Is education deterring India's growth? Experts debate

The latest edition of the venerable Economist, the British-based weekly, has a special India pull out. Its key theme is that India's growth prospects in the coming decade is nowhere near the 10 percent growth that was assumed until recently. Rather, India's potential growth is probably half of that, closer to the 5 to 5.5 percent mark.

In today's edition of Indianomics, a special show on CNBC-TV18, we discuss the issue of education, literacy and employability and we check out if these are turning out to be the deterrents to India's growth as the Economist argues.

The author of the piece in the Economist, Adam Roberts and two eminent educationists, Mohandas Pai, Chairman of Manipal University and formerly HR head of Infosys and Madhav Chavan CEO of Pratham, an NGO that provides education to underprivileged kids in Mumbai and other cities discuss the issues of education, literacy and employability.

Here is the edited transcript of the interview on CNBC-TV18.

Q: What exactly is the argument that you are presenting? Is your argument that India's educational system is fast turning out to be a constraint to India's growth story itself?

Roberts: I would may be put it in another way and say that India has an immense potential. You have a huge number of young people, the demographic dividend we often talk about, the billion brains ready to come into the workforce. That is a huge advantage over many other ageing and smaller countries. What does India need to do to get its workforce to be able to compete globally? Ofcourse it has to educate its young people.

You look at what India is trying to do in the last few years and what it plans to do in the coming decade or so. There is a lot of money going into education, there is a lot of people profiting on education. The government is spending a lot of money on skills development, lots of money going into schools, but the quality of education in India is still nowhere near high enough.

The real need for India is to get high quality education to get skilled and capable workers into good quality jobs. So far if you look around at the standard of the secondary school education, the standard of higher education, the standard of vocational education, it really isn’t there. There are huge numbers of people graduating, huge numbers of people coming out to join the workforce but, if you talk to employers, if you look for skilled workers around India’s economy there just isn’t the supply of highly skilled people ready to do the work that is needed.

Q: In a word therefore Adam's theme is there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that skilled workers are becoming scarce in India. Would you agree that it is becoming extremely difficult to find skilled workers as India's growth pace ticks higher and higher, unemployability of the workforce itself becomes a constraint would you say?

Pai: I would agree with the statement fully because I believe that the biggest constraint to India meeting its growth targets of 9-10 percent is availability of skilled human resources. We have a lot of human resources available but a fair number of them need to be trained to attain the requirements of the job.

When you look at the level of a blue collar worker or possibly workers who are not in the knowledge industry you find that they are largely unskilled, they are not productive at all, they require skilling up of maybe 6-9 months. If you look at people who come out of high education institutions and I must have hired about nearly hundred and seventy five thousand people during the five years that I spent at Infosys, we find that barely 25 percent of them are ready for the job immediately upon hiring. The balance needs to be trained.

At Infosys we set up the world's largest corporate university where we train between 32000-35000 people every year and many of them going through a 24 week to a 26 week full day program where we pay them their salaries. We had 600 computer science faculties training them. The big challenge that we have is that the gap between the academic institutions and industry is wide and it is widening very rapidly.

India has about 18 million young people in colleges as of now with a gross enrolment rate of 21 percent and I would say that we have a challenge here because the quality of the output is not very good. I won't blame the young people, they are very smart people. About 60-70 percent of people who come to colleges are very smart and in any university, anywhere in the world of reasonable quality, they would do very well but the inputs that they get in terms of education from the faculty, in terms of the infrastructure, the pedagogy and the technology is not up to the mark.

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Q: Let me come to Mr. Chavan to discuss the other important piece. There is a vast India, which is not able to make it to even the higher quality schools, to even the moderately good schools as well as to the private education institutions. What exactly is going wrong in that piece Mr. Chavan? The quality of the municipal schools we know is routinely very poor and yet a lot of money gets spent in that piece. If you can tell us what exactly is the input that should change. Should we just close down the municipal schools and provide that money in the form of free education stamps to those who deserve that kind of free education or is it that this piece itself can be mended?

Chavan: No, I think we need to understand what the question is. I don’t think closing down all municipal or government schools is the answer. The problem is that as a country we have created access to schools. 95-97 percent of India’s children are enrolled in a school that is within one or two kilometers of his or her house.

We have created something called school and have put some adults in the school who are called teachers. They are not very well trained, many of them are not very trained and there is a problem. The question is how to improve the quality of learning and how to define quality of learning. What we find is that upto 5th grade, just about 50 percent children learn to read-write and do basic arithmetic, basic arithmetic is even less.

If you look at what the outcomes of school education are then they are rather poor and it is because 50 percent can’t even read, write or do basic arithmetic properly these 50 percent is not going to survive upper primary and leave alone secondary education. As a result, even if you start many private schools or secondary schools, this large proportion of school-going children will not actually be able to negotiate the curriculum and this is what one of the biggest problems of India is today that we will be pushing children upto 8th grade.

There is a lack of secondary schools and whether they get into secondary schools or not they will still not be able to negotiate the curriculum. Then it is not just the academic curriculum, even if they want to go to vocational training, we find that they are lacking. We try to train some young people in vocational skills and we find that they cannot absorb basic information that is written or do not have soft-skills of talking etc. which are required.

I think the problem is not just about going to private schools. Private schools are not doing all that better either, leaving aside some of the so called top, elite, costly private schools. I think private schools on a very large scale have now come up in rural and urban areas. They do not necessarily have the quality that you desire.

It is just that the perception among the poor is that private schools are better and so in large numbers they are abandoning government schools. Whenever somebody opens a private school nearby they are trying to put kids in the private schools also. But I can’t say that private schools as a whole have a good quality.

Q: Let me shift the discussion to what you see as remedies. A lot of countries which have made it to the middle income category, like for instance Taiwan, Korea and even China have got their education piece right. In your reckoning when you spoke to industry and to educationists what did you see as the main hope, the beacon that might change what is quite clearly a system that is not throwing up employable Indians?

Roberts: The crucial part for an economy like China or Indonesia and therefore, like India is can we get the qualified workers? Can we get people after the age of 18 to improve on their skills, to do more than just basic literacy but to have some skills in English, to have some skills with computers for example and the ability to read well.

That is where you need quality higher education institutions and I would say that you need political reforms, you have got too many politicians who are invested personally in education institutions and who have no interest in reforming those. You have outsiders blocked from bringing in foreign capital and foreign standards into India. They could improve India’s education system at the high level too and then you have the need for vocational education, the sort of think that the National Skills Development Fund is trying to do.

There is a lot of government money available for that sort of vocational training of adults and getting them ready for work. But it is very hard to find reliable and good partners to do that training.

We know there are great companies like Infosys and so on that do it extremely well, but you are looking at training tens of millions of people to be able to work and that is going to involve a lot of very capable partners. I am afraid it is just going to take years and years of hard work to get India upto the level that it needs to be, the sort of level that China is already at.

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Q: What would you say is going wrong with the private sector piece? In several areas the entry of private sector actually brought competition and quality. It is not happening really uniformly in education where it has become actually a hotbed of profit tearing. How does one correct this piece, getting the private sector, but getting it with an attitude of philanthropy?

Pai: The basic challenge of getting the private sector is it is very difficult in India for good people, people who are philanthropists, who are interested in education to start an educational institution. Government does not give you approval. They ask for bribes, they harass you, they try to control you because the political class has got into education in a very big way.

Only people with political backing, people who are part of political parties can go to the government and get approvals easily. Look at engineering education. We have 3,500 engineering colleges, we have 1.5 million seats and maybe 80 percent of them are run by the political class and they are all in the private sector and a large number of them got approvals because they could pay bribes, they had political patronage and good people who want to start it get harassed and they demand bribes and all kind of things.

Unless you have an open policy you are not going to get good people. Having said that what is the remedy? The first remedy could be if the government were to say that higher educational institutions who have been in existence for more than 20 years and 20 years is a fairly long time for them to put their credentials, you do have some standards, you do have some brand equity. Then you can freely expand in any part of the country and it would have solved 30-40 percent of the challenge.

Let me give out the case of engineering institutions. If the top 1,000 engineering colleges are allowed to freely expand and take in 1,000 students each, that's a million students and the million students will get a reasonable quality of education, it may not be the best, but they will be much better than the bottom 2,000. I think we got to allow free expansion of institutions which have been there, done that, because education ultimately a question of management.

You need to build a brand equity, you need a group of faculty, you need to build a pedagogy, you need to build a culture, you need to build infrastructure and people who have been around for maybe 15-20 years and have done that.

Q: That is the larger piece, the bigger broader poorer India which is not even in this discussion of quality universities and quality private education. What kind of immediate fixes can we get to that piece - where does industry fit in? Since your organization has on its board of governors, a large number of very respected Indians, how can industry or well meaning people intervene in the current system to ensure that it is better run?

Chavan: I think one of the reasons why quality of education is not going up, say in vocational also is that the industry is seriously not demanding that kind of a quality.

I will give you can example. Tomorrow if the construction industry in this country was to lay down that we are going to accept skilled workers at this level and we are willing to pay per skilled workers so much money, I think you will find that there will be trainers available. Essentially, the business and the industry have to set standards.

When you apply for an American university you go and appear for Graduate Record Exam (GRE) or a Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). There is a standard setting after which the university accepts you. Many government people, government departments are also doing this. To become a teacher now in India you have to pass the teaching eligibility test, if you pass that test then and then alone you can become a teacher in India. It is not like before and you need a DEd or BEd to become a teacher. At every level, the educational institutions are setting their own standard but the employers are not. We are not focused on education. We may setup a college, we may setup a school but we are not saying what the outcome should be.

The level of certification, the sanctity of certification process has gone down significantly. When we train now for vocational skills we have partnered with industry leaders like The Taj Group or L&T and they create standards and curricular and they access the graduates of our training programme. As a result of which they can also maintain the standards of what we are doing.

I think the industry has to come out and start setting these standards, start demanding the quality. The industry is not willing to pay for a qualified worker. I think standard setting, goals setting, outcomes, focus from primary school to college and universities is extremely important, that is missing in our country.

Q: The poverty in the economy extends to poverty in the education system and in the poverty of standards as well. Do you see a beacon of light, which are the one or two examples that perhaps give you a hope that this education system both in the government piece and the private piece can be corrected and that could be the way forward?

Pai: The beacon of hope is India's citizens have realized the value of education. Every mother wants her child to go to school, she is eating one roti less a day and sending her to school, even to a bad school and in the school system they are dropping out of government schools and sending them to private schools. That means they have hope that something will happen but they crave for education. For higher education the lower middle classes, even the semi educated classes are borrowing money from banks, banks have lent out a lot of money, around Rs 45000-50000 crore going to different colleges and students are working hard.

So the entire citizenry has got this urge for high education and there are providers coming up of indifferent quality, bad quality, good quality who are doing this breaking the law, doing all kind of stuff but the urge is there and it's happening. I think this movement will catapult India into a very different league in the next 10 years.

All we require is a nudge from the government that is point number one. Point number two, industry too is realizing that we need people of a higher skill set and they are setting up their own training centers, they are talking to service providers. I agree with Madhav to a great extent that they are not doing enough but there is a need coming in the industry who are finding out there are just not enough people. The industry for instance just doesn’t have enough people.

So, they are trying to setup their own training institute and try to pay people more and salaries. I think it is becoming much more attractive to get higher skilled people. Lastly, technology is going to be a great differentiator in higher education in next 10 years. Akhilesh Yadav is giving laptops to college going students, he is giving tablets to school children in the higher classes. I met him three days back and he is very proud of it and he said it is going to be in Hindi, English, Urdu and Jayalalitha has given laptops to all college going students in her state.

If this happens they get access to the net where there is enormous amount of free high education material and you will see a revolution in the next three to five years. But the aspirations are high and the aspirations from Indian citizens are driving forward and I think that gives me great hope. Things are going to change in four to five years but its going to be a struggle.