Dr Manasvi M Kamat
The Princess of Sharjah, Sheikha Hend Al-Qassemi during her recent visit to India lauded the Indian higher education system. Appreciating the country’s contribution to the global community in her interaction with the students of the Nehru Arts and Science College remarked that India is no lesser than any other country in this world in terms of education, and rightly the appreciation is well deserved.
The Indian education system has come a long way with major changes happening, yet has a long way to go. India has the third largest education system in the world and claims to have a 90 billion US dollar turnover and likely to cross 100 billion by 2020. With 44 central universities, 90 private, and 903 state universities including technical ones, the growth has been satisfactory.
However India’s vision of being a world leader in the 21st century is unlikely to be realized without an education system that keeps abreast with the needs of our future citizens. The challenges also need to be well understood and addressed. There are approximately 500 million people who are below the poverty line having no formal access to education.
Moreover the issue of gender gap emerges as children get older with more girls dropping out than boys.
The data reveals that almost 40% of the eligible student populations are not enrolled in secondary school and the dropout rate is staggering. As one climbs higher echelons of educational levels even the opportunities are few as there are only 14 secondary schools for every 100 elementary schools.
Similarly only one in four Indians goes for higher education and contrary to this in South Korea, nine out of 10 students go to college. The other reason for this is that students, especially from low income families feel that a higher education will not help them get a job. This brings to light the point of skill-job availability difference.
Thus the higher education in India faces we face from two confronting problems.
First there is no access to education, and second the available institutions fail on parameters of institutional quality thereby failing to nurture students to secure gainful employment. Much responsibility falls on the schools. In many Indian States the government schools fail to deliver and the performance of their students in board exams continues to remain abysmal. Look for instance the figures from last year. Invariable in all States there are government schools where not a single student passed their Class X examination. In Himachal Pradesh only one student found a place in the distinction list out of the 80,000 students who cleared, while in Haryana the%age of students that flunked was 51.
Non-existent quality infrastructure, very miniscule investment in enhancing teacher’s ability and not developing student interest in extracurricular and skill building activities are the three main impediments that shift children away from government schools to private schools.
Today, India has approximately 250 million children going to about 1 million schools and 30-40% of these students are enrolled in private schools. In 2001, only 18% of Indian children were enrolled in private schools it is estimated that by 2025, 75% students will opt for them. In most nations, the state takes responsibility to educate children. In UK 93%, in USA 92%, in Finland 98% and in Sri Lanka 97% of the children are enrolled in public schools
Globally it is recognized that one way to correct the massive vacuum of quality in education is through privatizing. In countries like the United States, Canada, England, Germany and Australia have Charter Schools, funded by the government but run by private bodies and they maintain the highest standards of accountability.
Such Private enterprises need to survive market forces, scale in size by consistently delivering quality education at a competitive price. The understanding that if one who doesn’t deliver on quality or price won’t survive and parents will prefer another choice pressurizes such bodies to push themselves. It is thus no wonder that those Indians who can afford chose to fly overseas for good education and seen from increased spend on overseas education by 20 times in the past 10 years to $3 billion in 2018.
Most recently India saw a new and innovative experiment that could potentially revolutionize the Indian education space when more than 40 top CEOs and entrepreneurs, mostly educated from the IIT and IIM alumni have come together to set up a Rs 2,000-crore educational project. The aim is to set up something called ‘Plaksha University’, named after the mythical tree of knowledge from which river Saraswati originated and the needed campus in 50 acres will come up in Mohali in 2021.
The new institute aims to towards bolster entrepreneurship and a home-grown startup ecosystem by focusing on core engineering, deep technology such as AI, machine learning and mathematics. The entire team of more than 40 co-founders brainstormed for three years, putting in place a vision that advocates the best model in pedagogy, curriculum, culture, faculty, and processes.
Of the Rs 2,000 crore project, the group has already raised Rs 400 crore through personal contributions and CSR.
The proposed body has entered into a MoU with Stanford Research Institute for joint research and has made collaborations with other Ivy League names such as Berkeley and Purdue Universities.
Well-known academics such as Ashish Nanda (Harvard), Anant Agarwal (MIT), Shankar Sastry (Berkeley), and Arvind Raman (Purdue) are among those who have joined the academic advisory board of the new university.
The new university presents a strong case for corporate initiative in education which will unleash the potential of higher education to face the confronting challenges it faces. Though our efforts to better education have been lauded by the visiting Princess, there is always scope further improvement in our country. Having clear guidelines and an audit and accountability mechanism is necessary for such an endeavor to succeed.
