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Will the Indian state fix or further strangle its education system?

July 2, 2010

Barun S. Mitra has recently written a thought provoking op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about how the Indian State is trying to regulate innovation out of the educational system by strangulating it. To first put things in perspective, Mitra acknowledges that India’s education system and its engineering schools in particular produce some of the world’s brightest graduates for its increasingly knowledge-intensive economy. However, he also cited some of the following and somewhat shocking facts and statistics about the vast majority of graduates and the workforce that India’s education system currently produces:

- Only 5% to 7% of India’s current workforce has undergone any formal training in a skill.
- Nearly 70% of India’s current workforce may not have even completed their primary schooling.
- Approximately 135 million children are enrolled in primary schooling and about 15 in college but only 2.3 million will graduate.
- Just 12% of the 18-24 age group enroll for any sort of post-high-school courses.
- Only 10% to 15% of all graduates are actually employable.
- Less than half of the 200,000 post graduates in the sciences are employable.
- Only 25% of engineering graduates are employable and approximately 64% of employers are not satisfied with the skills of engineering graduates.
- For 2008, Infosys spent US$5,000 to retrain each of the employees it hired while Wipro spent about 1% of its annual revenues on retraining the fresh graduates it recruited.

To address this situation, India passed the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act in 2009. The new law, which took effect last April, requires the government to educate all children for free until the age 14 and for all primary schools to have one teacher for every 30 pupils (instead of today’s average of 50). Hence, state-run schools will be upgraded while private schools will be forced to reserve one quarter of their slots for children who come from impoverished backgrounds and all private schools will need to win official government recognition within three years – or else be shut down. All told, the law will cost about US$35 billion over the next five years.

However and when reporting about the new law, the Christian Science Monitor noted that state-run schools are considered to be so shoddy that 50% of parents in urban area have chosen to send their children to private schools where they receive a better education. In fact, the Christian Science Monitor interviewed a mother who chooses to spend 300 rupees (US$6.60) a month to send her child to a private school located in a slum. She was even quoted as saying that its much better than any government run school and that everybody says so.

This leads back to Mitra’s criticisms as he noted that surveys have shown that 40% to 50% of children from the slums of Delhi actually attend private informal schools. However, he also noted that the setting up of private schools is already completely tied up by the need for government licenses and permits. In fact, it requires 30-35 types of government permissions just to set up a school in Delhi and Mitra noted that hardly any of the coaching institutes that prepare students for engineering and medical colleges would be able to meet the new regulatory standards to qualify as a school. Moreover, he noted that senior officials at education related regulatory bodies have been accused of corruption and that one Kolkata newspaper has estimated that starting a technical or professional institute would cost US$10,000 to US$50,000 in bribes while university status would cost US$1-2 million in bribes.

Hence, we want to know what you our readers think of the new Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act and India’s education system in general. Will the Act do anything to fix the problems that plague India’s education system or will companies, especially those in the IT services and outsourcing industries, still need to spend considerable amounts of money to retrain the graduates that India’s education system produces?

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Written by JohnU · Filed Under Outsource Blogs 

Comments

4 Responses to “Will the Indian state fix or further strangle its education system?”

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  2. kpo on July 5th, 2010 6:31 am

    Indian gov. is trying to change the education system. With corruption it will take several years before they can achieve their dream.

  3. takes time on July 7th, 2010 11:51 pm

    The fix is happening but it will take a long time to see the impact of it.

  4. government grants on July 30th, 2010 4:11 pm

    Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends!

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