Indian education – the down fall!

GUEST COLUMN: Dr. N. Prabhudev

Education without values will only make you a clever Devil!

Bengaluru, June 13: Being in School Is Not the Same as Learning. The graduates are jobless and the degrees are worthless! Universities who got accredited by the NAAC- only 32 per cent could get ‘A’ grade while another 52 per cent of them could manage with ‘B’ grade. The remaining 16 per cent fall in ’c’ grade. NAAC assessment further indicates that 68% of colleges are rated as ‘B’ while another 23% colleges are rated as ‘C’ grade; and only the remaining 9% are ‘A’ grade. This reflects the quality in higher education. 

Literacy rates and enrolment in schools and colleges have shot up. Building nuclear plants, sending rockets to Moon and Mars, production of vaccines, etc. are the gains of the Indian education system. India is the fifth largest economy and home to the third largest number of billionaires in the world.

Education in India at 76 yrs. of independence! Crisis and challenges!

The Universities are required to revise the syllabi every three years. Many don’t revise their curriculum even once in five years and some in ten years!

•            Inadequate government Funding: The country is spending about 3% of its total GDP on education

•            5% of rural children are not enrolled for the school,

•            Only 24% of the households in the country have internet access.

•            There is a major digital divide within the country across states.

•            Only 16% of children in Class 1 can read the text at the prescribed level,

•            40% cannot even recognise letters.

•            Only 50 per cent of Grade 5 children being able to read a grade 2 text.

•            Lack of infrastructure: have only black boards, chalk and dusters and few teachers. A majority of schools lack drinking water facilities, a functional common toilet, and do not have separate toilets for girls.

•            Quality of teachers – are not trained adequately is a huge challenge.

•            India’s children attending a government school has now declined to 45 per cent

•            Huge dropout numbers

•            Cheating is rampant in our public examinations.

Macaulay wished to create a class of Indians who were Indian in colour and blood but English in taste and affiliation. The British failed to create a genuinely national educational system. They were interested in producing clerks to manage their administration. We are still blindly following the colonial system of education.

We are Recycling knowledge from outside, especially the West. 

•            315 million are students.

•            India has as many as 1.4 million schools

•            India has 819 universities and more

•            40,000 affiliated colleges,

•            More than 20 million students per year.

•            Indian Education system doesn’t make it to the top 50 education systems in the world of the 187 and odd countries

Given the population size, even a small per cent is a large absolute number. So, Indians are visible all over the world in top positions – the tip of the iceberg.

Education in the wrong hands – landlords, business tycoons, real-estate moguls, politicians, and liquor manufacturers etc. own – Colleges and educational institutions. Teachers have no autonomy. Marking system is a joke. Everyone gets very high marks and many get even perfect scores. Skills are no one’s concern. And doctorates – many of them educated illiterates!

An average Indian family spends an amount of 25.19 lacs for on their children education. This accounts for almost 46% of the total spending required to raise a child. And after all that money and hard work, students end up being unemployed or underemployed especially junior doctors and engineers.

Every student in India is judged by their performance on a sheet of paper once a year. Same subjects, same syllabus and the same tests for every student irrespective of their skills make Indian Education System pathetic. Studying is not a passion in India. It’s a race. A race for marks, race for getting into good colleges, race for getting a job. 

Very few teachers of today are teachers by choice. The honoured profession of teaching is no more honourable. The ultimate goal of education in India is to get a job not to learn or innovate or to become an entrepreneur.

Indian Education net Academic worth?

•            Only one Noble Prize in the science field – Germany 54, US 110 & UK 46.

•            India – 33.2 patents per million population in comparison to 4,205.8 by the Republic of Korea, 2,566.8 by Japan, 1,782.6 by the US and 680.3 in China.

•            Global Innovation Index 60/130.

•            Only 16 Indian Universities makes it to the list of Top 1000 universities in the world.

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