Youthful India and the Education System
The International Labor Organization has estimated that by 2025 we will have 116 million people in the age group of 20-24 and China will have only 96 million. We in India have the people but do we have the ability to equip the people in order to take advantage of this? We educate and train people in India, we really transform not only our own life but also the economy of the nation and the world. But if this advantage is not taken seriously then the demographic division is going to be the demographic disaster because it is already seen that in 165 out of our 625 districts the unemployed, frustrated and under-educated young men become prey to the blandishments of maoist. So education in our country is not just a social or economical issue, its even a national security issue.
There are 4 E's that has exceptionally contributed to the education system of India that we have toady and continues to contribute in the future:
1. Expansion: Expansion is the first priority in our nation because the British left us in 1947 with just 16% literacy rate and at that time there were only 3 lakh students in higher education, we had only 20 universities and 496 colleges. Today our literacy rate is 74% and we have 411 universities and more than 35,000 colleges and 20 million students. This shows that expansion has taken place in our country and we need to continue this expansion rate.
2. Equity: We also had to fight for equity, trying to include the excluded people to education, trying to reach out to people who did not get their fair share in education because of reasons that they could not help. Gender gap was an obvious reason, only 8 % of women in India was literate in 1947 that means 1 out of every 11 women could read and write. Other reasons include caste, region and religion we had to bring all those people who left out the education system back under its umbrella and that became a big challenge and a priority for education.
3. Excellence: We need quality in our education system, we already have some institutions of great quality in our country like the IITs, NITs and the IIMs to name a few but these institutions are just like small floating islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity. The average Indian higher education institutions is simply not of the quality that we as Indians would like to see.
4. Employability: The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce Industry found in a survey that 64% of the employers are not satisfied with the quality of graduates that they are getting. Some companies are going for the re-education of the people that they have hired, trying to teach them the skills that they have not learned at their colleges or that were not taught to them.
A great deal needs to be done to overcome these challenges. We are trying to put kids into the education system at an early age, the RTE (Right to Education) act has done a lot in this. If kids were found out of school in the old days it was said to be their parents fault but today it is the state's fault, the government is committed to provide education to every single kid in the country. We also have got more and more money being pumped up by the system at all levels, for example all the people in India are not able to get into the prestigious universities for their education, many of them go to the state universities that are mostly under-financed. The government has come up with schemes to pump money into the state universities so that they could have the resources to do something for the students that they have.
Money is not the whole answer to this, there is an entire challenge in terms of addressing things like the gender gap. Today the literacy rate of women is 65.4% which is much better than that we had during our independence but it's still not enough because it means that 1 out of every 3 women still can't read and write and we need to overcome this.
The good news is that the gross enrollment ratio of the primary schools today is 116%, which is quite impressive but the bad news is, it starts dropping as we go up the level, by the 8th grade it drops to 68%, by 10th it is going to be 39% and by college our gross enrollment ratio is going to be just 18% against the global average of 29%. So clearly we still need to do more, we have not achieved enough of the expansion, we haven't managed to get everyone to stay into the education system. Today the biggest challenge in the education system is to maintain the gross enrollment ratio, we have to sustain everyone into the system.
Some of the people actually need vocational training in our country because everyone is not going to be Sunder Pichai or an IIS officer, so we need to provide vocational training to people but how to do that in a culture where for 3000 years it is believed that if you want be a cobbler or carpenter you better have an uncle or father who is a cobbler or a carpenter because no one else is going to teach you. The transmission of knowledge of trade craft in our country has always been through the gene pool. We need to provide vocational training to people so that they could master their crafts. People in India will become more employable through these trainings.
These are the kind of changes that we are trying to bring and move along, but there is a change that the government alone can't bring, if we look at the need for research and innovation the government has doubled the amount of money spent in the research and innovation sector. We need to think out of the box, we need to come up with ideas. India is a country that is famous for its Jugaad, we invented the simplest and cheapest cardiogram, the simplest and cheapest EKG (Electrocardiography), the cheapest insulin injection, the worlds cheapest and smallest small car the Tata Nano but all these are things that were already there and we just had stripped off their cost and made them more affordable. We need to do something that others have not done before, we need to come up with new inventions. India is the land that invented Zero which transformed the global mathematics, we need to think like that again, we need to come up with ideas. We have 17% of the worlds brain so why do we just come up with 2% of the global research output from our country.
To achieve the full potential of our country we need to start from the classroom by getting our kids not just have their heads filled of facts and figures and the lecture of teachers and the book materials because it will just give them a well filled mind but in the era of internet we do not want that. We have access to all the facts just two clicks apart, we have Google. What we need today is a well formed mind, a mind that reacts to unfamiliar facts and details and can synthesis the information that it hasn't studied before. We need a mind that could react to a bigger examination that is called life which always comes up with the questions that we are not prepared for.
There is a good news, 95% of our 12 year old across India can actually read and write so we can say that the future looks good and as far as the work forces are concerned and if we can get all the other pieces at place then we can say to the rest of the world that We Are Coming!!!
Great information
ReplyDelete