On July 26 a section of the intelligent machine-guided Rs.4,700-crore Lucknow-Kanpur Greenfield National Elevated Expressway, inaugurated with great fanfare sank within 12 days; on July 12 an approach road to a Rs.16-crore bridge over the Tons River in Dehradun caved in within 16 days of inauguration; on July 4 a year earlier the Katai-Nilje flyover, completed after years of construction had to be substantially reworked; in 2025 the approach road of the Rs.60.43 crore Durgapali Railway Overbridge in Sambalpur exhibited larger craters just a day after its inauguration. In 2024  a section of the canopy of refurbished Terminal 1 at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport collapsed during heavy rain crushing vehicles, killing one person and injuring nine.

Every day muted newspaper headlines proclaim the collapse of poorly constructed roads and bridges inflicting great damage to the economy in terms of death of productive personnel and destroyed property. Add to these losses the number of lives lost on the country’s poorly designed roads. India has the largest number of annual road accident fatalities (172,000) and citizens injured (450,000) worldwide. Eighty years after the country attained freedom from foreign rule, it is becoming ever clearer that this huge annual loss to life, property and GDP is the outcome of neglect of education, especially vocational education and training (VET).

Currently only 4 percent of India’s 500 million workforce is formally trained cf. China’s 26, America’s 52 and South Korea’s 96 percent. Time to look back in anger at the type of education system five Soviet-inspired Planning Commissions, replete with eminent economists, engineered.