Our vision for education in this country is what I would like to focus on. As you know, we have gone through an amazing journey in the last 65 years. Essentially when the British left, they left us with just 17% literacy. We had about 30 Universities, 700 colleges in the entire country and 4 lakh students at that time. Today we have gone to 70% literacy, we have 670 Universities, 35000 colleges and about 20 million students. So, the transformation has been dramatic. At the same time we cannot be complacent about it, because 74% still means that about a quarter of Indians don’t know how to read and write, and some of the 74% may not be very good at it either. So the challenge is a very serious one. It starts at the bottom of the pyramid, at the lowest level, and goes up to the top to the space where you all are trying to work in the field of technical education.
Let me stress that the bottom levels have not done too badly. Primary education enrolments have gone up so dramatically that the latest figures for the gross enrolment ratio at the primary level are 104%, so there are actually enrolled more kids than what existed in that age group. But when we get to Class 8th, it drops to 69% when we go to 11th and 12th, it drops to 39%. And by the time we are at University level, it is right down to just 18% against the global GER for Higher Education. So, we are behind the rest of the world.
And if you look at the other yardsticks, if you look, for example, at the fact that most of the widely accepted international rankings for educational universities, there is no Indian University in the top 200 in the Times Higher Education Ranking, in the QS ranking and so on. There is a particular reason for that, that most of our institutions have tended to be teaching institutions, rather than giving heavy weightage for research. So, we are now encouraging our institutions to do more research. We are putting in research centres, innovation centres into our IITs and into the other institutions of higher education, and we will encourage more to do the same.
Now I should stress two more things. The first is simply, that this is now a young people’s country. 540 million Indians are under the age of 25. 225 million in the age between 10 and 19. So, they are the ones who will be coming into college if we can train them and educate them properly in school system to be ready for a higher level of education. Do we have enough places for them, clearly not. Do we have sufficient quality. This is a big debate.
I have often spoken in terms of Indian Education in terms of 4 other Es, apart from the E of education.
EXPANSION
The first is E of expansion, which I have described to you. Going from that modest level of 1947, to levels of today, that expansion was necessary.
EQUITY
Accompanied by a second E which is Equity, including those who’ve been left out.including those who were denied education in the earlier days, because of their birth, their caste, their religion, their region, their gender. Equity includes very great emphasis on gender education. Because when the British left us with 17% literacy, there was a gender divide too. Only 8% of Indian women were literate in 1947, so today when we spoke of 74%, there is still a gender divide. We have 82% men and 65% women literacy. So, the women have to be given an opportunity to catch up because there is nothing more transformational in any society, than educating girls.. We educate a boy, its very good, we educate a person, but if you educate a girl, you educate a family, you transform a community, you change the society. So, that’s very important, we are trying everything to get more girls into school and keep them there. Dropout rates of girls by Class 8 are very high. Sometimes it can be something as simple as lack of toilet in the school. Girls, after a particular age, need the facility to be able to change, there’s no such thing in the school, no toilet, they will go home, and many of them don’t come back. So drop out rates can be avoided. in addition to that, we do need of course to put more resources in educating girls from under-privileged communities, backward communities, educating backward districts giving ample opportunities which we are doing through programmes like the Kasturba Gandhi BhartiyaVidya and so on. However on focusing on these two Es of expansion and equity, I fear we have left out the third E of excellence.
EXCELLENCE
Quality is very important and has been lacking, by international yardsticks, and national yardsticks, and in the 12th 5 year plan, the emphasis is much more on quality. We want to see excellence in our system, that’s the only way we can compete with the world.
EMPLOYABILITY
The 4th E which we’ve completely neglected so far is employability. I’ve spoken to many many CEOs who say that once passing the IITs and top institutions, the students they hire from other engineering colleges and institutions, are frankly not upto the mark. After hiring these students they have to give them one more year of education to make up for the deficiencies what they have not learned from college. I’m not talking about on- the job training. They are actually doing make-up classes because of the inadequacy of the education that the student has received, in many engineering colleges and technical institutions. In a FICCI-Survey recently 64% of the employers were not satisfied with the quality of the young engineers they are recruiting.
So, when we speak of edupreneurs, we are talking of coming into the education space, and offering the service, but you must link that to the employability of your graduates. You must, as entreprenuers yourself, tie into the market place, get companies to come and tell you what sort of skills they want in your students. You should ensure that your students are well equipped with what the marketplace is demanding, before trying to get them into the job market. Otherwise that 4th E of employabilty will not be there. And unemployed engineers are not good to anybody
What we need in our society, are people who are qualified and able to take advantage of the opportunities that the 21st century India and the world offers. We have a youthful population at the time when the rest of the world is aging, including China. In 20 years, China’s workforce will become 5% smaller, and ours will be 32% larger. But to take advantage of this, we need good, suitable, efficient, relevant education.
If you as eduprenuers want to succeed andget more awards in the future
“you must do so by offering quality education that respects excellence, that does not exclude anybody, and will provide employability to your graduates. If you can do that, you will succeed.”
