Although it seems axiomatic that the bottom-rank status of India on every metric of national development — early childhood nutrition, infant mortality, primary school dropouts percentage, learning attainments of 15-year-olds, literacy, enrolment in tertiary education, employability of graduates, poor productivity and low per capita income — is rooted in the country’s neglected, and dysfunctional education system, this perspective is a minority opinion. The Indian establishment, politicians, bureaucrats, learned editors, academics and proconsular television anchors included, obviously don’t agree. That’s why all invitations of your editor to involve leading lights of the establishment in the cause of QEFA (quality education for all) have failed to evoke any worthwhile response.
In this regard the indifference of the media is particularly disappointing. Perhaps education is too unsexy a subject for learned editors preoccupied with corruption exposés, complex vote bank, communal and caste analyses, to pay attention to the building blocks of national development — QEFA, public health and sanitation, and law, order and justice systems. All these crucial building blocks are in poor condition and strewn all over the national landscape, with neither leaders, pundits nor pontificators bothered, despite cause and effect being so manifest. Poor public health and sanitation adversely affect school attendance and learning outcomes. The thoroughly corrupt bureaucracy unchecked by crooked law and order maintenance personnel, licences all the wrong sort of people to run vitally important education institutions, especially colleges of professional education.
Consequently Indian education at all levels — primary, secondary and tertiary — is characterised by a few shining campuses of excellence surrounded by a host of ill-administered, outdated and often downright fraudulent business enterprises, disguised as teaching-learning institutions. Therefore youth intent upon acquiring industry-respected qualifications and certification need to be very careful while choosing professional colleges in a system where substantial tuition fees are payable up-front, and the impenetrable judicial system is unlikely to decree refunds in a hurry.
This is the public service rationale behind the exhaustive inaugural EducationWorld-C fore surveys of engineering colleges (featured in EW June) and B-schools from which the IITs and IIMs which dominate all professional education surveys, are excluded. The great majority of school leavers don’t make the 98 percentile cut demanded of the IITs and IIMs. They have to pick and choose from among the thousands of other engineering colleges, B-schools and institutes of professional education.
The purpose and intent behind the EW-C fore surveys of June and July is to enable them to make informed choices. And the good news is that there is justifiable and growing institutional pride within hitherto media-neglected ‘other’ B-schools and professional education institutes, and that the quality-of-education gap between them and the IITs and IIMs is closing.
