20150518 Five years to repent if Singaporeans don’t demand accountability from PAP for foreigners’ dubious/bogus degrees

I refer to TRE’s “Teo: No need for central authority to screen FT degrees”.

DPM Teo is right because we do not need to waste more tax dollars to set up another agency to oversee the responsibilities of irresponsible government organisations. Teo was replying to MP Png’s question in Parliament on foreigners’ bogus qualifications.

Png should have demanded accountability instead of allowing PAP to wriggle out of repeated screw ups. The repercussions go beyond just a few jobs lost to foreigners. Based on PAP’s support of IDA’s shoddy HR practice, there are likely to be tens of thousands of foreigners with fake degrees. Could it be that PAP isn’t aware of the endemic corruption in India?

PAP’s defence of IDA’s untenable position is likened to equating local graduates to foreign ones from unheard of universities, ie Local grads = Foreign grads from unheard of unis. Is this in our interests?

To a foreigner who has little job prospect in his country, the risk of getting caught for a bogus degree is worth the price for landing a job in Singapore. This is because an accountant in Singapore ($3,854) earns about 10 times more than one in India ($340). (more links in TRE article)

The ‘quality’ of Indian graduates has been revealed by The Wall Street Journal’s “India graduates millions, but too few are fit to hire”, published by TRS on 29 April (below post). The article reveals shocking facts about Indian graduates. An Indian call centre has found it increasingly difficult to find competent Indians and most of its 8,000 employees are based outside of India. Most Indians could not communicate effectively in English and only 3% of applicants could be employed. According to the article, “75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India’s high-growth global industries”.

If Indians could not be employed in India, why does the PAP lay out the employment red carpet for Indians at the expense of local graduates? .

(Singaporean graduates had better wake up to the reality that PAP has contractual obligations to provide jobs for Indian nationals under CECA and it has NOTHING to do with creating good jobs for locals. Indian banks set up in Singapore hire mostly their nationals. Singaporean banks like DBS which set up branches in India hire mostly their nationals. Both ways, the Singaporean graduate will be screwed. Even DBS CEO is a new citizen from India.

CECA has enable DBS to set up 12 branches in 12 major Indian cities. Indian salaries are at least 5 times lower than Singapore’s and would DBS sacrifice it profits to employ Singaporeans at local wages in India?

To date, no minister has provided any statistics of all the good jobs created by our immigration policy because there is hardly any. PAP policies only serve its business interests.)

It is disingenuous of IDA to deny that a higher educational qualification plays no part in employing Nisha. If there were 9 other local graduate applicants without an MBA, wouldn’t IDA have considered Nisha’s MBA?

In TRE’s “Corruption in Indian universities – A way of life”, an Indian student was reported to have told a BBC reporter that “It is our democratic right! Cheating is our birthright”. Another person told the reporter, “India’s university system is in crisis. Cheating happens at every level. Students bribe to get admission and good results. Research students get professors to write their dissertations. And the professors cheat too, publishing articles in bogus journals.”

PAP has always been indifferent to a high level of corruption in foreign countries because its sole objective is to increase the profits of overseas Singaporean businesses, mostly GLCs. So long as PAP remains the dominant political party, there will never be any accountability for its lack of due diligence. PAP’s track record – NO ONE at ICA, MOM and IDA has been held accountable for letting in fake talents, eg Yang Yin.

A Singaporean spends at least 10 times more than an Indian on education. Is it fair for PAP to put us on par with foreigners? Is it not immoral to invent excuses for not conducting due diligence? Aren’t there thousands of foreigners with bogus degrees? Why has PAP not taken any action to weed out those scumbags and sent them packing?

Singaporean graduates had better understand how Singapore Inc works under PAP as it may be too late after falling victim to the system. PAP started with depressing low wages in the 1990s and all low wage workers have experienced real wage stagnation for more than a decade. But low wages can’t go any lower or even Indians and PRCs would not want to work here. PAP then targeted those without a degree, eg poly graduates now have to compete with foreign grads from PAP’s ‘reputable’ unis who are willing to accept a lower salary. Eventually, even Singaporean degree holders were not spared.

In 2013, it was revealed that the number of foreign lawyers grew 42% in the preceding 6 years compared to 27% for local ones. Soon to hit our shores in numbers will be Indian accountants and nurses. Nurses’ wages have already been depressed by foreigners from China and the Philippines in recent years. Who’s next?

PAP will stop at nothing to increase the foreigner population in order to reduce business costs. This is to maintain the high rental cost which benefits the government who is the biggest landowner. Reducing high rental cost will have a cascading effect on its income through lower property prices, GST, income/corporate tax revenues, etc. Our fake economic growth will be exposed.

Under the PAP, it is inevitable that Singaporean graduates will compete with foreign ones from ‘reputable’ unis, many with bogus degrees. If Singaporeans do not demand accountability from the PAP at the polls, we will have 5 years to repent.

For those who miss TRS, below is a saved copy.

WSJ: INDIA HAS MILLIONS OF GRADUATES EACH YEAR, BUT FEW ARE FIT TO HIRE

Post date:
29 Apr 2015 – 7:31pm

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.

So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges.

Yet 24/7 Customer’s experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India.

In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore.

“With India’s population size, it should be so much easier to find employees,” says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. “Instead, we’re scouring every nook and cranny.”

India’s economic expansion was supposed to create opportunities for millions to rise out of poverty, get an education and land good jobs. But as India liberalized its economy starting in 1991 after decades of socialism, it failed to reform its heavily regulated education system.

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What’s more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world.

“If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys,” says Vijay Thadani, chief executive of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.

Muddying the picture is that on the surface, India appears to have met the demand for more educated workers with a quantum leap in graduates. Engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 390,000 available in 2000, according to the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade group.

But 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India’s high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centers, according to results from assessment tests administered by the group.

Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools in rural areas in India, where more than 70% of the population resides. It found that about half fifth graders can’t read at a second-grade level in india.

At stake is India’s ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.

The challenge is especially pressing given the country’s more youthful population than the U.S., Europe and China. More than half of India’s population is under the age of 25, and one million people a month are expected to seek to join the labor force here over the next decade, the Indian government estimates. The fear is that if these young people aren’t trained well enough to participate in the country’s glittering new economy, they pose a potential threat to India’s stability.

“Economic reforms are not about goofy rich guys buying Mercedes cars,” says Manish Sabharwal, managing director of Teamlease Services Ltd., an employee recruitment and training firm in Bangalore. “Twenty years of reforms are worth nothing if we can’t get our kids into jobs.”

Yet even as the government and business leaders acknowledge the labor shortage, educational reforms are a long way from becoming law. A bill that gives schools more autonomy to design their own curriculum, for example, is expected to be introduced in the cabinet in the next few weeks, and in parliament later this year.

“I was not prepared at all to get a job,” says Pradeep Singh, 23, who graduated last year from RKDF College of Engineering, one of the city of Bhopal’s oldest engineering schools. He has been on five job interviews—none of which led to work. To make himself more attractive to potential employers, he has enrolled in a five-month-long computer programming course run by NIIT.

Mr. Singh and several other engineering graduates said they learned quickly that they needn’t bother to go to some classes. “The faculty take it very casually, and the students take it very casually, like they’ve all agreed not to be bothered too much,” Mr. Singh says. He says he routinely missed a couple of days of classes a week, and it took just three or four days of cramming from the textbook at the end of the semester to pass the exams.

Others said cheating, often in collaboration with test graders, is rampant. Deepak Sharma, 26, failed several exams when he was enrolled at a top engineering college outside of Delhi, until he finally figured out the trick: Writing his mobile number on the exam paper…

*Read the full article at http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703515504576142092863219826