(http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12749787)
Special Report on India: Creaking, groaning- Dec 11th 2008
"Primary education is a particular worry. It is hard to teach illiterate Indian women basic hygiene. Illiterate men are not equipped for productive employment. Yet in 2001 only 65% of the population was literate, optimistically defined, compared with 90% in China, even though every Indian government for the past two decades has vowed to fix primary education. The current government is no exception. It has increased the overall education budget, but not much. Last year it represented 2.8% of GDP, about half the figure in Kenya. At least almost all Indian children now go to school: a survey of 16,000 villages carried out last year by ASER, an NGO, put the enrolment rate at 96%. But it also pointed to the appalling quality of education on offer. Half of ten-year-olds could not read to the basic standard expected of six-year-olds. Over 60% could not do simple division. One reason is that, according to a World Bank study, only half of Indian teachers show up to work. Half of Indian children leave school by the age of 14.
Let the market provide?Or rather, many of them turn to private schools, on which poor Indians spend 2% of their incomes. Many of these are wholly unregulated, but apparently no worse for it. A study of a Hyderabad slum, by James Tooley of Britain’s Newcastle University, found that of 918 schools, 35% were government-run, 23% were private but officially approved, and 37% were informal. The private schools were better. In a standardised test the informal private schools actually came out best, with an average mark of 59.5% in English, compared with 22.4% in the government schools.
Clearly the government should support the grey market in education that its own failings have given rise to. It should make it easier for private schools to get approval. Their teaching materials could then be upgraded and standardised. ASER’s survey also suggests that, with a few sensible steps, big improvements are possible even in state-run schools. By making teachers accountable to local governments, Bihar, India’s most unlettered state, roughly halved its truancy rate last year. A draft law awaiting parliamentary approval would make similar changes across India.
Higher education is another candidate for reform. In the past five years the rate of enrolment in higher education has taken off, from 7% to 13% of young Indians. But the quality of teaching at India’s 348 universities and some 18,000 colleges is generally poor. NASSCOM, the IT industry’s lobby group, reckons that of the 350,000 engineering graduates who emerge each year, mostly from private colleges, 25% are unemployable without extensive further training, and half are just unemployable.
In response to an urgent need, the central government has announced plans for 30 new centrally run institutions. These will not be first-rate. In a recent ranking of the world’s 500 best universities by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, only two were from India. But the new central institutions will be much better than most Indian public universities, which are run by state governments. In these places the teaching is mostly dreadful, syllabuses are outdated and facilities can be a health hazard.
Many private establishments (which must be affiliated to a public university and cannot be run for profit) suffer the same deficiencies. With demand for higher education outstripping supply, they have little incentive to improve. Cumbersome and politicised regulators add to their woes. Getting approval to open a nursing college in India can take years even though there is a dire shortage of nurses, with only 30% of nursing jobs in rural hospitals filled. Almost the only investors who would submit themselves to this process are the politicians who control it, and indeed many of them own universities.
In a recent paper on India’s higher education, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur call it “the collateral damage of Indian politics”. For corrupt state-level rulers, a tightly regulated university system has many benefits. Politicians, or their lackeys, collect bribes for appointing faculty, admitting students and awarding good grades. They insert their supporters to run the racket. Having destroyed a public university, they then grant themselves permission to open a private one from which, illegally, they milk profits. India’s politicians would clearly be mad to reform this system."
