Poor governance in India: Part IV
India has made progress in increasing primary education attendance rate and expanding literacy. However, education is still far behind that in China or Thailand. Most children never attend secondary schools. Only one in five job-seekers are trained.
EDUCATION: IT is an important indicator of social development. It is increasingly becoming the primary determinant of overall development in the emerging knowledge economy.
India is a meeting point for students, teachers and all concerned. The country has a large number of schools, colleges and universities. There are important educational institutes like IITs, IIMs, JNU, DU and other MBA colleges. Many institutions also provide distance learning courses. In fact, India is a home for education. There are over 300 universities and 45,000 colleges here.
Three Indian universities were listed in the Times Higher Education of the world’s top 200 universities: Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2005 and 2006. Six IITs and the Birla Institute of Technology and Science - Pilani, were listed among the top 20 science and technology schools in Asia by Asia week. The Indian school of Business, located in Hyderabad was ranked number 15 in global MBA rankings, by the Financial Times of London in 2009 while AIIMS has been recognised as a global leader in medical research and treatment. Similarly, National Law School located in Bangalore, is often considered to be the best law school in South Asia.
India has made huge progress in terms of increasing primary education attendance rate and expanding literacy to approximately two thirds of the population. However, education here is still far behind that in China or Thailand. Most children never attend secondary schools. An optimistic estimate is that only one in five job-seekers in India have ever had any sort of vocational training.
In the context of Human Resource Development, the prevailing education system in India suffers from many shortcomings, some of which are highlighted below:
- There is no link between producers and users of manpower. This means that institutions of learning, essentially at the secondary, technical and higher levels, are not exactly aware of the end result and use of their manpower output. There has to be a synchronisation and rapport between the two sets: the producers and the users, as happens in most of the countries, including the developing ones.
- There is no focus on the quality of education, in terms of depth and dimensions of teaching and in terms of syllabi, though technical education does have some quality control. There are rarely any revisions and upgradation of courses in light of the changes occurring in the given discipline or in terms of the country’s manpower requirements.
- Higher education is basically financed by the government without any reference to quality and output. It lacks philanthropic support from NGOs and the corporate world. In this era of reforms, the time is not far when higher education, funded entirely by the government, will be tossed into a free and competitive market suddenly, with sharply reduced government funding. It will then be termed as India’s higher education open market, the initial impact of which will be largely negative. Many institutions would shut down, strangled by the loss of resources.
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