India should shed its colonial hangover of credential obsession and rediscover its entrepreneurial DNA, says Marcellus Funding Managers’ Saurabh Mukherjea, who warns that elite levels now not maintain the important thing to success in a radically shifting financial world.
On a latest podcast with Bharatvaarta, Mukherjea argued that India’s fixation with prestigious levels and elite schooling—lengthy thought-about tickets to upward mobility—has outlived its utility. “Overlook the diploma per se,” he mentioned. “Deal with summary pondering expertise, creativity, and articulation.” In response to him, these are the actual instruments of survival and success in at present’s world.
For Mukherjea, the foundation of this obsession lies in India’s colonial previous. “The British got here in, created the civil service and the clerical babu class,” he famous. Publish-independence, India’s leaders adopted the identical bureaucratic mannequin, designing a system that churned out workplace employees as a substitute of risk-takers. “We had been bred by means of our faculty and faculty years to be match staff for big corporations,” he mentioned. “That world is gone.”
The shift shouldn’t be non-obligatory however structural. “Employment as a phenomenon is simply about 200 years outdated,” he mentioned. “Earlier than that, we had been an entrepreneurial society. Everybody must turn into an entrepreneur now—by design or necessity.”
Mukherjea cited historian Lakshmi Subramanian’s latest work, India Earlier than Empire, which particulars how pre-colonial India was a worldwide commerce hub with sturdy rule of regulation and a low price of capital. “We had a vibrant, affluent enterprise group,” he defined. The British dismantled it—strategically and systematically—by fostering disdain for native entrepreneurs and changing them with colonial-backed enterprise pursuits.
“The British left, however their insidious legacy remained,” Mukherjea mentioned. “They satisfied us that the very best life is one among white-collar servitude secured by means of rote studying and levels. That mindset lasted 75 years—but it surely’s breaking now.”
With India’s startup scene booming and a brand new era rejecting conventional profession scripts, Mukherjea believes a return to roots shouldn’t be solely overdue, however inevitable. His recommendation to the subsequent era? “Cease struggling to validate your price by means of elite certificates. Construct issues. Suppose otherwise. Personal your future.”
