Indian education @ tipping point

All of a sudden, education of the country’s 450 million children below age 18 – the largest national child population worldwide – has become a high priority, hot- button subject. Dilip Thakore reports On the eve of release of this eighth anniversary issue of EducationWorld – India’s pioneer and as yet sole education news and analysis print publication – there is a discernible sentiment of quiet satisfaction in the monthly’s bright seventh floor head office, which offers a panoramic vista of traffic-choked Bangalore (pop. 7 million), the information technology capital of resurgent 21st century India. Since EW was launched upon an unprepared public with the mission statement to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the No.1 item on the national agenda” in November 1999, perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the back-burner subject of education and development of the nation’s abundant human resource has steadily moved up on the development agendas of government in New Delhi and the state capitals. And on the priority lists of 192 million households countrywide. All of a sudden, education of the country’s 450 million children below age 18 – the largest national child population worldwide – has become the high priority, hot-button subject it should have become decades ago. Almost all self-respecting daily newspapers have introduced weekly education supplements; hundreds of education focused heavyweight NGOs (non-government or voluntary organisations) including Pratham, CRY, Akshara Foundation, Akanksha, Infosys Foundation, Seksaria Foundation among others have sprouted countrywide; and seminar and lecture halls across the country are reverberating with impassioned pleas and debates exhorting Central and state governments, the establishment and public to pay greater attention to expansion and contemporisation of the country’s crumbling and rapidly obsolescing education system. Almost imperceptibly, India’s huge population of children and youth (500 million Indians are below the age of 24), hitherto regarded a Malthusian threat to economic development, has metamorphosed into a high-potential resource which if adequately educated, could prove to be a major goods and services provider of the rapidly emerging global economy. Yet perhaps the prime factor which is steadily pushing education to the top of the national development agenda is the unprecedented shortage of skilled professionals, technicians and even modestly skilled shopfloor workers, being experienced by Indian industry. With the hitherto laggard economy mired for several decades in the so-called Hindu rate of growth (3.5 percent per year) currently growing at 9 percent plus per year following the liberalisation and deregulation of the dirigiste, Soviet-style, centrally planned economy in 1991, for the first time in 5,000 years of Indian history, employers are pursuing skilled professionals and personnel with job offers garnished with never-before pay and perks packages. The grave skills shortage currently facing Indian industry and the economy in general, has belatedly awakened the nation’s somnambulistic political class to the need for quality – rather than ritual – education to be dispensed by the country’s 934,521 government schools characterised by shabby infrastructure, crowded classrooms, multi-grade teaching and chronic teacher absenteeism. Reportedly shaken by a Union HRD ministry survey made public a few months ago which highlighted that a…