Abhishek Jain

Somewhere around the second century CE, near present day Thanjavur, a Chola king named Karikala put thousands of labourers to work sinking unhewn stone into the sandy bed of the Cauvery to make a dam, in a hope that it could supply water to his kingdom. To everyone’s surprise, no mortar was used to hold it together; there were only rocks laid against rock for more than three hundred metres, across a mighty river that flooded every year without fail. I’ve often wondered what his ministers...

As IT hiring collapses, India’s universities stand exposed as assembly lines for jobs that no longer exist. Consider three names. Google. Facebook. Dell. Each of them was built inside a college dormitory. Google was a doctoral project at Stanford in 1996; its parent company is today worth over three trillion dollars. Facebook was a side experiment in a Harvard dorm in 2004; it now reaches half the planet. Dell began in a University of Texas dormitory in 1984, assembled by a nineteen-year-old...

As AI renders entry-level work obsolete, India’s education system risks producing graduates for jobs that no longer exist. Last week, I made a simple phone call. I was trying to help a young finance graduate - a bright kid, full of hope - find a job at a company I knew well. A BPO firm. The kind of company that used to hire hundreds of freshers every year. My friend, a senior leader there, heard me out. Then he said something I was not ready for. “We don't need freshers like that anymore.” He...