Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has rightly described the present century as the 'KnowledgeCentury', where 'brain power' will determine India's place in the comity of nations. He has also urged the scientific fraternity to "join the race for reaching science, as well as the benefits of science, to every nook and corner of the country".
These are, no doubt, noble sentiments, but given the state of India's current educational infrastructure, they are destined to utter failure. The 'benefits of science' cannot - except arbitrarily and accidentally - be 'gifted from above' by a minuscule community of scientists on a general population mired in ignorance and poverty.
They can only be 'absorbed' by a population whose education has created in them the capacities, the skills and the 'scientific temper' for a creative interface with modern technologies and for productive employment within the context of the contemporary and increasingly globalised economy that can help them generate the resources to access these.
India has long boasted of its swelling literacy rates, and for decades the primary focus ofgovernment policies has been their continuous augmentation. Little attention has been paid to the quality of education and skill generation among target populations.
There are, no doubt, a handful of institutions across the country that provide education at global standards, but these service a microscopic minority of the rich and privileged. The majority of India's children have been abandoned to substandard institutions that produce human resources that are, overwhelmingly, unemployable, or capable of handling little more than manual or semi-skilled labour - labour that has diminishing utility in the contemporary 'knowledge economy'.
Among the cohorts of youth who are poorly equipped to play any productive role in the modern economy are millions who pour out of the country's education system with certificates and degrees. On the day newspapers reported the Prime Minister's exhortations to scientists, they carried another interesting news item, also arising out of a function the Prime Minister attended: 22 per cent of unemployed graduates in the country came from the 'science stream'. Worse, post-graduates from a science background comprise 62.8 per cent of all unemployed post-graduates.
Is there, indeed, such a dearth of employment for the educated in India today? As anyone who has had to look for suitable candidates for almost any kind of skilled job will testify, while the list of applicants tends to be unending, the pool of suitable applicants is invariably microscopic. With small exceptions, our schools, our colleges, our technical institutions, are pouring out millions of graduates who are, in fact, fit for very little in the modern world.
According to one recent estimate, there are at least 90 million children in schools where they are 'learning very little' - and this is in addition to an estimated 59 million children who are entirely out of the schooling system. That is close to a 150 million children who will grow up without the capacities to be absorbed into the modern, technology driven economy, and most of whom will prove to be burdens, rather than assets, in this economy.
In many villages today, parallel to the government schools, private initiatives and enterprises are setting up 'public schools' which teach English and Science, and in some cases, computers. As it becomes increasingly clear where the jobs are, linguistic chauvinism is rapidly being jettisoned, and more and more schools are trying to turn to the English medium. Nevertheless, the proportion of families who can afford even the modest fees these schools charge is small.
The revitalisation of the vast apparatus of government-supported educational institutions will, consequently, remain critical to the realisations of India's aspirations in the foreseeable future. And the potential impact of such revitalisation can be assessed from the fact that more than 90 per cent of the country's rural population is now, ongovernment records, located within a kilometre of a school (which, of course, may or may not, presently, be functional).
This contrasts dramatically with a time when rural children would trek tens of miles to and from school - though it is significant that they often had the motivation to do so in those early days after Independence, while children today are increasingly dropping out of schools that fully fail to stimulate them, and are turning away from teachers who obviously fail to inspire.
Literacy can no longer be an objective for the people of a country that seeks eminence in the globalised world order. The creation of relevant capacities and skills for productive employment, for entrepreneurship, and for the generation of further employment, have to be built into the schooling system. Technology has penetrated every aspect of the modern world.
It cannot remain the subject of specialised study in technical and scientific institutions alone. The education of every child in India must now contain components of familiarisation with contemporary technologies, and at least minimal competence in the use of the most important among these. It is time to go beyond 'Operation Blackboard' and to try to put a computer in every classroom in the country. At the same time, it is necessary to focus on standards, and to re-educate teachers, particularly in English and Science.
There is also a particular and urgent challenge with regard to textbooks and curricula. The current crop of textbooks is, by and large, quite dreadful. It is time to throw away the fruitless cycle of alternately ideologically loading and 'detoxifying' textbooks, and to focus on excellence rather than partisan propaganda. Even a lie that is well written would be more educative than a truth expressed badly.
Jawaharlal Nehru alone, among India's Prime Ministers, had the courage of conviction and the vision to sink as much as six per cent of the budget into education - a target that has remained the elusive objective of all subsequent education policy. Unsurprisingly, he was one of the nation's greatest institution builders and even today, the finest and most prominent educational establishments in the country are those that were created under his guidance and patronage.
The currency of power in today's world is, indeed, knowledge, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh can leave an indelible stamp in India's history if he could reform the nation's education policy to reverse the precipitous decline in standards of education at all levels, create new institutions that would meet the challenges of globalisation and transformation, and radically expand and improve the quality of education available in the currently moribund, but gigantic network ofgovernment-supported schools, particularly across rural and mofussil India (though even in Delhi and other metropolii, in most municipal andgovernment schools servicing the poor, standards remain abysmal).
Such an achievement would, in its impact, go beyond any other policy of development that can even be imagined, and would truly empower the marginalised people of this country far more than any poverty alleviation or developmental strategy can. It would, moreover, generate the quality of human resources that the country needs if it is, in fact, to become the 'great power' it seeks to be.
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K.P.S. Gill is Publisher, SAIR; President, Institute for Conflict Management. This article was first published in the Pioneer.
