10 Big Ideas Revolutionising Indian Education

If the 1990s can be described as the tipping point decade for Indian industry, the decade 1999-2009 has proved to be the tipping point for hitherto criminally neglected Indian education. In this celebratory 10th anniversary issue we highlight 10 big ideas of the past decade which have radically transformed Indian education for the greater good of the world’s largest child population. Dilip Thakore reports

In the millennium year (2000) British-born, New York-based Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s seminal book Tipping Point (Abacus) became a highly acclaimed international bestseller. Its unique sales proposition was that it demonstrated how great ideas, which change the mindsets and history of nations, imperceptibly lodge in the collective unconscious of societies and suddenly become accepted wisdom. Building upon the penetrating insight of French philosopher Victor Hugo (1802-1885) who famously observed that “Greater than the tread of mighty armies is the power of an idea whose time has come”, Gladwell argued that powerful ideas, new behavioural norms and revolutionary messages can be deliberately propagated by “connectors”, “mavens”  and “salesmen” to “levels at which change becomes unstoppable”.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is now clear that the 1990s was the tipping point decade for the Indian economy. In July 1991 when the country’s foreign exchange reserves had been drawn down to cover barely three weeks of imports (against the norm of 16 weeks), the then Union finance minister Dr. Manmohan Singh presented a historic Union budget which demolished the entire licence-permit-quota superstructure which had governed independent India for over four decades. Almost overnight, it became obvious to the hitherto staunchly socialist intelligentsia, media and the public that the plethora of government laws, rules and controls regulating economic — particularly industry and commerce — activity were anti-national and self-defeating. Since then the tipping point decision to take that right turn has been vindicated by the transformation of a moribund India stuck in the rut of the “Hindu rate of growth” (3.5 percent per year) for 40 years, doubling its annual GDP growth rate to emerge as the second fastest (after China) growing economy worldwide.

If the 1990s can be described as the tipping point decade for Indian industry — who in the 1980s would have entertained the idea that within two decades India would become a major exporter of automobiles? —  the decade 1999-2009 has proved to be the tipping point for hitherto criminally neglected Indian education. Suddenly there is national awareness that “education, education and education” — in the famous utterance of former British prime minister Tony Blair — should be the top three priorities of the Central and state governments and Indian society.

Certainly during the first decade of the new millennium — and particularly after the return to power in Delhi of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA-2) government after the general election of May 2009 — there has been a flurry of activity within Shastri Bhavan, which houses the Union ministry of human resource development, even if not in the education ministries of India’s 33 state governments. Ever since PROBE (Public Report on Basic Education) 1998 reported the pathetic condition of  public primary education in the Hindi belt BIMARU (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh) states, and blew the lid off government primaries characterised by gross neglect of infrastructure, pervasive malnutrition, chronic teacher truancy and poor learning outcomes, education has steadily moved up the  agendas of the Central and state governments, gravitating towards centre from the outer peripheries of the national development  discourse.

Moreover given the grudging national mindset few will concede as much, the launch of EducationWorld in 1999 with the mission statement to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the No.1 item on the national agenda”, has also intensified pressure for radical reform, overhaul and revitalisation of public education, hitherto woefully ignored to the grave detriment of the world’s largest (450 million) child population. With this publication relentlessly committed to chronicling corruption, scams and inequities — even while celebrating islands of excellence — in Indian education, ministers and bureaucrats in the education ministries and regulatory organisations at the Centre and in the states are increasingly being called to account and exposed to the full glare of media spotlight.

In this celebratory 10th anniversary issue of EducationWorld, we highlight 10 big ideas/ developments of the past decade which  have radically trans-formed  Indian education for the greater good of the world’s largest child population.

1. ICT revolution in K-12 education

Arguably, the most high-potential development of the past decade is the rapid speed with which a new generation of post-liberalisation education entrepreneurs or eduprenuers, has developed and sold the idea of IT (information technology)-enabled education and institutional administration services to the Central and state governments, and private school managements  across the country. Today every self-respecting private primary-secondary — and a growing number of government schools — boasts computer learning centres in which students familiarise themselves with computer usage, and avail curriculum-mapped supplementary education. An entire new industry led by publicly listed ICT (instructional communication technologies) companies such as IL&FS-ETS, Everonn Education, Educomp Solutions, NIIT and Manipal K-12 among others — all darlings of the stock exchange — has sprung up, installing hi-tech learning centres and/or fully wired smart classrooms in private and government schools.

Well aware of the poor purchasing power of institutions and households, most of them have adopted the BOOT (build, own, operate and transfer) model to provide ICT infrastructure and services in almost all of India’s 162,000 secondary schools, charging modest fees of Rs.50-100 per student for providing curriculum mapped content and administrative software. Given higher pupil-teacher ratios in Indian secondaries, these modest levies have translated into huge revenue streams for the country’s ICT education companies, prompting their diversification into satellite-aided distance education and promotion of bricks-and-mortar schools and higher education institutions.

Thus for instance, according to P. Kishore the visionary promoter-CEO of  the recently renamed Everron Education Ltd, (revenue: Rs.121.38 crore in 2008-09), the Chennai-based corporate has transformed into a full-fledged “aggregator, facilitator and educator” company, which besides providing ICT and v-sat (very small aperture terminal) distance learning services, is setting up educa-tion institutions for trusts, edupreneurs and philanthropists on a turnkey basis.

Likewise, Shantanu Prakash, chairman of the Delhi (Gurgaon)-based Educomp Solutions — a highly-fancied stockmarket blue-chip — is rolling out an ambitious plan to promote/establish 150 bricks-and-mortar primary-secondary schools countrywide under the company’s Millennium brand. And while IL&FS-ETS has ventured deep into rural India with its unique K-Yan computer-cum-projector learning system, NIIT which provides ICT services to 7,800 government and 1,200 private schools across the country has recently promoted a state-of-the-art NIIT University in Neemrana, Rajasthan. Moreover the Bangalore-based Intel India claims to have trained over 1,000,000 teachers across the country in classroom IT usage under its CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiative.

“There’s no doubt that ICT is catalyzing a revolution in Indian school education. It is slowly but surely changing classroom processes and promoting self-learning and project work which develops students’ research skills. Now the national imperative is to strengthen and expand ICT education into all of India’s 1.8 million government schools. This isn’t possible without the government annual investment in education doubling to 6 percent of GDP. Reaping India’s demographic dividend isn’t possible without bridging the digital divide between private and government schools,” says Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, hitherto professor of education at the Institute for Social & Economic Change (estb. 1974) and currently an advisor to the Karnataka state government.

2. Rise and shine of India's can-do edupreneurs

Perhaps the most unkindest cut of all imposed by successive central and state governments upon two generations of midnight’s children after India wrested independence from the British on August 15, 1947, has been the open, continuous and uninterrupted neglect of public education institutions. For mysterious reasons which need to be seriously investigated by historians, neither government, the intelligentsia nor middle class society accorded high priority to the education of the masses. Although post-independence, Nehruvian India adopted the centrally planned Soviet Union/Chinese socialist development model, unlike these two countries which gave top priority to universal literacy as a national development goal and invested heavily in primary education, successive governments in New Delhi and the state capitals neglected public — particularly elementary — education. The accumulated consequence of this continuous neglect of primary education is that currently over 35 percent of the adult  population — more than 200 million citizens — is illiterate.

The prime cause of this dismal situation is that very little teaching is dispensed in the country’s 1.25 million government primary schools characterised by crumbling infrastructure, abysmal learning outcomes and mass teacher truancy. According to Pratham, a highly respected Mumbai-based NGO, 22 percent of children in class VII of rural schools countrywide don’t display the learning outcomes they should have attained in class II. Little wonder that a massive 53 percent of India’s children enroled in primary schools countrywide drop out of the education system, before they enter secondary education (class VIII).

The silver lining to this dismal scenario is the entry of a new generation of entrepreneurs into education. They include not only the ICT-in-education providers mentioned above, but also traditional bricks-and-mortar education providers. Among them: the Mumbai-based Ryan International Group of Institutions (RIGI, estb.1976) which dispenses quality English medium K-12 education to over 200,000 middle class children through its owned 240 primary-secondary schools across the country; the DPS Group with 300,000 children enroled in 150 schools promoted under the franchise model; the DAV Group with  500,000 children enroled in 400 schools.

Actually, the great Indian middle class, foolishly given to complaining about the so-called high fees levied by private, unaided schools (which provide the world’s cheapest English medium K-12 education), owes a great debt to the country’s edupreneurs — as also to the managements of pioneer Christian missionary schools — who have suffered the thousand unnatural shocks and tribulations visited upon them by the ubiquitous neta-babu, inspector regime — to deliver high quality secondary education which has empowered and enabled it. Indeed privately promoted and unaided primary-secondary schools established in the teeth of opposition from state governments and parochial politicians, constitute the one bright spot in India’s grim education scenario.

The huge contribution made to Indian school education by traditional and new genre edupreneurs, has been replicated in professional (medical, engineering, business management, pharmacoepial, nursing etc) education. Although media space is dominated by the 13 Central-government funded Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and seven Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the plain truth is that their combined annual student intake is barely 11,000. The great majority of engineers, who have driven the growth and development of India’s IT and engineering industries, are graduates of the 2,240 privately-promoted engineering colleges which have survived and modestly prospered, despite being subject to a complicated regime of government fee regulation, merit and caste quotas. Among the big names in private professional education are: the Bangalore/Manipal-based  Manipal Education Group; the Coimbatore-based PSG Group; the Chennai-based SSN and Hindustan Group of institutions and the Delhi-based Amity Group.

“From the mid-19th century, most innovations in school education have been introduced by private sector and NGO educators. This is true even today. Modernisation initiatives in terms of new pedagogies, interactive child-centric education, in-service teacher training and development have emerged from private schools and are trickling down into government institutions. Therefore private initiatives in education deserve every encourage-ment,” says Shomie Das, former tutor to Prince Charles at the Gordonstoun School (Scotland) and former headmaster of Mayo College (Ajmer), Lawrence (Sanawar) and Doon School, Dehradun.

3. Advent of 5-star international schools

Although international schools affiliated with offshore examination boards such as the Middle States Examinations Board, USA and Cambridge International Examin-ations, UK (e.g Woodstock, Mussoorie (estb. 1852); Kodaikanal International (estb.1901) and Hebron School (estb.1899)) have been providing quality, internationally benchmarked education to a small minority of students for over a century, a new crop of international schools distinguished by sprawling campuses, ICT-enabled infrastructure, contemporary pedagogies and affiliation with the Geneva-based International Baccalaureate Organi-sation and a rejuvenated CIE, has flowered in India following the historic economic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of 1991.

Among the first new genre 5-star international schools to be established  in India (at a project cost of Rs.28 crore) was the Mahindra United World College India, sited at Mulshi, near Pune which admitted its first batch of Plus Two students in 1998, following clearance of a 30-year application by the HRD ministry in Delhi. This breakthr-ough set the precedent for a rash of elite international schools across the country. They include The International School, Bangalore (2000, estimated project cost: Rs.80 crore); Pathways World School, Gurgaon (2003, Rs.100 crore); G.D. Goenka World School, Gurgaon (2003, Rs.100 crore); Chinmaya International Residential School, Coimbatore (1996, Rs.30 crore); Indus International, Bangalore (2003, Rs.35 crore); Ecole Mondiale, Mumbai (2004, Rs.80 crore) among others. Currently The Association of Inter-national Schools of India (TAISI, estb.2006) has a membership of 28 state-of-the-art internationally benchmarked schools as its members.

Although the new international schools which demand — and get — annual tuition fees running into several lakhs, are anathema to Left intellectuals who dominate the national education discourse, they have undoubtedly set new benchmarks in school education. Fully committed to harnessing ICT-driven peda-gogies and noted for their balanced curriculums, profes-sional pastoral care and counseling, they have played an important role in raising the aspirations and standards of  K-12 education providers  in India. These 5-star international schools often headed by expatriate principals, offer English-medium education of global standards at a fraction of the price of private schools abroad. Little wonder they are beginning to attract students from around the world, and are prospective foreign exchange earners for the country.

Comments Anu Monga, the highly respected principal of the Bangalore International School (estb.1969) and chairperson of TAISI: “With their new pedagogies, vertically and horizontally integrated curriculums and community outreach programmes, international schools have set new standards and benchmarks in Indian education. They offer the promise of transforming India into an international hub of English medium education”.

4. Professionalisation of the pre-school sector

One of the curious anomalies of indian education is that while tertiary and higher education are over-controlled and regulated by government and its agencies such as UGC, AICTE, Medical Council of India etc, the pre-school sector is completely unregulated. Consequently thousands of nurseries and pre-schools for children as young as three years have been started in garages, garden sheds and urban apartments.
Though most urban pre-schools — in effect crèches to socialise children from an early age — claim to deliver the Montessori and other play-way pedagogies, they tend to be staffed by under-trained teachers, and the preliminary skills and love of learning which they promise to inculcate in tiny tots is a matter of luck and conjecture. Yet with educator and parent communities becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of pre-school education, and given that it’s completely free of government interference, it’s hardly surprising that education entrepreneurs in India and abroad are entering this sector in a big way. For instance, the Zee Group, a big name in sophisticated wrapping foils, television and the media, has quickly established a nationwide 600-strong chain of Kidzee pre-schools under the franchise model.

Likewise, Australia-educated, Mumbai-based edupreneur Lina Asher has also promoted the 36-strong Kangaroo Kids chain of pre-schools countrywide, under the franchise model. Moreover according to the grapevine, the Mumbai-based Ryan Group of Institutions which runs India’s largest chain of  privately-owned  K-12 schools (240), is poised to enter pre-school education in a big way.

5. Renewed NGO activism in elementary education

Non-government organisations (ngos) have always played a major role in Indian education in the form of traditional temple gurukuls, dispensing elementary education to poor and rural children. In the mid 19th century modern western education and pedagogies were introduced into Indian school education, when several renowned schools such as St. Paul’s, Darjeeling, Bishop Cotton (Bangalore and Shimla), St. Joseph’s (Darjeeling and Bangalore) among a host of others, were promoted by Church of Rome and Protestant missionaries. Fortunately after India wrested independence from British rule in 1947, despite pressure from Hindi language chauvinists and supra nationalists, these great schools and colleges (St. Stephen’s Delhi and St. Xaviers, Mumbai among others) were permitted to continue their teaching mission undisturbed. During the past six decades they have indigenised, and  contributed immensely to the growth and development of contemporary India’s great middle class, an estimated 300 million currently.

Meanwhile the burden of NGO activism in the education sector was half-heartedly assumed by Left wing intellectuals who, while driven by strong sympathy for the educationally deprived in urban and rural India, conspicuously lacked organisation ability. In West Bengal (pop. 80 million),  where the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) has ruled continuously since 1977, through persistent interference with education institutions, ruling party cadres and party-backed teachers’ unions have comprehensively ruined the state’s education system, consigning West Bengal to 30th rank in the education index of the Delhi-based National University of Educational Planning & Administration.

However a positive post-1991 development is the emergence of a growing number of NGOs driven by liberal ideologies. The Mumbai-based Pratham (estb. 1994), Akanksha (estb.1994); the Delhi-based Deepalaya and Centre for Civil Society (CCS), and the Bangalore-based Parikrma are among the more prominent education NGOs which not only run learning centres and schools for poor children, but also make valuable contributions to the on-going national debate to improve abysmal learning outcomes in elementary education. Pratham for instance, publishes its valuable Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) each January, which measures learning outcomes in rural schools across India; and CCS has introduced a voucher scheme on a pilot basis under which slum children can attend private schools in Delhi. These and other new genre NGOs have strongly supported and reinforced the efforts of vintage NGOs such as CRY, Action Aid, etc, to ensure legislation and passage through Parliament of the imminent Right to Education Act, 2009.

6. Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2008

The Constitution of India adopted by the Constituent Assembly on January 26, 1950 called upon the State (Central and state governments) to make free and compulsory education available to all children by the year 1960. However the adoption of the Soviet model of state-driven industry development which poured national resources (and foreign aid) into the white elephant public sector, resulted in disastrous neglect of public education — especially public primary education —  for over 40 years.

As early as 1966, the Kothari Commission recommended raising the annual outlay for education (Centre plus states) to 6 percent of GDP, a recommen-dation which has been honoured more in the breach during the past four decades with the annual provision for education averaging a mere 3.5 percent of GDP. However post-1991, when global economic theory somewhat belatedly swung around to acknowledging the primacy of human capital in develop-ment economics, pressure to address the glaring injustices of Indian education began to intensify. In 1999, on the eve of the declaration of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by the United Nations, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government in New Delhi unfolded its Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (Education For All) programme, to enrol all children in the age group six-14 in primary schooling. Moreover following the adoption of MDGs by 193 member states (inclu-ding India) of the United Nations in September 2000, a large number of  NGOs and civil society groups mounted a national campaign for a constitutional amendment to make elementary education a fundamental right of all children.

Accordingly the 93rd Constitutional Amendment Bill, 2001 was unanimously passed by Parliament inserting a new Article 21-A into the Constitution making elementary education a fundamental right of all child citizens of India. Nevertheless it  took seven years and seven draft Bills for the Right to Education Bill, 2008 which makes free and compulsory education, “as the State may by law provide”, a fundamental right of all child citizens aged between six-14 years, to be passed by Parliament.

Currently awaiting presidential assent, the RTE Bill has many infirmities and grey areas. For instance the Bill is silent about the quality of education the State will provide to the children of the poor. On the contrary it makes it incumbent upon private independent schools to reserve 25 percent of class I capacity for poor neighbourhood children, and retain them until the age of 14 for which the state/local government will compensate them with unspecified tuition fees. Quite obviously there will be a cap on the tuition fee paid by government to private school managements, some of whom levy fees of Rs.3-4 lakh per year. Therefore the constitutional validity of the State imposing a quota on private schools instead of raising teaching-learning standards in its own 1.8 million primary-secondaries apart, the RTE Bill also poses the danger of increasing government interference in private school education, if not backdoor nationalisation.

Nevertheless despite grey areas including sharing of the estimated Rs.178,000 crore per year required to implement the universal education provision of the Act between the Central and state governments, there’s no gainsaying that passage of the RTE Bill is an important landmark in  Indian education. It represents a historic first step towards universal education of the world’s largest child population.

7. Entry of tertiary edupreneurs

While Indian education has always enjoyed the benefit of the philanthropy of industry leaders — J.N Tata promoted the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; G. D. Birla, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani and Lala Shriram, the Shri Ram School, Lady Shri Ram College and Shri Ram College of Commerce, all in Delhi — post-liberalisation India has witnessed the emergence of a new generation of dedicated education entre-preneurs, fully focused on promoting and developing institutions within the education sector. Such full-time edupre-nuers include not only ICT pioneers such as P. Kishore (Everonn Education), Shantanu Prakash (Educomp), K. Ganesh (TutorVista), Rajendra Pawar and Vijay Thadani (NIIT), but also a new cluster of tertiary edupreneurs, who have begun to transform Indian profe-ssional education into a global force.

The leaders among Indian edupre-neurs who, notwithstanding the slings and arrows rained upon them by ideologically confused politicians and dog-in-the-manger bureaucrats, have boldly ventured to establish highly respected institutions of professional education are the father-son duo of Dr. Ramdas and Ranjan Pai of the Bangalore/Manipal-based Manipal Education Group (MEG), and the Delhi-based Dr. Ashok K. Chauhan and his sons Atul and Aseem of the Amity Group.

MEG’s first medical college was established in 1953 in Manipal and over the past decade, it has co-promoted and established state-of-the-art medical schools (teaching hospitals) in Malaysia, Nepal and Antigua (West Indies). Currently MEG comprises 55 institutions of professional and higher education including Manipal University with an aggregate enrolment of 125,000 students, and recently it entered the primary-secondary education sector with the promotion of Manipal K-12 Pvt. Ltd in collaboration with the Bangalore-based Tutor Vista.

Perhaps even more astonishingly, within the short span of 15 years since Dr. Chauhan — formerly (1970-90) one of the most successful Indian entrepreneurs in continental Europe —  famously reverse migrated to India in 1994, the Amity Group has established Amity University, Uttar Pradesh and Amity University, Rajasthan apart from 150 institutes of higher education with an aggregate enrolment of 65,000 students. Now having drawn up a master plan to establish an Amity University in all 33 states of the Indian Union, Chauhan together with his highly qualified sons Atul and Aseem, who have established a reputation as Ambanis of Indian education, has already established the group’s flagship Amity Business Schools in London, Singapore and New York (see EW cover story October, 2009).

8. Multiplication of India's private universities

Although India’s 130 deemed or private universities are under a cloud currently, for not living up to the their titles, there’s no doubt that on the whole the emergence of private alternatives to Central and state government colleges is a favourable development in the national interest. Deemed universities are under suspicion because during the decade 1998-2008 when BJP hardliner Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi and socialist Congress party stalwart Arjun Singh presided over Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi, the number of deemed universities countrywide  more than doubled. A large number of professional colleges with inadequate investment and academic credentials were expeditiously accorded deemed university status, for reasons that can only be conjectured.

Be that as it may, most unbiased educationists concede  that even the worst deemed universities — in effect single campus institutions granted varsity status — deliver better quality education than the thousands of government arts, science and commerce colleges pouring millions of unemployable graduates into the marketplace, and lumbering Indian industry with the highest training costs worldwide.

Moreover it’s incontrovertible that the best privately promoted varsities such as Manipal, Amity, NIIT and VIT have set excellent standards in higher education. Besides offering  first-class infrastructure, foreign linkages, better research facilities and well-remunerated faculty, they provide globally benchmarked undergrad and postgraduate education at a fraction of the price of western universities, and as such, are increasingly attracting the next-best students who don’t make the cut for admission into the few excellent Central universities, IITs and IIMs. And now with Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal set to clear the decks for entry of reputable foreign universities into India, the latter are likely to prefer collaborations with private universities rather than red-tape bound government institutions of higher education.

9. Changing complexion of Supreme Court

Regrettably, the licence-permit-control regime which has bedeviled Indian education as much as it has Indian industry for the past half century, has had the full support of the lordships of the Supreme Court and the higher judiciary. Unmindful of ground conditions in the bureaucracy where it’s every babu for himself, their lordships somewhat naively bought the argument that public servants would act in the public, rather than their personal interest. Moreover the phrase “commercialisation of education” has always been anathema to the judiciary, which ever since the 1970s when prime minister Indira Gandhi mooted the idea of a committed judiciary and superseded several senior judges of the apex court to appoint her acolytes, has tended to support the heavy-hand of government in private education, the pitiable condition of government institutions notwithstanding.

However following liberalisation, new wisdom seems to have dawned upon the Supreme Court. In 2002 in a landmark judgement in T.M.A Pai Foundation vs. State of Karnataka & Ors, a full-strength 11-judge bench of the apex court  overruled its previous judgement in Unnikrishnan’s Case (1993) and upheld the right of private unaided professional education colleges to regulate their own student admission processes (subject to being based on merit) and determine tuition fee structures (provided they are “reasonable” bearing in mind the quality of infrastructure and services provided). Expanding the right bestowed upon minorities by Article 30(1) of the Constitution to establish and administer education institutions of their choice to all citizens, the apex court nevertheless stopped short of acknowledging provision of education as a business or trade, preferring to describe it as an “occupation” and fundamental right under Article 19 (1) (g). The judgement in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation Case was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in the P.A. Inamdar Case (2005), but was somewhat muddied by a five-judge bench of the apex court in the Islamic Academy Case (2003), which permitted state governments to establish admission and fees regulation committees headed by retired high court judges to adjudicate the admission processes and fee structures of professional education colleges.

With state governments in particular fighting a determined rearguard action to retain control over private education institutions  — there are huge opportunities for shakedowns, patronage and rent-seeking in the licence-permit-quota regime — the road is not clear for private initiatives in education. Now with the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2008 having imposed a 25 percent poor neighbourhood children quota on all private, unaided primary-secondary schools, the ratio decidendi of the T.M.A. Pai Foundation and P.A. Inamdar judgements of the apex court will be put to the test, and determine the future direction of Indian education.

10. India's coaching schools revolution

The glaring lacunae and great infirmities of post-independence India’s government-dominated education system have been partially made good by the supplementary tutorial or coaching school phenomenon, which has become a huge Rs.30,000 crore industry and parallel education system. With entry into the much-too-few institutions of high-quality higher education, particularly the handful of IIMs and IITs being limited to less than 11,000 per year, a whole new industry which tutors, trains, and coaches aspirants to top the IIMs’ Common Admission Test (CAT) and the IIT-Joint Entrance Examination (IIT-JEE) has flowered across the subcontinent. Over time most of them have diversified from preparing students for the highly competitive CAT and IIT-JEE to other public exams, for entry into top jobs in the civil services (IAS, IFS, IPS), medical and engineering colleges countrywide.

Coaching school industry leaders such as TIME, Bansal’s Classes, Brilliant Tutorials, FIITJEE, Career Launcher and Mahesh Tutorials among others, have promoted branches across the country and are raking in revenues of Rs.50-100 crore annually, while threatening to reduce the formal government-dominated higher education system to irrelevance. Since the coaching schools industry is not subject to government regulation and is free to set tuition prices the market can bear, it has also begun to attract venture capital and even foreign investment. And now having acquired confidence that they can teach and prepare students of all ages better than government and even private sector schools, most coaching school promoter-managers are drawing up plans to establish bricks-and-mortar secondary, vocational and higher education institutions.

For instance the Kota-based Career Point is building universities in Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh, and the Delhi-based Career Launcher is all set to enter secondary education where there is a huge demand-supply imbalance. Having cut their teeth on preparing students for highly competitive exams such as CAT, IIT-JEE and CET, coaching school eduprenuers have learnt how to make students learn, and are poised to make a great contribution towards raising teaching-learning standards across the board in Indian education.

Quite clearly during the past ten years since EducationWorld somewhat hesitantly ventured forth to navigate and investigate the murky waters of Indian education bedeviled by pernicious licence-permit-quota raj and glaring injustice and iniquity, there’s been a sea change in official and public attitudes about developing the nation’s abundant human capital. Suddenly there’s tipping point awareness that 21st century India’s future is less dependent upon the Nehruvian temples of modern India — great dams, steel mills, cement factories and petrochemical complexes — than on educating and skilling the world’s largest child population. Indeed the salvation not only of India, but of the new rapidly globalising and ageing world, depends upon a successful sea change in Indian education.