Page 58 - EW Jan 2024_Neat

Cover Story

by fear that the PISA 2009 debacle
would repeat itself, when the Indian
sample of 5,000 students drawn from
Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh
were ranked second last of 74 partici-
pant countries. Within government
and the establishment, there’s belated
awareness that early childhood and
K-12 education — especially public
schooling — has been neglected for
over a century, first in British India
and subsequently in independent In-
dia.
It’s all very well to forgive and for-
get in the warm glow of Raj nostalgia
and the newly emergent Indo-British
camaraderie. But the plain truth is
that when the Brits exited India in
1947 in post-World War II panic after
almost two centuries of exploitative Government school children in Rajasthan: intelligentsia also blameworthy
rule glossed over by Western histo-
rians — for an accurate picture read over 150 years vintage — are ranked able the Central government to mobil-
Smoke and Ashes, Amitav Ghosh’s among the global Top 200 in the an- ise an additional Rs.7 lakh crore (cf.
latest (2023) oeuvre which traces nual league tables of the authorita- its 2023-24 allocation of Rs.1.12 lakh
the roots of deep and enduring pov- tive London-based university ranking crore) for investment in public educa-
erty and backwardness of present-day agencies QS and THE. Unsurprisingly, tion and health has never received any
Bihar — a mere 16 percent of India’s according to some consultancies and response, even from top economists
population was literate and average recruitment companies (McKinsey invited for debate/critique.
longevity was 32 years. and Aspiring Minds), 75 percent of For the rock-bottom condition of
Shockingly, even after indepen- engineering and 85 percent of arts Indian education, self-serving gov-
dence, public — especially primary — grads of Indian higher ed institutions ernments apart, the country’s feeble
education continued to be accorded are unemployable in Indian and for- intelligentsia is also to blame. Despite
low priority in free India. eign multinationals. a mountain of historical evidence
R EGULAR READERS OF ered Kothari Commission strongly primary-secondary education of ac-
Way back in 1967, the high-pow-
worldover testifying that universal
EW are likely to be well-
recommended annual allocation (Cen-
ceptable quality is the prerequisite of
acquainted
this
with
burgeoning middle class including
public education. Although univer-
writer’s cause-and-effect tre plus states) of 6 percent of GDP for national development, within India’s
analysis of this deplorable situation. sally acclaimed, that target has never the intelligentsia, academia, business
Adoption of the inorganic Soviet in- been achieved for the reasons outlined and industry, which has the option of
spired socialist model of development above, averaging a mere 3.5 percent. A private education for its progeny — 48
which canalised national savings into schema/calculus routinely presented percent of in-school children are in
capital-intensive public sector enter- by your editors coterminously with private schools — there is pervasive
prises that never earned adequate the Union budget, which would en- indifference to public/government
re-investible surpluses for invest- provided K-12 education, lending
ment in public education and health; Within India's burgeoning credence to the Marxist ideology that
simultaneous strangulation of private middle class which has the bourgeoisie has a vested interest in
industry and business which reduced mass illiteracy and poverty. It ensures
tax revenues to a trickle; and contin- the option of private availability of a vast pool of cheap la-
uously rising establishment, defence education, there is pervasive bour.
and middle class subsidies. Against this backdrop, the OECD/
Nor is the condition of public indifference to public/ PISA methodology of selecting
higher education any better. None of government provided K-12 15-year-olds from a cross-section of
India’s 42,000 undergrad colleges or education schools — including India’s govern-
1,126 universities — some of them of ment schools plagued with multi-

58 EDUCATIONWORLD JANUARY 2024