QUO VADIS GOA'S HUMAN CAPITAL?
By Frederick Noronha

Goa's wealth is not its iron-ore. Nor is it the factories that
import raw materials from half-way round the globe, pour in a few
hundred crores of rupees as government subsidies, and churn out
some chemical or other product.

It's not even true to say that Goa's real wealth is its
breathtaking beauty -- now rapidly being destroyed, thanks to the
hurry our politicians are in to make a fast buck. This region's
true wealth, undoubtedly, is its people.

For a fact, human capital has remained one of our most critical
exports for much of the twentieth century. It's not for nothing
that people spoke about Goa's money-order economy in the past.
Disparagingly or otherwise.

Tens of thousands of Goans have scoured the globe, to land up in
distant shores. Not excluding working as nurses in the Artic
Circle of Canada or as missionaries in the slums of Brazil.
(These are not imaginary instances. We have indeed encountered
the former via the Internet, and the latter, a nun, happened to
be visiting her family home at Nerul some months ago.)

But are we at all aware of the significance of this fact?

As we enter the next millenium, the good news is that the people
of Goa are getting even better at that which made this small
region stand out all this while. But, the bad news is that we
seem to be more than content in neglecting our own human capital,
destroying what little educational infrastructure we have, and
fumbling along without any long-term plan or vision about what
Goa and her people should aim to be. Our governments are of
course contributing to this in a big way.

If you go to any pocket of the globe, it won't be long before you
sniff out a Goan. Journalist colleagues who visited remote North-
Eastern India were surprised to find Goans there. A diplomat who
represented India in a long list of countries, Placido P D'Souza
who has since retired and is in Pune, spoke in an interview of
the odd experiences he himself had in meeting Goans at the most
unexpected places in the globe in Africa and the Far East.

What then gave these people from a small place the ability to
travel so far and so wide? Part of the problem was the gap
between the world-wanderers' expectations and the lack of
opportunity in Goa. But there were other crucial factors too.

Undeniably it was the education they managed to get access to;
particularly English-language education that stood in good stead
both when "the sun never set on" the British Empire and later. It
was also an openness to the outside world that the people of Goa
gained, ironically due to an early encounter with European
colonialism. It was their ability to adapt to new ideas

Generation by generation, the Goan diaspora worldwide worked its
way up. In the early part of this century, our grandmothers may
have worked as nannies to Western children. One generation later,
it seemed as if teachers, secretaries, nurses and accountants
dominated the ranks of emigrating Goans.

Now, the scene has changed vastly. It is the era of the Keith
Vazes, the Suneta Peres da Costas (remember the hardly-
recognised-at-home novelist from Down Under?) and the Dinesh
D'Souza (the Goan in America whose best-selling books have caused
major controversies, nevermind the allegations of racism). We are
already in the era of the Romulus Pereiras (the young man who
along with his two other Indian partners sold his Silicon Valley
company for a few hundred million dollars only) and the Ashank
Dessais (the CEO of the multicrore Mastek software giant who
studied at the Goa Engineering College in the early seventies).

These, it could be argued, are just a few exceptional cases. They
do not represent, it could be said, the bulk of simple-minded
Goans. Even if that's true, it cannot be denied that today there
are many more people than ever before of this small 1.3 million-
sized state and her expatriates who are becoming engineers and
chartered accountants, computer whizzes and financiers. People
from here are getting more professional and skilled to take on
the world.

But if this is happened, it is happening despite what colonial or
post-colonial governments have been able to do in Goa. Not
because of it.

Goa set up an impressive educational network in the 'sixties.
After all, didn't we had to prove to the world that New Delhi
liberated Goa, and had not 'conquered' it? But since then, the
record in later years has been dismal.

Widespread corruption has led to the bankruptcy of state coffers.
This means there are simply no funds to further build up the
higher-educational infrastructure that Goa so badly needs.
Politicisation of education and the state-run centres of culture
has vitiated the atmosphere further. Clique-ism in the running of
publicly funded organisations has not helped things. Nepotism in
the granting of top jobs -- just look at the top officials who
share family names with serving and former ministers and chief
ministers -- has added to the overall crisis.

Inspite of this, there can be no room for pessimism.

We cannot afford to give up so easily, or point to the misdeeds
of others as an alibi for our own lack of performance. We owe it
to our future generations to make the most of our present, and
create instituions and options that would give the next
generation of Goans a leg-up as they face up to the world of the
twenty-first century.

This will indeed happen.

If nature abhors a vaccum, community or voluntary and even
private initiatives could step in to provide the educational
backup that Goa so badly requires to develop its own human
capital.

We can already see signs of this happening. Life has its own
logic, and solutions often pop up from nowhere. If only, we are
willing to take cognisance of the positive signs when we come
across them....

In the last few years itself, a number of positive signs have
been coming up.

After decades of suffering from the brain-drain, it now seems to
be time for a change in the situation. We perhaps need to take a
leaf out from the book of Binod Khadria, author of 'The Migration
of Knowledge Workers' (Sage, 1999, New Delhi). We here too need
to take a positive approach and explore how despite losing our
valuable human resource to migration, can make the best of the situation.

Goa has been suffering from a dual loss of human capital and
knowledge resources. But can we not foresee a situation where
second- or third- and even fourth-generation migrants' skills and
abilities can be used to turn this apparent loss into Goa's
advantage?

Expatriates who have achieved fame, name and money overseas have
an enormous fund of goodwill towards their home state, Goa. If
only we are not to look at them as milking-cows, from whom we
only want something but are unwilling to give anything in return.

In this coming century, where technology will see the shrinking
of distances, it's the best time to build up links that are
mutually beneficial.

We would need to encourage Goan youngsters to have a greater, but
also more critical, openness to the outside globe. We need to
offer them the skills that would equip them for this task. Goa
needs to build up the capacities of her women in a much more
solid way than done before. If women hold up half the skies, as
Mao said, they certainly have a far greater role to play. Despite
finding themselves often in a male-chauvinist dominated society,
Goan women have done fine for themselves, partly because
migration thrust responsibility upon them.

Goa needs to realise that without a vision, nothing can be
achieved in any field. More so in a critical one like developing
its human capital.

We've been talking long about promoting the infotech industry in
Goa. But have we done anything to develop our own manpower to
cope with this new sector when it grows here? Or will we be
simply the neo-colonial pattern of development, where we import
power, manpower, capital and management skills to simply produce
IT products against a Goan backdrop?

For long, the Goa government has been making tall claims about
its achievements on the education front. Fact is that Goa has
reached where it reached despite, and not because of, her
governments.

Now, as we embark on a new century, can we chart out where we
would like to go on the education front. Whether the government
does something or not; whether the government helps or hinders
this effort? The clock is ticking; and we can't wait or just
simply grumble...