HRD factor: Attach importance or repent afterwards

 Dr B K Mukhopadhyay

(The author is a Professor of Management and Economics, formerly at IIBM (RBI) Guwahati. He can be contacted at m.bibhas@gmail.com)

For any development plan, it is the development and utilization of the human resources that play the defining role. The two-way linkage between human resource development and overall economic progress is crucial—sustained high economic growth requires a blend of healthy, educated, and adequately skilled manpower. This enables human resources to fully participate in and contribute to the development process. We must, therefore, take a holistic view of organisational workforces and their improvement—related chiefly to performance management, which in turn begins and ends with employees. Let there be no doubt that human capital forms the quintessential component of any performance initiative.

Clearly, Global leadership calls for global skills. Today’s business culture demands leaders who are true innovators, challenging traditional thinking. The target today is to achieve competitiveness through the knowledge worker. Talent is one of the determining assets of every organisation facing great change and competition. Skills, insight, and individual commitment are the raw materials for innovation, service, and agility, which in turn mean the disciplines of sourcing, developing, retaining, and motivating high-quality manpower.his is an area that is turning out to be the key differentiator of success, with talent management moving to the centre of strategy formulation.

In the field of corporate management today, the most relevant area is that of human resource management. Industrial relations chiefly involve two interest groups: management and the knowledge worker. This relationship has to cater to individual human resources in their individual characteristics as well as the collective group. The most important ingredient is definitely the adult-to-adult contractual principle. And conflict management continues to be the most formidable task. A creative approach to this would be to demonstrate confidence and fearlessness in dealing with the problems of the day. Mutual confidence is gained through interaction with all parties concerned in an organisation. And this would pave the way for successful conflict management. It remains the top priority as the workforce in the organised sector’ has gone up from three to six million to 15 million, while the industrial workforce has moved up to five million compared to two million in 1947.

Human Resource Development (HRD) is a process distinguished from mere personnel functions where employees are helped in a continuous and planned manner to acquire and sharpen their capabilities and develop an organisational culture. The employees are continuously helped by performance planning, feedback, training, periodic performance ratings vis-à-vis development needs, and the creation of development opportunities through job rotation, training, and responsibility definitions.

Organisational development is the process of planning and implementing systematic changes designed to improve organisational effectiveness. Periodical training programmes for the staff are, therefore, to be arranged on a wider scale so that the instructions contained in the manual and check list are understood and meticulously followed in day-to-day operations. Arrangements like judicious manpower deployment are thus crucial for the optimal utilisation of available manpower. As avenues for work deployment galore arise, the reallocation of duties and necessary training, motivation, and inclination factors naturally come into play. Any kind of projection and long-range planning, then, must take into account the nature of work, work load, and return from the venture concerned. One also needs to understand the amount of drift from the existing equilibrium.

India’s economy is no longer a minnow. In many key areas, the country has been able to draw global attention. Skill shortfalls in social development are, thus, an area to be looked into on an urgent basis. India’s literacy rate now is around 65 percent, as compared to over 95 percent in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines, or even Indonesia’s 92 percent! In fact, the mortality rate in India is around 60 per thousand, compared to 32 in Indonesia, 28 in the Philippines, and 24 in Thailand. Current data has established the fact that, with a peak import duty of around 12.5 percent against the Asian average of 8 percent and continuing labour policy hurdles, India’s merchandise exports are growing at a compound rate of over 20 percent per annum. India has become a world power in service exports, notably computer software and business process outsourcing. The upshot is clear: such countries do possess latent talents that, if properly explored, could yield ample dividends.

The success of any economy, especially the developing ones, thus largely depends on how human resources are put to use. Japan and China [albeit through suppression in some areas related to human rights] are cases in point, among others. The microfinance revolution that has already taken place in Bangladesh as well as the one coming up in India constitute the right process on this score. It is heartening that even an economy like Mali—one of the poorest countries in Africa—has also been following the microfinance model.

There is no denying the fact that in countries like India, the combined effects of economic growth and measures for direct interventions for poverty alleviation have led to a decline in the incidence of poverty, especially in the recent past. Barked by sustained growth momentum as well as the launch of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, this trend is all set to continue in the future. A progressive increase in the coverage of such types of programmes from the current level of 200 districts to the country as a whole in the next five years, rime-bound implementation coupled with transparency through the Right to Information Act, and accountability through decentralised panchayati raj institutions have the potential to make a permanent dent in the incidence of unemployment and poverty in the country, as rightly observed by the Economic Survey.

For any development plan, it is the development and utilization of the human resources that play the defining role. The two-way linkage between human resource development and overall economic progress is crucial—sustained high economic growth requires a blend of healthy, educated, and adequately skilled manpower. This enables human resources to fully participate in and contribute to the development process. We must, therefore, take a holistic view of organisational workforces and their improvement—related chiefly to performance management, which in turn begins and ends with employees. Let there be no doubt that human capital forms the quintessential component of any performance initiative.