India’s belated skilling revolution

The great sin of sustained neglect of primary, secondary and higher education in post-independence India has been compounded by continuous neglect of vocational education and training. But a quiet skills revolution is gathering momentum countrywide TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY India’s dysfunctional education system, defined by crumbling infrastructure, multi-grade teaching, massive dropouts, truant teachers and abysmal learning outcomes, is the most damning indictment of Soviet-style central planning adopted as the official development dogma of free India, after political independence was wrested  from imperial Britain by Mahatma Gandhi and leaders of the freedom movement in 1947. The essence of central planning is that the State commandeers, generates and canalises national resources into industry, agriculture and services — drawing up intelligent priorities — to ensure balanced and equitable national development.    But curiously, even 66 years later, neither the political class, establishment, nor public has accorded sufficient weightage or priority to education — even primary education — unambiguously acknowledged as the essential precondition of national growth and progress (see special report p.74). It’s pertinent to note that while the education outlay to GDP ratio averages 5 percent globally, and most OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation & Development, a rich nations club) countries allocate 7-10 percent of their GDP to education, in post-independence India, it has averaged 3.5 percent per year. The consequences of this inexplicable blindspot of the Planning Commission and the self-serving Indian establishment (including the media) are patently visible. The vast majority of the 1.3 million government schools has conspicuous deficiencies of teaching staff and basic infrastructure. According to the manifesto of the recently promoted Children First Party of India, whose lib-lab-lav agenda is to equip all elementary schools countrywide with libraries, laboratories and lavatories within 12 months (expenditure: Rs.42,750 crore), 650,000 elementary schools across the country are without  libraries/reading rooms; 410,000 lack drinking water; 500,000 are bereft of laboratories; 610,000 are denied toilets and 250,000 don’t provide separate toilets for girl children. Unsurprisingly, learning outcomes in India’s primary/elementary schools are abysmal. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) published by Pratham, India most respected education NGO, learning outcomes in the country’s 700,000 rural primaries which school an estimated 159 million children in the age group 6-14, are declining continuously. ASER 2013 reports that 53 percent of children promoted to class V cannot read and/or comprehend class II texts written in their own vernacular languages. Moreover 74.8 percent of children in class V can’t do simple three-digit division sums. Learning achievements aren’t anything to boast about in secondary education either. In 2010, a Union government-selected batch of Indian class IX students wrote PISA (Progamme for International Student Assessment) — a global annual test which assesses English, science and maths learning of 15-year-olds — and was ranked 73rd among 74 countries. Since then, Indian participation in PISA has been discontinued. In higher education, according to a 2005 Nasscom-McKinsey World Institute study, 75 percent of India’s engineering and 85 percent of arts, science and commerce college graduates are unemployable in multinational companies. The great…