India Can / Bloomsbury India (ePub)

The book is a collection of 21 easy to read short stories. Each short story contains an idea that can create a favourable impact on the socio-economic growth of the country. The 21 fictionalized stories have narratives with relatable characters solving a key challenge using the idea. The subjects discussed are varied and touch every aspect and strata of life in our society.This is a book of ideas, albeit the story format is used to ensure that you have an enjoyable time working your way through each idea in this book. Several or all of the ideas in this book may have occurred to you at some point in time or you may have read, heard or seen them some-where. Facts and data that could have accompanied the ideas have deliberately been avoided to keep the book from becoming pedantic or too text-bookish. The artwork that accompanies each story is aimed at reinforcing the central idea of the story in a form that is easy for a visual reader to absorb and imbibe. You will observe that most of the stories, through their central characters, attempt to find ingenious solutions either to India's unemployment challenge or key issues involving the Indian economy. The employment challenge faced by India is a behemoth, given the country's huge population of employable age. The complexity of finding meaningful work for our young men and women is an onerous task. Our employable population lacks uniformity of skills, training and education. There is a marked difference in propensities and of resources available to young men and women on the basis of their socio-economic class and the regions that they come from. The demographic dividend that we keep priding ourselves on could also be our nemesis, if not engaged with and channelized in a meaningful way, the time for which is now. We have to place our young men and women in meaningful, productive and fulfilling work. This book attempts a few answers to such questions.