India's Education System: In Need of Urgent Reforms
One
of the major challenges faced by the Indian economy is the spectre of
unemployment or, more accurately, underemployment.
Factors
accounting for slow growth of productive jobs:
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Poor Infrastructure
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Poor Governance
*
Anti-employment bias of a whole slew of economic policies
*
Failure of India’s education policy
Skill
Statistics:
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Only a small proportion of the workforce has the educational foundation
required for skilled high-productivity jobs:
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Barely 5% of the workforce in
India has had any skill training.
*
Only 2% have any formal skill certificate
compared to over 70% in advanced European countries like the UK or Germany, and
as much as 80% to 90% in East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea.
Pradhan
Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana Statistics:
Government
introduced a National Policy on Skill Development and Entrepreneurship 2015 to
address India’s enormous skill deficit. Several programmes have been launched
under this policy, including the ambitious PMKVY:
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It aims to train roughly 400 million workers in the 15-45 age group over seven
years.
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The results so far are disappointing. In its submission to a parliamentary
committee, the government indicated that of the 1.76 million candidates trained under the PMKVY till 25
April, only 580,000 could be
certified as having successfully completed the training. Less than 82,000 were actually placed in
jobs. (Around 5%)
Why
is the success rate so low in PMKVY?
No
skill development programme, however well designed, can succeed without an
underlying foundation of basic education. But India’s long-standing neglect of
primary and secondary education has greatly limited the access to quality basic
education.
State
of our Basic and Primary Education
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India is finally approaching the goal of universal primary education, more than
a hundred years after it was originally mooted in the famous “Gokhale’s Bill” of 1911.
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China had achieved this goal by the 1970s.
*
South Korea achieved it even earlier, by the 1960s, and had more or less
achieved universal secondary education by the 1970s.
*
As of 2012, over 26% of India’s
population was still illiterate compared to 5% in South Africa, 4% in
China and only 2% in Turkey.
*
About 50% of India’s population had
only primary education or less, compared to 38% in China, 24% in South
Africa, and only 20% in Turkey.
*
About 52% of class V students could not read a simple text meant for class II
students. Similarly, about 50% of class V students could not do a simple
subtraction meant for class II students. (ASER)
Sadly,
these outcomes have shown no improvement over successive Aser surveys. Such
deficits in foundational reading and arithmetic skills are cumulative, leaving
students grossly handicapped for further education.
International
Comparisons:
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In 2008, 6,000 students from Odisha and Rajasthan participated in the
well-known global Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study test for mathematics and science. They
were ranked 43rd and 47th out of 49.
Their average performance was three standard deviations below the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average.
*
In 2009, students from Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, educationally two of
India’s best-performing states, took the Programme
for International Student Assessment (PISA) test conducted by the OECD.
The two states were at the bottom, ranked 72nd
and 73rd out of 74. The average standard of the Indian students was
comparable to that of the bottom fifth percentile of OECD students.
*
The Indian authorities have been too ashamed to participate in subsequent PISA
tests, allegedly Western-style tests not suitable for Indian students. But the
top three positions in 2009 went to Singapore, South Korea and Japan, and Asian
countries have continued to rank at the top in subsequent PISA tests.
State
of our Tertiary Education – Proof of Elitist Bias in Indian Education System:
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Oddly, the 13% of population with
tertiary education at the upper end in India is quite comparable with
10% in China, 14% in South Africa and 15% in Turkey.
*
This peculiar top-heavy structure of India’s education profile, neglecting
basic education and attaching priority to higher education, starkly captures
the elitist bias in the implementation of India’s education policy.
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Half the population is still crowded at the bottom, either illiterate or with
only primary education. Meanwhile, a disproportionately large segment is also
bunched at the upper end with tertiary education.
Why
has India’s school education policy been so ineffective?
First,
education policy in India is focused
on inputs rather than learning outcomes, which is what matters.
Second,
education policy has a strong elitist
bias in favour of higher education as opposed to primary or secondary
education. Among Asian countries, the ratio of per student public expenditure
in tertiary relative to primary education is less than four in Malaysia, two in
Indonesia and one in Thailand and Korea. In India, it is over nine.
Finally,
and most importantly, the incentive
structure for government school teachers is highly distorted, virtually
guaranteeing poor performance.
Ills
that pervade our Public Education System
Teacher salaries in government
schools are relatively high in India at three times
per capita income compared to China, where it is about the same as per capita
income.
Moreover,
teachers are guaranteed lifetime employment
as public servants regardless of performance. They have no accountability to students and their parents. Their only
limited accountability is to the education department bureaucracy. Teachers are
rarely reprimanded for
non-performance, let alone fired.
High absenteeism
is routine, around 25% according to some surveys. Even when present in schools,
teachers often engage in activities
other than teaching. Poorly paid and less qualified contract teachers
actually do a much better job than permanent teachers.
Learning
outcomes are also generally better in private schools where average teacher
salaries and costs per student are less. The student share of private schools
is already over a third and rising fast even though private schools have fees
while government schools are free.
Consequences
of failure of Education Policy:
The
failure of India’s education policy has far-reaching consequences. Given the
fragile foundation of basic education, the large majority of our workforce cannot be trained for highskill,
high-productivity jobs.
Given
the low education profile of the presently underemployed workers, they would
mostly have to be employed in low- or
medium-skill jobs, but would be better paid in the organized sector
than in the unorganized sector.
Unfortunately,
neither is the demand for such workers growing fast enough, nor is the supply
of such suitably skilled workers who can move from the unorganized to the
organized sector.
(Note:
The above discussion is limited to the instrumental value of education in
enabling the workforce to get properly paid, high-productivity jobs. However,
the intrinsic value of a sound education system in enabling the citizenry to
enjoy fulfilling lives and participate in robust democratic processes is at
least as important. For both its intrinsic value as well as its instrumental
value, reforming our dysfunctional education system is of paramount importance.)
We are grateful to Sudipto Mundle
whose article in Livemint has served as our source for the above blog. Link to
the Livemint article is as follows:
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