce throughout sectors was 64% in agriculture, 16% inindustry, and 20% in services. Total employment in the organized sector was28 million. A large number of people work as daily wage labor in agricultureand other sectors to earn their living. They are classified under the unorga-nized sector, which means that a large number of the labor force in India donot work in organizations or in the organized sector, which is both privateand public sector, but outside it. Twenty-six percent of the people live belowthe poverty line (Government of India, 2003). These statistics reveal thatany NHRD policy that does not focus on the labor force of 406 million andtheir quality of life is lopsided. The 20 million who work in the public sector(railways; posts and telegraphs; electricity boards; government departmentslike health, agriculture, revenue, and police; and the like) are the chiefagents of change. Developing their capabilities will have multiplier effectson the system. The NHRD policy is sensitive to the teachers and institutionscatering to the education sector but not to the other sectors. The Ministry ofPersonnel is a separate ministry that caters to the development of variouscategories of personnel employed in the government. It designs perfor-mance appraisal systems, organizes training, and determines career plan-ning. There is a separate education and training setup for each of the minis-tries. For example, the agriculture staff is trained by separate traininginstitutions (like the Agriculture Extension Education Centres, AgriculturalInstitutions, and National Institute of Rural Development). The same is truefor many other staffs.

The renaming of the Education Ministry as the HRD Ministry in 1985provided a great opportunity to bring all of its HRD efforts for these institu-tions under one umbrella. Synergizing the efforts of all agencies by treatingthe entire nation under one roof for formulating NHRD policies and empha-sizing the need to develop agents that promote the development of peopleare perhaps the main gaps that were left in the Education Policy of India.This could have made it a comprehensive NHRD policy. Perhaps India, assuch a big country, is too complex to be subject to such a national policy.

Another gap is in terms of the lessons to be learned from the corporatesector. The NHRD policy benefited very little from the experiences of the




corporate sector. In fact, the people associated with industry were rarelyinvolved in NHRD policy formulation. It is only in recent years that effortshave been made to involve industry.

Future DirectionsIn the past decade, after structural adjustments and economic reforms

undertaken by the country, India has begun to feel global pressure and alsothe advantages of access to global knowledge. Although the Indian corpo-rate sector is benefiting from global HRD and other management practices,there is little knowledge and experience flowing to NHRD policies or theirimplementation in India. Because India’s problems and issues are unique,and there is practically no parallel country that can offer lessons that canbenefit India in totality, India has to seek solutions from its own experienceand experimentation. There is no other democracy as large and complex asIndia that is committed to people and their participation in governance.There is no other country as multidimensional and as divided as India andtherefore as complex as India. Hence, no uniform solutions are likely to beapplicable.

India could, however, learn a lot from small experiments and encourageexperimentation within itself. The issues are complex, but some internalnetworking, learning from each other, and managing such learning will pavea way for the future. Perhaps the Commonwealth Secretariat guidelines(Commonwealth Secretariat, 1993), the Human Development Index, andexperiences drawn by the UNDP for developing countries will help in such apath (United Nations Development Program, 2003).

References

Cho, E. S., & McLean, G. N. (2002). National human resource development: Koreancase. In U. Pareek, A. M. Osman-Gani, S. Ramnaravan, & T. V. Rao (Eds.), Humanresource development in Asia: Trends and challenges (pp. 253-260). New Delhi,India: Oxford & IBH.

Commonwealth Secretariat. (1993). Foundation for the future: Human resource develop-ment. London: Author.

Government of India. (2003). Economic survey 2002-2003. New Delhi, India: Ministryof Finance and Company Affairs, Economic Division.

Govinda, R. (Ed.). (2002). India education report: A profile of basic education. NewDelhi, India: Oxford University Press.

Ministry of HRD, Government of India. (1992). National educational policy with modifi-cations. Retrieved September 9, 2003, from http://www.education.nic.in/html.web/natpol/htm




Rao, T. V. (1985). Integrated human resources development systems. In L. D. Goodstein& J. W. Pfeiffer (Eds.), The 1985 annual: Developing human resources (pp. 227-237).San Diego, CA: University Associates.

Rao, T. V. (1996). Human resource development: Experiences, interventions and strate-gies. New Delhi, India: Sage.

Rao, T. V. (2003). Future of HRD. New Delhi, India: MacmillanUnited Nations Development Program. (2003). Human development report 2003. New

Delhi, India: Oxford University Press.

T. V. Rao, chairman, TVRLS, was professor at the Indian Institute of Management,Ahmedabad. He is founder and first president of the National HRD Network, India,and the founder director of the Indian Academy of Human Resources Development.He has authored more than 30 books in HRD, education, entrepreneurship, health,population, and management training. Dr. Rao worked as a consultant to the Com-monwealth Secretariat, London; UNIDO; UNESCO; USAID Indonesia; and vari-ous other international bodies as a consultant.

Rao, T. V. (2004). Human resource development as national policy in India. Advances inDeveloping Human Resources, 6(3), 288-296.




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Advances in Developing Human Resources 2004 Rao 288 96