Dilip Thakore posed five questions to Azim Premji to which he responded by e-mail. Excerpts:
Nobel laureate economist Milton Freidman once famously remarked that the business of business is business. what are the factors which prompted you to promote APU?
Azim Premji University has been promoted with the objective of expediting social change through the power of education, and establishing a just, equitable, humane and sustainable society as enshrined in the Constitution of India. The experience of APF (Azim Premji Foundation) of working in primary school education with children from disadvantaged backgrounds for over a decade has made us aware of the pressing need for high calibre, competent and committed profess-ionals in the domain of education and development. APU is perhaps the first in India to focus entirely on a combination of these two domains. We hope to enhance school education by creating an outstanding facility for global research to develop knowledge that is relevant to India.
Five years down the line, what is your expectation of the contribution(s) that APU will make to the growth and development of Indian education?
Since APU aims to empower the nation through improving education at the grassroots level, we will work on developing several short-term certification programmes to enhance the skills of the 7 million in-service teachers and administrators in state-run rural and urban schools across the country.
We also plan to promote model institutes in areas of optimal teaching, assessment, computer-aided learning, research and pedagogy which will add value and create change agents. The objective is to encourage government, NGOs and other education providers to establish similar institutions and replicate global best practices which will enhance the quality of education.
You made your first foray into the education space with operationalisation of the APF in 2001. What were the major objectives of APF and how satisfied are you that they have been achieved?
APF was established to contribute to sustainable, systemic change in the quality of school education in India. Since 2001, the foundation has engaged with over 20,000 schools and 2.5 million children in 13 states. The foundation’s objective from the beginning was to catalyse pan-India and large-scale systemic change which could be replicated. Thus it was imperative to work with the Central and especially state governments which are the country’s largest providers of primary education. Our mission is to enable governments to leverage available resources and infrastructure to enhance the state’s capacity to fulfill its constitutional obligation of providing quality primary education to all children.
As a business entrepreneur and one of the largest employers in Indian industry, how satisfied are you with the industry-readiness of youth emerging from the education system?
As many studies and our own experience confirms, the vast majority of graduates of our colleges are unemployable. A report of the McKinsey Global Institute states that multinational company managers are willing to recruit only 25 percent of India’s engineering graduates. Developing technical and soft skills and English language proficiency are serious issues, which require major improvement of the government school system which also needs to encourage creative thinking, skills development and the ability to develop lifelong learning capability.
Looking ahead, how confident are you that india will be able to reap its much-proclaimed demographic dividend in the 21st century?
Whether or not India reaps its demographic dividend in this century is closely linked to the quality of education provided to children at all levels. Currently, only 12 percent of children who enrol in class I complete higher secondary education. Moreover, from APF’s Learning Guarantee Program implemented in over 8,000 schools in five states across the country, we have learned that in only about 10 percent of schools do the majority of children possess the expected competencies.
Clearly, there’s been a national failure to provide even the basics of quality education, let alone fostering the scientific temper, environmental consciousness, and sensitivity to larger human and societal issues, all of which will make the difference between reaping a dividend or disaster as we move further into the 21st century.