2030: Will India recover its lost education momentum?

Against the backdrop of leaders in all walks of life inexplicably unable to absorb the self-evident proposition that rigorous education and human capital development is the essential precondition of national progress, on the 20th anniversary of EducationWorld we do some crystal ball gazing to forecast the shape, form and efficacy of Indian education circa 2030 – Dilip Thakore EducationWorld was launched on November 1, 1999 with the ambitious mission statement to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. On our 20th anniversary, even as mandarins of the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry in New Delhi are giving final shape and form to the National Education Policy 2019 based on the 484-page report of the K. Kasturirangan Committee which was made public in May this year, this is a good time to do some crystal ball gazing to ascertain the shape and contours of Indian education ten years hence, i.e, 2030. Certainly, since the inaugural issue of EducationWorld — The Human Development Magazine, the country’s first exclusively education-focused publication, sounded the first blast of the trumpet calling for deep and comprehensive reforms in primary, secondary and higher education, the subject has moved from being a blip on the radar of national consciousness to a dot. But even this dot is, at best, midway between the periphery and centre point of national consciousness. Although the number of seminars and conferences, education festivals and rain of awards conferred upon the country’s top-ranked education institutions by several self-styled education magazines — which have piled onto the road prepared by this publication — has risen impressively since the dawn of the new millennium, they signify little in terms of better learning outcomes and meaningful upgradation of India’s moribund preschool to Ph D education system. Depressingly, although an estimated 10 million of the country’s 164 million infants in the 0-5 age group receive professionally-administered ECCE (early childhood care and education) in private pre-primaries (aka preschools) and 85 million receive a modicum of ECCE in 1.36 million anganwadis — essentially nutrition centres for newborns nd lactating mothers (also mandated to provide education to infants), 69 million children in this vulnerable and critically important age group don’t receive any professionally administered ECCE. In primary/elementary education (class I-VIII) too, despite much sound and fury, there is precious little progress. Year after year, the detailed Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) of the Pratham Education Foundation which measures actual learning outcomes of children in rural India through field administered tests, has been highlighting that though primary school enrolments have improved dramatically, children’s learning outcomes are declining. For instance, according to the latest ASER 2018, 55.8 percent of class V children in government rural primaries (and 34.9 percent in private rural primaries) can’t read and comprehend class II textbooks written in their own vernacular languages, and 56 percent of class VIII students cannot solve simple three-digit division sums. Yet there’s minimal public outcry against these shocking revelations. The on-ground situation in secondary and…