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A NEW GOVERNMENT will be sworn into office in New Delhi by mid-May after an aggregate sum of Rs.30,000 crore will have been spent — according to a study of the Centre for Media Studies, Delhi — by an estimated 10,000 candidates in the electoral fray for 543 seats in the Lok Sabha. And with a general consensus having emerged that mending and upgrading the early childhood primary, secondary and higher education systems is a top national priority, one hopes the new government at the Centre will provide urgently needed additional resources in terms of teachers, money and materials to take India’s schools, colleges and universities to globally comparable levels.
One of the root causes of the dysfunctionality of the K-12 education system in India is that teacher recruitment is a total mess, especially in government schools. Most state governments prefer to appoint ‘para teachers’, paying pittances as honoraria. This malady has spread to higher education where even Central government institutions suffer 40-60 percent faculty shortages and make do with guest lecturers paid on a per lecture-basis. This is happening because the Sixth Pay Commission has decreed sky-high remuneration which is becoming increasingly unaffordable for government schools and higher education institutions.
In my considered opinion, India’s cognitive capital could multiply four-fold if our schools attain globally comparable learning outcomes. It’s shocking how a nation of 1.27 billion continues to ignore the education of 75 percent of its youth and stoically suffers huge annual GDP losses.
Clearly, this situation is untenable. The new government must urgently bring out a document like Challenges in Education prepared in 1985, and paint an honest picture of Indian education highlighting lacunae and deficiencies. It should be followed by a pragmatic, visionary and futuristic New Policy on Education (NPE) 2014. NPE 2014 must focus on meeting the manpower requirements of the industry, agriculture and service sectors in close collaboration with the corporate sector.
However, such transformation of the economic profile of the nation necessitates a drastic change in the school education system. Its structure, content and processes will have to become flexible and skills education — vocational education and training (VET) — will need to be given equal priority with textbook learning. Academic education supplemented with skills acquisition could also be utilised for inculcating moral, ethical and humanistic values in school students — currently a grave lacuna. In China and Korea, rigorous academic education supplemented with VET on a massive scale, has ramped up their annual rates of GDP growth. It’s a myth that skills acquisition is inimical to intellectual growth. On the contrary, VET stimulates it.
Against this background, the first challenge is to restore the credibility of the country’s 1.20 million government schools. This will relieve the pressure on private schools, which although number less than 10 percent, cater to around 33 percent of all K-12 students. Two significant policy initiatives are required in this context. First, the promise made by every political party for several decades that investment in education will rise to 6 percent from the current less than 4 percent of GDP, must be immediately fulfilled by the new government. Secondly, a concordat is required between the Central and state governments, regulatory bodies and private sector entrepreneurs that private investment in education will be encouraged.
The plain truth is that india needs private investment in education across the board, and edupreneurs have the resources and expertise to revive Indian education. This is the only realistic option available to expand capacity, particularly in higher education, which is essential to stem the outflow of India’s most ambitious students to foreign universities. Moreover the ban on “commercialisation of education” — a hangover of discredited Indian socialism —needs to be reconsidered by the new government, Supreme Court and public. This prohibition has resulted in multiplication of corrupt practices at all levels.
India’s impressionable youth are not unaware of corruption in education which is disastrous in terms of values-adherence when they enter professional life. Moreover, now that the CSR (corporate social responsibility) obligation under which all corporates with annual revenue of over Rs.1,000 crore are obliged to expend 2 percent of net profit on public welfare has become law, it’s time for India Inc to step forward to promote VET institutions to raise manufacturing and agriculture productivity. With a mere 2 percent of India’s workforce having acquired formal technical education, filling the national skills gap requires massive initiatives. Decades of neglect and stasis in education have reached critical mass.
Vital issues such as the structure of education, content, pedagogy, medium of instruction, evaluation systems, institutional networking, and resource generation require urgent policy decisions. India’s much-proclaimed golden period of demographic advantage will be rendered meaningless if the country’s children and youth are denied their right to quality education at every stage.
(J.S. Rajput is a former director of NCERT and NCTE)