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NEW DEHLI. – Sahana Subramanyam is a final year student at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. She is majoring in economics and minoring in data science. She says she chose to focus also on data science because it bridges the demands of economics and her love for computer programming.

The university has a compulsory course for all students in quantitative reasoning, under which she chose to learn the Python programming language. In the data science course, among other things, she has learnt R, a programming language that enables you to manage and analyse massive data bases. Sahana is already using Python to build a model for a research project on identifying how graded inequalities, such as caste, emerge in societies. Python enables you to build predictive models significantly faster than traditional methods.

“Programming languages allow you to use the power of the computer,” Sahana says. It’s a power that has touched extraordinary levels today.

Sahana’s course combination allows her to do work that a traditional economics focused student would never be able to do. Her programming strengths also give her the ability to look way beyond economics, considering technology has become core to every field and industry. Her university actively encourages these combinations. There are students majoring in physics and taking education as a minor, combining economics with sustainability, biology with economics, physics with sociology, economics, and the history of India.

“Take renewable energy, you cannot understand it without understanding economics, engineering, physics, politics. Real world is like that,” says Anurag Behar, vice chancellor of Azim Premji University.

He is critical of the way India has fragmented education. He agrees it’s absolutely important to learn a discipline deeply, be it sociology or electrical engineering.

“But it is in real life that you apply these disciplines,” he says. So you need to understand other aspects of life.

Many countries around the world do not have this siloed approach to higher education. Today, as the world gets transformed by technology and other trends, a growing number of educationists and employers believe it’s time for India to move to a cross-disciplinary education system.

Sabina Dewan is co-founder & president of JustJobs Network, a think-tank based in Washington and New Delhi focused on finding solutions to create more and better employment. She previously worked with the International Labour Organisation in Switzerland, and the European Commission in Belgium.

Dewan says the world is at a crossroads, with a confluence of mega trends – technology, urbanisation, trade, migration, and climate change – drastically reshaping the global employment landscape.

“The scale and pace of this is unprecedented and we are not equipped to understand how these will change jobs of the future,” she says.

So it is necessary to equip young people in a way that they are flexible enough to respond quickly to a new context. Sagar Paul, head of client services at technology consultancy.

ThoughtWorks, notes that businesses are already going through massive contextual changes. Earlier, a steelmaker may at best move into adjacencies like building automobile or white goods plates. Today, a Google moves from a search engine to autonomous cars, and an Apple from PCs to phones to watches.

“So it requires employees to be able to shift context quickly. We need change makers in the organisation. We are not hiring for skills anymore, but a certain aptitude,” he says.

Paul also notes that all enterprises have become consumerised, with the adoption of technology and services used by individuals in the workplace. So his employees also need to relate to people much more.

“My interview checks for empathy, solidarity. Customers are human beings, and we need to be able to have huge empathy for them. Empathy is much higher among those from the liberal arts, the performing arts.

So we need artists who are technologists, technologists who are artists, people who can also come up with independent thoughts and make it a movement,” he says, adding that India needs to introduce liberal arts into all curriculum.

“With our current education, we are solving 20th century problems, not 21st century ones,” he says.

Shraddhanjali Rao, head of human resource for India at enterprise software company SAP, brings in the imagery of a jungle gym and spider web to describe the kind of employee she values. A career, she says, is no more a ladder for you to grow in the same function one step at a time, but is a web of experiences across various functions and roles.

“You need a much broader perspective, not just depth of knowledge or expertise in one specific area,” she says.

And if a person has two interests, say journalism and psychology or UX (user experience) design and social media, Rao says she can also work with the person in a multiple-engagement model.

“If work in one comes down, then you can do more of the other,” she says.

Paul Dupuis, CEO of Randstad India, which services the HR requirements of a number of large companies, says more and more Indian CEOs are discussing the need for multi-skilled employees. “Companies are looking for people who are agile, have a wide perspective. They want soft skills that might be acquired from a liberal arts background,” he says.

Dewan of JustJobs believes changes must start at the school level itself and argues that six-month or one-year training programmes cannot make up for years of poor quality education provided to especially those in the lower economic strata. She’s pushing for introduction of employability skills at the secondary school level – skills in new technology areas, basic financial management skills, soft skills.

Prof Jagadeesh Kumar, dean of academic courses at IIT Madras, the institution wants its students to understand that as engineers, they cannot say they will deal with only engineering problems.

“Eleven percent of the total coursework of a student involves working with other disciplines including ethics, life skills, environment, political science and others,” he says.

IIT Madras even offers engineering economics as a subject.

“The idea is to learn what kind of engineering will survive in the commercial world,” Kumar says.

Balakrishnan Shankar, associate dean of the school of engineering at Amritapuri in Kerala, says students are looking to merge big data with biology and social science.

“Theories that you learn in big data or engineering can be applied to population of birds, movement of sand dunes or census data,” he says.

Rao of SAP says the ability to interpret and analyse data will soon become a base level expectation in all industries.

This is the reason why all undergraduate programmes in Azim Premji University have quantitative reasoning as a compulsory course. The university also has two other compulsory courses for all: one on public reasoning, which trains students on the art of public discussion with respect for pluralism, and the other on India, its history, sociology, so that students can relate their core courses with the world outside.

Behar says the success of the approach can be seen in the fact that the university’s undergraduate students are writing for peer-reviewed academic journals like the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW). It can also be seen in the confidence with which an undergraduate student in economics speaks about programming.

Asked why she likes R over data analysis software like Stata, Sahana says, “I like R because it’s open source, it allows you way more control over what you do, and allows more ways of thinking about a problem.” – TimesofIndia