By Yash
Published: July 15, 2007
Updated: August 3, 2008
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The consequences of the flaws in Indian Education System are several. Since the education system induces unacceptable skills, the costs of training the people (re-teaching?) to suit the needs of the companies escalated in the past decade. It’s noteworthy that the reason behind MNC's like IBM moving to India is lack of independent thinking and application oriented training in India and not cheap labor. Indians are good at effectively completing the designated tasks in a timely manner without asking any further questions.  In other words they can be confident about the security of their product blueprints and get their work done. Their confidence in our inability to improvise the existing product and coming up with high quality cost effective product is the reason behind this shift. 

I can’t help but quote Ajay shah, author of the article “Will BPO hit a staffing crisis”, who nailed the fact very well. According to him we have an abundance of technicians who can turn the wrench, but not people who understand which wrench to use.  And to a greater extent it’s true and it’s reinforced by the fact that there is not a single product from India which made it to the International market and there are no Indians in top level jobs in these MNCs. Even those who managed were foreign trained, Sabeer Bhatia for instance was a BITS exchange student at Caltech (undergrad) and later got his masters and PhD form Stanford. Same is the case with Vinod Khosla, an IITian who got his masters from Carnegie Mellon and MBA from Stanford. Thanks to the Indian Education! This is just not the case with IT; it is the case with all the fields.   So it is high time that our educators realize the need for world class education and address the issue.

 

Some possible solutions:

 

Re-vamping the syllabus at the secondary education level:  Syllabus changes should be incorporated at post secondary level; these changes should target a gradual shift from exam oriented system to application and independent thinking oriented system.

 

Increasing awareness among parents: Part of the problem is lack of awareness among parents. They have set aims for their children and they do not take the children’s aspirations into consideration. Effort should be put into educating parents and convincing them to leave the choice to the kids. Parents might have the best of interest of their kids but they definitely do not know what their kids will enjoy doing.

Promoting sense of responsibility and educating the students:  Efforts should be made to educate students of various career opportunities and also help them to make wise choices about the decisions during crucial years (post secondary stage). Another important factor is promoting sense of responsibility in our youth which is pretty much lacking in the present generations.

 

Promoting summer Camps/ Internships:  Premier institutes like TIFR , BITS, AIIMS,IIS, ICMR and its regional institutes, CSIR should offer summer internships for high school students  and undergrads.

Change in the Exam and Admission system: The examination system should be made much more rigorous and emphasis should be on testing analytical skills.  The admissions to professional colleges should not be based on just the CET results. They should start taking their academics and extra curricular activities into consideration as well. Universities like Oxford and Cambridge moved away from their rigid curriculum to suit the needs of the country and we are still functioning in the mode we built on several years ago based on their curriculum

 Building World Class University system:  It is not something impossible. If the so called policy makers give a close attention to the billions of dollars we are losing in foreign exchange in the form of tuition to foreign universities; they will realize it’s just not affecting us in one aspect of our life.  The yearly averages of Indian students moving to foreign countries like US, Europe and Australia to get quality education are 70K, 30 K and 27K respectively.  Say on an average these students are paying 8 lakhs per year as tuition that itself accounts to 10160 crores (approximately 2 billion dollars) each year.  If we can have world class education in India why would anyone be interested in travelling to foreign land? We will not only save billions of dollars over a period of time but also attract several foreign students.

                The so called billionaires should also take the moral responsibility of giving it back to the country and help the country in realizing this dream. To an extent Tatas and Birlas are contributing to the excellence of education through Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Birla insititute of Technology and so on.  But just handfuls of them are not enough and other industrialists show take Tatas and Birlas as an example and follow suit.  In long run this investment of theirs would benefit them as their alma mater would help them in reaching their goals in international market.

 

All these can’t be achieved in a fortnight and will need several years of dedicated effort and time will have to decide if our policy makers will make any attempt in that direction.

 

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