Page 60 - EW November 2023

Cover Story

had been provided acceptable quality
primary-secondary public education
and health services, the India growth
story would have been substantially
different.
F OR ONE, A BETTER edu-

cated citizenry would have
elected better quality Mem-
bers of Parliament and
MLAs (members of state legislative
assemblies) who would have been less
susceptible to the anti-industry and
business propaganda of professed so-
cialist politicians whose prime interest
in perpetuating licence-permit-quota
raj is speed money and bribes extrac-
tion. Moreover the public would have
been able to better articulate demand
for superior law and order, justice and Government school in Uttar Pradesh: grossly inadequate infrastructure
governance systems. And thirdly they
would have been equipped to insist on and placements company, 70 percent ket determined tuition and residential
incrementally better quality education of engineering college graduates and fees which is anathema to the Indian
in the country’s 1.10 million govern- 80 percent of arts, science and com- middle class accustomed to heavy sub-
ment schools. merce graduates are unemployable sidisation of higher education — at the
As repeatedly reported by the an- in Indian and foreign multinational cost of primary education.
nual ASER ( Annual Status of Educa- companies. As a result the in-house Therefore the pressure for admis-
tion Report) surveys of the indepen- training costs of Indian corporates sion into the much-too-few globally
dent Pratham Education Foundation, are among the highest worldwide and
learning outcomes in (rural) govern- damage bottom lines and capital for- Indians top list of US unicorns
ment schools are pitiably poor. Over mation. IT companies such as TCS, immigrant founders
half of children in class VII cannot Infosys among others run huge train-
read simple passages from class III ing establishments in several cities to study (2022) by Dr. Ilya A.
textbooks (in vernacular languages) make college/university graduates A Strebulaev, professor of fi-
or manage simple computation sums, job-ready. nance at Stanford University, Gradu-
with government schools faring worse The condition of India’s 1,074 uni- ate School of Business, indicates that
than budget private schools. Moreover versities, some established over 150 90 of 1,078 founders of 500 US uni-
ASER surveys have also routinely years ago, is not much better. Again, corns were born in India.
highlighted multi-grade classrooms only a few dozen managed by the Cen- India 90
(25 percent (1.5 million) government tral government such as the 23 IITs
school teachers are absent every day) and a dozen IIMs graduate engineers Israel 52
and grossly inadequate infrastruc- and business managers who are eager- Canada 42
ture — electricity, drinking water and ly snapped up by industry. In the lat- UK 31
toilets shortages — in government est Times Higher Education league
schools, mostly managed by state table of the world’s Top 1,000 univer- China 27
governments. sities, India’s top-ranked varsity is Germany 18
Learning outcomes in the major- the Indian Institute of Science, Ben- 17
ity of higher education institutions galuru (estb. 1904) ranked in the 251- France
are only marginally better. Only a 300 band. Against this neighbouring Russia 14
few dozen of the country’s 42,000 China has five among the Top 100. Taiwan 12
junior and undergraduate colleges And although a dozen globally bench- Ukraine 12
provide globally benchmarked un- marked private universities, which
dergraduate education. According to have been permitted to set up shop Source: Ilya A Strebulaev, Professor of finance at
a study conducted in 2019 by Aspir- in the new millennium, offer a ray of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business
ing Minds, a Delhi-based recruitment hope, they demand — and get — mar-

60 EDUCATIONWORLD NOVEMBER 2023