India Awaits its HR Revolution
With a population approaching 1.2 billion, half under the age of 25, India is one of the world’s human capital powerhouses. But is India making the most of its demographic edge? In Human Resource Development International, Rao and Varghese suggest that “conservative human resource development (HRD) policies” have not helped India’s skills base to keep pace with the country’s economic progress.
India’s organizations were among the earliest to separate HRD departments from personnel departments to focus on talent and organization development. Despite this, the authors contend, “there is little to show that the HRD function has added value. HRD’s impact on business is still not assessed. Data from HRD audits of 12 Indian organizations indicate that the HRD function is structured badly, differentiated inadequately, poorly staffed and fails to meet basic HRD framework requirements.”
The authors cite one recent study of line manager perceptions of the HRD function in 18 Indian organizations, which indicated a dramatic fall in the performance of the HRD function over the last decade. “While many organizations have been trying to reposition or reinvent their HRD,” they note, “the HRD function seems to be busier in HR maintenance activities than HR development activities.”
The HR environment in India is beset by a shortage of skilled labour at all levels of the spectrum and fierce competition for talent, resulting in poaching, rising wages and attrition, and the loss of intellectual capital.
Faced with such challenges, HR departments are running to stay in place. The authors offer a litany of shortcomings:
- HR departments spend little time or resources on the development of existing employees.
- What resources are available for training are almost exclusively devoted to building hard technical skills at the expenss of soft skills.
- Several management fads and styles are practiced across organizations, confusing employees.
“Large-scale professionalization of the HRD function in Indian industry through reliable and robust HRD systems and sub-systems is, at best, a distant dream,” Rao and Varghese write. “While many firms have taken encouraging steps to pursue HRD on a more systemic footing, at several others, systems serve a public relations function to be pointed out occasionally in chaste corporate speak to newspapers and magazines for employment branding purposes.”
Trends and challenges of developing human capital in India, by T.V. Rao and Sumeet Varghese; Human Resource Development International (12:1,15 — 34; 2009)
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