填空题 The economic transformation of India is one of the great business stories of our tinge. Indian companies like Infosys and Wipro are powerful global players, while Western firms like G.E. and I.B.M. now have major research facilities in India employing thousands. India's seemingly endless flow of young, motivated engineers, scientists, and managers offering developed-world skills at developing-world wages is held to be putting American jobs at risk, and the country is frequently heralded as "the next economic superpower."
But India has nm into a surprising hitch on its way to superpower status: its inexhaustible supply of workers is becoming exhausted. {{U}} {{U}} 11 {{/U}} {{/U}}
How is this possible in a country that every year produces two and a half million college graduates and four hundred thousand engineers? Start with the fact that just ten per cent of Indians get any kind of post-secondary education, compared with some fifty per cent who do in the U.S. {{U}} {{U}} 12 {{/U}} {{/U}}
India does have more than three hundred universities, but a recent survey by the London Times Higher Education Supplement put only two of them among the top hundred in the world. A current study led by Vivek Wadhwa, of Duke University, has found that if you define "engineer" by U.S. standards, India produces just a hundred and seventy thousand engineers a year, not four hundred thousand. The irony of the current situation is that India was once considered to be overeducated. {{U}} {{U}} 13 {{/U}} {{/U}}
However, once the Indian business climate loosened up, though, that meant companies could tap a backlog of hundreds of thousands of eager, skilled workers at their disposal. Unfortunately, the educational system did not adjust to the new realities. {{U}} {{U}} 14 {{/U}} {{/U}}Even as the need for skilled workers was increasing, India was devoting relatively fewer resources to producing them.
India has taken tentative steps to remedy its skills famine-the current government has made noises about doubling spending on education, and a host of new colleges and universities have sprung up since the mid-nineties. {{U}} {{U}} 15 {{/U}} {{/U}}.
In a country where more than three hundred million people live on a dollar a day, producing college graduates can seem like a low priority. Ultimately, the Indian government has to pull off a very tough trick, malting serious changes at a time when things seem to be going very well. It needs, in other words, a clear sense of everything that can still go wrong. The paradox of the Indian economy today is that the more certain its glowing future seems to be, the less likely that future becomes.
A. But India's impressive economic performance has made the problem seem less urgent than it actually is, and allowed the government to defer difficult choices.
B. Moreover, of that ten per cent, the vast majority go to one of India's seventeen thousand colleges, many of which are closer to community colleges than to four-year institutions.
C. Infosys says that, of 1.3 million applicants for jobs last year, it found only two per cent acceptable.
D. Although India has one of the youngest workforces on the planet, the head of Infosys said recently that there was an "acute shortage of skilled manpower," and a study by Hewitt Associates projects that this year salaries for skilled workers will rise fourteen and a half per cent, a sure sign that demand for skilled labor is outstripping.
E. In the seventies, as its economy languished, it seemed to be a country with too many engineers and Ph.D.s working as clerks in government offices.
F. Many Indian graduates therefore enter the workforce with a low level of skills.
G. Between 1985 and 1997, the number of teachers in India actually fell, while the percentage of students enrolled in high school or college rose more slowly than it did in the rest of the world.