Apart from access to education, what worries me about education in India is quality of Education. Though the perception about education in India is still very good, I suspect that after a decade or two, the perception may not survive. I hope it does not happen. Already in my generation itself, the number of people who actually wish to think is too less and unfortunately that's what industry wants, especially the high recruitment software industry, whose still main business is to take boring, pathetic work that westerners don't want to do and ask our people to do that mindlessly without questioning whether what they do makes sense?

Aah, as always I am digressing from the topic. So, what wrong? Why do I think quality of education is going down? Well, first, to have good quality education, there should be teachers to teach. Most times, teachers are there physically but shouldn't they be teaching? You might say, that's why all kids go to tuitions. Let me ask back do tuitions teach? All they do is to tell you how to get more marks in exams, which is actually what even schools do. Is getting marks education????

What lacks most in today's education scenario India is ability to think. How many schools encourage thinking? Almost none.... Student has to write answers as told by teachers or else... The common method is to know what possible questions will come in exams and rattofy them, who the hell needs to understand? The goal is to get marks in the exam and not learn? That's what parents want to. I know it is difficult to blame them because in the system we have made in our country, entry depends on marks which can be obtained by writing exams at the end of year or semester. There is almost no focus on continuous learning. But how much really success in life depends on marks you get in all the exams? very weak relation, if there is any at all. Just look around, are all the successful people are academic achievers?

The real problem is the way education goes because of the marks system. Mugging has become the most essential skill in today's education system. Find out all the questions that can come in the exams, write the answers and mug them. Of course, even that is not so much work, there are all kinds of guides and everything that do for students. Where the hell is thinking? Where is learning? Do we want to see our future where people can't think and have to depend on some specialist for every damn little thing? Already, we are not too far from that, and do these specialists really help, they do not understand how their problems in their field relate to problems in other's fields, and therefore they screw up, they literally play with our lives, not juts healthwise, but psychologically, spiritually, and all other ways one can think of.

The next stage is that of higher education. Indians are among the most successful in the world when it comes to higher education, and people like Jawaharlal Nehru created strong emphasis on higher education by encouraging building systems like IIT. Ironically, despite all this the amount of research output that comes out from Indians, situation with higher education system in India is not very encouraging. Why do all bright Indian kids have to go outside India to do great research? Yes, infrastructure and industry environment has been problem, but that's not all. Let's start from IITs and IIMs which are like pinnacle of our higher education system. If you go to any IIT, first thing you will notice is that except for one or two departments here and there, the main focus is always on B.Tech. degrees. There is one famous line in IITs 'B.Tech.s are products, M.Tech.s are by-products and Ph.D. are wastes'. Very very derogatory line not only for researchers but IITs themselves. Yes, that's the attitude in general you will observe. There is no bigger myth about IITs than that all B.Tech are the brilliant people while M.Tech.s and Ph.D.s are not. It is simply that B.Tech.s are the ones who grabbed the opportunity first. I had been an M.Tech. student in IIT and average intelligence of them is no less that that of B.Tech. though it is most likely that top 5% B.Tech. students will be more intelligent than top 5% M.Tech students. There lies root of another evil in our system but I will come back to it later. Although this might be debatable, what is definitely not debatable is crop of number of tuitions and institution which prepare students from early age to master the entrance exams, again focusing on mindless pursuit of certain kind of questions and techniques rather than fostering thinking and learning skills which these exams are supposed to measure. The point is about research and higher education. Some of the professors in IITs do wonderful research but very few students get opportunity to be part of that. Overall research almost feels like a totally separate dimension of IIT. No wonder there is so less research output from IITs. If you look universities all over the world, research is always driven by students, professors provide the trigger and background (and take the credit too) but it is always driven by students, their enthusiasm, their fresh perspectives, and their hardwork. I do not intend to belittle Professors, they do tremendous hardwork, show enthusiasm, and after all it’s their wisdom which guides students. Professors are the enablers and the mentors. The point of I want to make is for high quality and high quantity research output it is essential to have student participation in it. I am not very familiar with IIMs but as much I have heard from my friends in IIMs, situation is not much different there.

One of the roots of evil in our education is the great belief that intelligence is everything. Let me tell you it is only one of the several things a successful person needs. Education is not about intelligence, education is about learning to live like a human, to instil values, to be able to differentiate between right and wrong, to understand ourselves, to understand nature. I know, all are only worries about development and progress, so on and so forth; but even there intelligence is only one of the several things. what about professionalism, what about discipline, what about attitude, what about perspective? In India, we have very bad habit of judging children and unfortunately also their future based on so called intelligence (which is roughly translated as ability to score in exams)? I ask you, what the heck is intelligence? Are we going to be a developed nation by having intelligent people who have no sense of how to use their intelligence or commitments or responsibilities or how to deal with people or morals or values or empathy towards fellow citizens? The answer is absolutely 'NO'.

I think this has already become too big and although I am reproducing from my earlier writing, it hasn’t improved much. I hope I will be able to do better next time.