?I look for patterns in life,? says the 59-year-old founder and chief of the Rs 2,113-crore NIIT Group, which encompasses the around three-decade-old IT training and software services business, and lately, even a not-for-profit university. A techie by education, no wonder Pawar connects all that his company has achieved, and continues to strive for, by a common thread, a pattern if you will.
?The 21st century is the century of the mind, and, therefore, India’s century. And, I see lot of our actions fitting into that fundamental reality,? says Pawar, lovingly ?Raji? to company insiders. So whether it?s IT education, consulting, and now higher education, Pawar says all involve people and building their potential. A childhood spend in an army environment and some inspired schooling at The Scindia School, Gwalior, made him a body disciplinarian, but he worships at the altar of the mind. ?The body has to have the strength, because it is the carrier after all, but basically value gets created through the mind?tapping, nurturing, leveraging, harnessing it?call it what you will, but it all starts with a way to build capacity to reflect and think.?
To Pawar, old civilisations like the Indian and the Chinese have tremendous understanding of the mind, and that more than anything else?big markets and/or favourable demographics?is their claim for dominating this ?century of the mind??the knowledge era so to say. ?The IT industry is only the first expression of that (move where we) start respecting our traditional knowledge more and more and, therefore, tap into what we (already) know about the human mind and how it works,? he says.
It is this quest that has redefined NIIT’s core from mere ?IT training for a developing country? to a more open and holistic ?global talent development?. The difference is not merely in semantics, emphasises Pawar. ?Whether it?s higher education that needs to create new knowledge, or massive skilling for jobs at the bottom (of the income pyramid), both need a sustainable model.?
Take the 100-acre, year-old NIIT University, located at Neemrana, Rajasthan, for instance. Pawar hopes to run it as non-profit initiative, even if the laws of the land were to change to permit money making in higher education. ?The intent is to make it a place for serious research and industry-linked with incubators inside the campus. And frankly, with this objective, for-profit does not look like a possibility, as there will always be a conflict then on how much (money) to draw (out) and how much to put back.? Pawar insists that you can do a large training operations, a la IT training and NIIT, for profit, but if the objective is to create new knowledge, the pursuit is endless, and profit (motive) shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with it.
Pawar’s eyes lit up as he speaks of what he hopes NIIT University becomes. ?Ultimately, the university has to create intellectual property, as that is part of its financial/sustainability model.? As member of the Prime Minister’s National Council on Skill Development (NCSD), Pawar also grapples with the demographic dividend dilemma of a young, poorly-skilled population that can turn into India’s biggest boon or bane, depending on how the challenge is met.
?Skill building needs innovation to find a funding model, and that will come once we recognise some basic, as we call it at the NCSD, ?principles??that skills should be certifiable, bankable, fungible and artificial barriers between education and skills be broken.? And it is best if free markets be allowed to operate in skill building, with the government as a facilitator in promulgating those ?principles?.
?The model that we build in NIIT can lend itself to even carpentry,? says Pawar. Perhaps a partnership model that NIIT has build with ICICI Bank (financial services training) and Genpact (business-process-outsourcing training) could be a model here.
Pawar looks deeper within NIIT to find answers to the acute skills problem facing the nation. ?We, perhaps, run the biggest public-private partnership, in terms of touching people, with our school-learning solutions programme.? The programme, over a decade old and an Rs 250-crore business vertical actually, has touched over 10 million schoolchildren, largely in government-run schools, where ?the child (or the parents) does not pay a penny?.
The state governments?and NIIT works with over a dozen here?is the client on such build-operate-transfer PPP projects for enhancing schoolchildren?s IT skills. It sounds such an obvious and easy model to emulate, provided one can ?innovate in business model and technology, so that you can build a self-sustaining character?. Apparently, the National Skills Development Corporation, itself a PPP, is busying itself with providing the first tranche of risk-capital to around half-a-dozen entrepreneurial ventures for skill development in areas ranging from construction to auto repairs.
?Back in school in the 1960s, there was this practice of astachal, essentially to watch the setting sun in silence. We lived the sunset, year after year, watching it in silence, and at that time you had no option but to reflect.? This habit of watching the sunset has stayed with Pawar, something he says steered him to a life-long personal engagement with ?matters of the mind?. So much so that during the company offsites, Pawar makes it a point to drag his senior people to watch the sunrise at least one day, as ?you can?t do sunset if you’re working?. In fact, Pawar had taken this ?personal best practice? even to the NIIT University, as it helps ?still the mind?, and a peaceful mind is likely to generate more creative thoughts. For Pawar, all patterns or value creation in business start with those ?products of the mind??thoughts and ideas.
