I happened to write this piece a day before “Teachers Day”, this year. A day when all of us students both past and present alike remember and honour our teachers who have played and are playing a vital role in shaping and moulding us. Being a student of that Universal and Primeval - or should I say - first Teacher of ours; God incarnate, as well as having served as a teacher in a Tutorial Institute during the early stages of my career, I decided I would and should post a piece on Indian Education, its current status and the way ahead.

It was then that I also happened to read a column by former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations who is currently Chairman of Dubai-based Afras Ventures, Dr. Sashi Tharoor in his weekly column in The Times of India titled, “Lets groom teachers of tomorrow” in which he addresses the need for quality amongst teachers and also the need to motivate them and boost their morale by honouring the best – which according to me would only become another way to increase jealousy and rivalry amongst the teachers which already exists in good measure.

He has also brought out the paradox of “a country where nearly half the population is illiterate but which has produced the world's second largest pool of trained scientists and engineers. A country which invents more sophisticated software for US computer manufacturers than any other country in the world, and yet, in which there are at least 35 million children who have not seen the inside of a school”.

I have always believed that we Indians should have been mentally liberated before we were physically liberated from foreign rule. Only then would we have learnt to put to good use the freedom that was obtained with the blood, sweat and tears of noble souls. This mental liberation could and can be achieved only through education. This post is therefore my attempt to address or rather add my two cents worth on what I consider the critical issues facing ‘Indian Education’. I hope Shashi Tharoor will also have the opportunity to read this post for I have used a few quotes of his and also borrowed a few statistics that he has provided to prove my point. Actually, the spade work for this post had commenced two years ago when I was based in Delhi and serving in an NGO involved in educating deprived children.

Background:

India's concern and commitment to the spread of knowledge, education and freedom of thought among its citizens as drawn on paper is well known and is clearly reflected in its Constitution which is also on paper. The Directive Principle as found in Article 45 emphasises the same. However, more than fifty years down the line we still find ourselves in the same situation, as we were when we attained freedom.

In its efforts to build a just and humane society, the Indian Government is attempting to make the right to elementary education a fundamental right and to enforce it through suitable statutory measures. This is expected to help remove obstacles in achieving Universal Elementary Education (UEE) for all. However, I do not foresee much good coming out of such endeavours since there is a lack of political will to do so. Politicians feel threatened that if all were to be educated then they would be sidelined and shunted out since education would provide the illiterate masses the clarity of thought to see through their wiles and deceit.

Since education is in the concurrent list of the Constitution, the State Governments have a very major role to play in the development of primary and secondary education and have been responsible over the years for causing greater regional disparity.

Educational policy and progress have been periodically reviewed but the national development goals and priorities continue to remain unaddressed. In our national perception education is essential for all and is fundamental to our all-round development. Education is a unique and vital investment in the present and for the future. This principle is supposed to be the cornerstone of the National Policy on Education.

It is obvious that education for all cannot be achieved in a state of disorder and needs to be managed in an environment of utmost intellectual discipline and seriousness of purpose while also providing freedom for creativity and innovation. While far-reaching changes will have to be incorporated in the quality and range of education, the process of introducing discipline into the system will have to be started, here and now, in what exists.

While India has to its credit the deregulation of the corporate sector and the resultant globalization that has brought about the much touted IT boom, we cannot say the same for the education sector.

The important problem of education in India is financing. The total allocation for education by the Government is very marginal when compared to other components of its budget. Another problem in improving and preserving the quality of institutions is the lack of serious institutional reforms. Public universities which have become totally politicised and bureaucratic in nature (I have even witnessed dog fights amongst faculty of the same department who would vie with each other and resort to all kind of politicking to become the Head of the Department even before the incumbent Head completes his term), have resulted in lack of quality staff and has therefore affected the quality of students also. Education continues to be still suffering from the license –permit raj syndrome. The problem of Indian education in a nutshell can be put as “too much control and no innovation”.

Issues facing Indian Education:

The problems and evils afflicting the Indian educational system can be listed as follows:

1. The Government largely provides primary education in India. The clientele of most of these Government run or supported schools are the poor and there is willful neglect on the part of the Government servants & staff in these schools. As a result of this the poor belonging to the backward castes including scheduled castes and tribes are neglected and their fundamental right to education is violated.

2. Our primary school system is one of the largest in the world, with approximately 150 million children enrolled. However, we have and continue to focus on quantity rather than quality. Governments have simply raised enrolment rates without ensuring high learning achievement in schools.

I personally know of Government schools in Chennai which send out their teachers to market the school and enroll more students so that they achieve the targets fixed by the Government. As a result teachers enroll uninterested children who join and only wait until scholarships and free cycles are provided after which they vanish from the scene. Thirty-seven per cent of all Indian primary school children drop out before reaching the fifth grade. As pointed out by Sashi, “the illiterate population of India exceeds the total combined population of the North American continent and Japan”.

3. The Government schools do not possess adequate infrastructure. While private schools need to have adequate infrastructure to obtain recognition and certification from the Board of education, the same rule is not applied to the Government schools.

4. Another major problem of primary and secondary education in India is the unavailability or lack of qualified and competent teachers. Poor scales of pay for the teachers, lack of quality amongst teachers, lack of committed teachers, etc. are some of the reasons for this. This also leads to wider disparities in the student teacher ratio.

5. The Government has periodically announced many schemes & projects for basic education of the poor but none of these are making any significant impact to the lives of these poor children since none of these projects and schemes are implemented in letter & spirit. They are only intended to garner votes for whichever party that announces such schemes. Corrupt politicians and bureaucrats feather their own nests utilizing these schemes.

6. All laws and regulations pertaining to education in India are anti poor and discriminatory. Moreover these laws are applied rigourously only to Private Schools and Schools run by NGOs while these laws are not applied to Government Schools which are a law unto themselves.

7. Access to education is not available to children living in small villages & hamlets as Government sets up such schools only if there are at least a minimum of 100 children of school going age in that village. As Sashi says once again “we would need to build a new school every day for the next 10 years just to educate the children already born) though universal primary education is available in theory, fewer than half of India's children between the ages of six and 14 attend school at all. India alone accounts for 35% of the entire world's population of children who are not in school”.

8. As pointed out by Sashi “Our national literacy level officially stands at 66%. But one must be wary of these official figures. UNESCO defines an illiterate person as one who cannot, with understanding, both read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life. By that definition, I fear that fewer than half our population would really qualify as literate. And while Kerala has literacy rate of nearly 100%, Bihar is only at 44% (and has a female literacy rate of only 29%). No wonder, we are ranked 147th out of 177 countries measured for literacy by UNESCO” (Personally I have seen and continue to see everywhere as well as here on fropper, quite a few who claim to be graduates and post graduates including those in professional streams such as medicine, engineering, management, etc., who cannot write coherent and grammatically correct sentences in their native tongue let alone English).

9. Indian Education has been the outcome of a myopic piecemeal policy approach - Higher Education in the Macaulayan tradition of training Babus for an Empire through generalised education of B.A., B.Sc’s, etc which is highly subsidised by the State at its own cost. This has resulted in a total misfit with the emerging Knowledge Economy, wherein 90% Graduates are with out even the requisite low level of skills for BPO / Clerical jobs as per NASSCOM.

10. Indian Higher Education is in a complete mess - Politicisation, Bureaucratisation and Trade Unionisation have thwarted any attempts at reform and have led to - strikes, very little or no syllabi change for 20 years, very few classes ever held in most colleges and even if they are held teachers lack the knowledge and magnetism to attract students (I’ve never been to any during my college days), very little original Knowledge creation, few patents, very few research citations in international publications, poor libraries & labs, huge faculty shortage have all been the bane of the Higher education system in India.

11. The economics of Education is also in a mess and is completely skewed – While India has the largest number of illiterates in the world; our expenditure in providing education at the primary level is the least. The total budgetary allocation for education is a very minimal percentage of the whole National budget and the sum spent on higher Education is much more than the sum spent on primary education. “India spends less than 4% of its GNP on education: 3.6% is the current amount. Successive governments collectively have spent only one-tenth of the amounts on education that they have committed to defence”. While insufficient allocation continues to be a major constraint on the universalisation of education it is sad to note that there are also instances of non-utilization of allocated resources due to bureaucratic indifference and apathy. Added to this is the fact that 90% of the total education budget goes towards salaries and establisment costs. The government does not have the will to explore, identify and utilise alternative models for raising resources. Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Arjun Singh recently said a nine-fold allocation proposed for education in the 11th Five Year Plan would target to achieve this goal.

12. In India we do not have or encourage having a properly structured Public-Private partnership model. Financing of educational activities is either through the Government or by private individuals. Currently, Capital funds invested in Higher education to set up state of the art campuses and marketing these institutions with huge media budgets is being undertaken with opaque and dubious local capital. In fact it is rumored that some such institutions only serve as fronts for money laundering activities while some other such institutions have been set up by NRIs who have committed crimes and white-collar frauds and are wanted in those countries for such offences. All said and done the stakes are huge and only properly structured Public Private partnered Institutions can help bring in sufficient legal capital to create institutions of excellence.

13. The corporate sector may be deregulated but education sector is becoming increasingly regulated. This has resulted in preventing and inhibiting the creation and growth of quality educational institutions. In the name of accountability these institutions are being controlled and choked by and with regulation. In India we have in place a Regulatory system of a License and Inspectorate Raj for private sector educational institutions thanks to the AICTE which are leading to rampant corruption and abuse of the system. Speaking recently at the second meeting of the Regional Forum of Ministers of Social Development of SAARC, Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Arjun Singh said 'There are restrictions of funds, but we cannot succumb to temptations of the market forces,' he added.

14. The current situation of formal Vocational Education in India is in a complete mess. The ITIs that were once considered the suppliers of quality manpower that would form the backbone of almost every sector of commerce and industry are in a total state of disarray. With more and more engineering colleges opening up all potential candidates now opt to join these Engineering Colleges as they find that more weightage is provided to a degree in the job market than the Diploma issued by the ITIs. Consequently, over qualified people are performing job functions, which a Diploma pass out, could do. Moreover the ITIs have almost no link with Industry and hence there are no channels for students to pursue a career path.

15. The silver lining on the looming grey clouds are the IITs & IIMs which stand out as islands of excellence. However, these IITs & IIMs are highly govt controlled with restrictions on fees to be collected and the seats to be reserved, etc. Another problem afflicting these premier institutions is the shortages of quality faculty caused by inability to pay more than the corporate sector.

16. Caste or economic status based reservations may ensure equality only when such reservations are ensured at the level of school education. Reservation at the level of professional education is merely a political fix with the objective of fooling the public and thereby obtaining votes. Reservation is a negative way of bringing about equality and the Government seems to have no strategy for affirmative action. Reservation at the higher education level will only divide society further and reduce standards of quality at all levels.

17. Globalisation has turned around the face of Indian Industry and Commerce but has had little or no impact on the education sector. It is indeed a pity that the Government bodies do not encourage any efforts to tie up with or link with international institutions of repute However; I was told a couple of years ago that it if any Indian Institutions attempt to go global their Governing Body or their top level Management can go to jail as per AICTE – I don’t know if this holds good.

18. The most important issue as I consider it is the growing concern over the erosion of essential values and an increasing cynicism in society, which has brought in to focus the need for readjustments in the curriculum in order to make education a forceful tool for the cultivation of social and moral values, ethics, honesty and the like, which would help eliminate obscurantism, religious fanaticism, violence, superstition and fatalism.

The lack of values in Education can be witnessed by the behaviour of so called educated people on the roads of our cities and towns. It is only the educated who openly flout laws; safe in their knowledge of the loopholes that such knowledge provides. The lack of values and ethics in the workplace and the dog eat dog attitude of colleagues to somehow curry the boss’ favour and destroy the careers of others has led to people like me becoming unfit to work and being unemployed; for pray tell me how do I work if I am to be always looking behind my back to check which colleague is about to stab me in the back. The more honest and sincere I am at work, the greater the jealousy and deceit among my colleagues to some how run me out of the organization. These colleagues are the so called cream that Indian education has produced. Their argument being ”if this guy is really clever and so good as he is made out to be, he will have no problems finding another job, so let us safeguard our jobs by making the life of this guy miserable and eventually drive him out of this office”. I am sure that all those working in corporate environments will agree with me that they have encountered such mind games at some stage or the other of their career.

19. As per Sashi again “What is missing is not just financial resources, but a commitment on the part of our society as a whole to tackle the educational tasks that lie ahead”. Even NGOs who seem to be committed are found to falsify success rates on paper to exhibit to their donors that they are really doing a good job.

The road ahead:

I agree with Sashi when he says, “India will not become a 21st century tiger without building up its ‘human capital’. There is no industrial society today with an adult literacy rate of less than 80%. No illiterate society has ever become an industrial tiger of any stripe”.

The future of education in the information age and knowledge economies in this new millennium is rather dismal for as pointed out by him, “How are we going to cope with the 21st century, the information age, if half our population cannot sign their name or read a newspaper, let alone use a computer keyboard or surf the Net Today's is the Information Age: the world will be able to tell the rich from the poor not by GNP figures, but by their Internet connections. Illiteracy is a self-imposed handicap in a race we have no choice but to run”

Therefore, what is immediately required is a comprehensive policy overhaul - new strategies, structures, mechanisms for Public Private Partnerships, standards determining systems and much, much more. An attempt should be made to consolidate and utilise the huge reservoir of Indian intellectual capital and available talent in Indian Academic/ Research Institutions, Non-Governmental Organisations and Corporate Organisations to thereby create guidelines for framing futuristic policies related to the Indian Education Sector.

Unfortunately being an ordinary individual with no organisational backing to support me, my desire for change cannot even scratch the surface of the thick-skulled brains of our politicians and policy planners. I hope at least guys like Dr. Sashi Tharoor take this suggestion seriously to work on ways and means to provide policy drafts and recommendations to the Government and I am sure if guys of his stature are involved the Government would surely take these recommendations seriously. If need be I would only be more than happy to assist him in such an endeavour.