A Harsh Spotlight on Education

Contrary to frequent assertions that the development of physical infrastructure is the key to ensuring India’s future, the country’s destiny actually lies in the aggressive nurturing of its human capital potential.  (For more on this point, see my previous post.)  Two events last week threw important light on the debilitating state of India’s educational system and, by extension, its ambitions to be a full-fledged global power.  The first was a public lecture by Amartya Sen, an eminent Indian economist, which focused on the chronic problem of illiteracy.  The second was an address by India’s vice president, Mohammad Hamid Ansari, which took aim at the country’s failings in the area of technology education, supposedly one of the country’s strengths.

Dr. Sen, who won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics and currently teaches at Harvard University, is known for his focus on the relationship between educational attainment and economic growth.  In his lecture, he argued that deficiencies in the educational sector – particularly the widespread lack of basic literacy – are the root cause for many of India’s development challenges, and deplored the wide disparity between the country’s high-flying growth rates and its dismal literacy rates. 

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Kapil Sibal, the minister for human resource development, also spoke at the event.  Dr. Singh underscored his government’s commitment to raising literacy rates.  But he conceded that “we still have a very long way to go” and lamented that “a quarter to a third of our people remain illiterate.”  He also admitted that “no modern industrial nation has less than 80 percent literacy” – China’s rate is over 90 percent – and drew attention to the disturbing gap between literacy among Indian men (75 percent) and women (54 percent).  Closing this gender bias must be an “immediate priority goal,” he argued.  (For video snippets of the remarks by Sen and Singh, click here.) 

For his part, Minister Sibal expressed confidence that India will achieve full literacy by the end of this decade.  This will be a very tall order to fulfill, even for the energetic Sibal since a few days later he also acknowledged a national shortage of 1.2 million teachers.  Both in terms of the availability of resources and their effectiveness, the public education system scores poorly relative to the other BRIC countries and to other emerging market countries.  According to a recent report by the Associated Chamber of Commerce & Industry of India, the country ranks last in primary education among the world’s seven largest emerging economies.  And the 2009-2010 Global Competitiveness Index places India at 100^th, out of 133 nations evaluated, in terms of the quality of primary education (China is ranked 42^nd).

To be sure, India in recent years has made important gains.  For example, the World Bank reports that elementary school enrollment increased by almost 60 million between 2003-2009.  And the Singh government can take credit for the recently-passed Right to Education (RTE) act that provides a constitutional guarantee of free schooling to children aged 6-14 years. 

Yet questions remain whether, given the nation’s fiscal problems, New Delhi can come up with adequate funding for the RTE act.  And even when children are in school, it’s unclear whether they are actually learning.  Last year’s Indian Education Report found that only 36 percent of Year Five students could actually do division sums correctly, while around 40 percent of all rural children in the same grade were at least 3 full grades behind in terms of education. 

Moreover, as a new UNESCO report points out, India leads the world in the number of adult illiterates, with 270 million; China comes in second with 71 million. 

Vice President Ansari’s remarks focused renewed attention on the deep problems plaguing higher education in the areas of engineering and technology.  His address was all the more resonant given that it was delivered at the convocation of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi, one of 15 elite engineering and technology schools that are widely regarded as the crown jewels of Indian university system.  But as Ansari made clear, all is not well even among the vaunted IITs.  

He emphasized that the country has few institutions with strong international standing.  Among the IITs, only those in Bombay and Delhi are listed in the 2009 Times Higher Education ranking of the world’s top 50 engineering and information technology institutions.  But no Indian school, including any of the IITs, ranks among the top 100 universities in the widely-consulted Shanghai Jiao Tong university index or in the Times Higher Education (THE) ranking of the world’s top 200 universities.  The first Indian school appearing in the Jiao Tong listing, in the 303-401 tier, is the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore; the first IIT mentioned, in the 402-501 tier, is the one at Kharagpur.  The first Indian institution listed in the THE scores is IIT Bombay, ranked at 163^th; IIT Delhi is ranked 181^st.   

Ansari noted that on the basis of research output – whether measured by publications, literature citations, or patent applications and awards – India’s engineering schools fare poorly even in comparison to other developing countries.  He also bemoaned that less than one percent of IIT graduates choose to pursue post-graduate studies within the IIT system, while tens of thousands of others have expressed their lack of confidence in the state of Indian technical education by flocking to masters and doctoral programs in the United States.  (Read the full text of Ansari’s remarks here.)

Ansari’s is the latest in a series of pointed critiques that Indian leaders have issued in recent years that illuminate the chasm between the country’s high-tech image and the defective state of its technology education.  In 2006, Prime Minister Singh’s scientific advisor warned that research output from Indian universities is “hitting an all-time low.  They are unable to perform and compete.  Moreover, even our top institutions are not performing well in terms of research papers and the number of research students they train.”

A year later, a senior government official in New Delhi lamented that the country manages to produce less than 50 PhDs in computer science each year and conceded that India would never become a great power on the basis of such paltry numbers.  (This point is even more poignant when one considers that Israel graduates approximately the same number of computer science PhDs as India despite the gargantuan population disparity.)

Other significant red flags are also visible:

• Incredibly, the Infosys Science Foundation in 2009 was unable to find a worthy recipient for its inaugural prize honoring an Indian researcher in the field of engineering and computer science. 
• The Journal of the ACM, the world’s leading journal in the computer science field, has for a number of years been unable to publish Indian submissions on quality grounds.
• Concerns about the caliber of India’s legions of engineering graduates have mired New Delhi’s bid for full membership in the Washington Accord, which governs international recognition of foreign engineering degrees.  
• Indians took pride in Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, a structural biologist who shared in the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry.  But since he is an U.S. citizen who works in the United Kingdom, his award also highlighted the fact that no Indian working in India has won a Nobel Prize in the scientific arena since C.V. Raman’s 1930 award in physics.  Israelis, on the other hand, have managed to win three Nobel Prizes in chemistry since 2004 – again despite the vast differential in population size.

Indians are eager to take their place in the front rank of great powers and some have even taken to calling their country “the knowledge hub of the 21^st century.”  But as Sen and Ansari (and even Singh in his own way) remind us, serious questions remain about whether India has the internal prerequisites to make such a claim.