Education in India

Do you have days when you feel like your problems weigh squat compared to the hardships in others' lives? Imagine not being given the opportunity to learn more about the world, to be trapped in a town or a city or a group of people with a frog-in-the-well mindset. I then go through the whole process of chiding myself for taking my comforts for-granted, for cribbing about the so-called difficulties in my well-cushioned life.

As a teenager I often had the dilemma - Is it 'Do I get what I deserve' or 'Do I deserve what I get'. Typical existential meltdown.

Recently I had a long discussion over cynicism and idealism in people who at some point wanted to change the world. The conversation obviously included dialogues like "Inside every cynic is a dissapointed idealist" and rebuttals of the nature "Inside every cynic is an idealist who gave up too soon". I definitely believe social change agents need perseverance and patience, if nothing. It is a hard job to defy governments and a harshly profit-centered world. People are quick to assign labels such as 'anti-development', 'marxist', 'socialist' etc. Its rather unnecessary. It definitely ticked me off when I was watching Karan Thapar interviewing Medha Patkar on Devil's Advocate and relentlessly tagging her 'anti-development'.

On another note, I also have much trust in the brilliance of Public Private Partnerships.

After much digression, coming to the title of the post.

The budget came out earlier this July and I was looking particularly at allocations on education and health care. Fiscal allocations and policy making have brought up many questions in me. The more I am exposed to the subject, the higher the number of questions.

I saw this. Very insightful.


Some observations/ideas from the past:

-> I heard from an NRI friend that the 'Teach for India' program only takes NRI's who bring in financial resources, as their fellows, and that her well-qualified IIM-A friend was rejected. Is that true?! If it is, then it is hideous and highly abominable. I love the way the 'Teach for America' program is executed. In fact UT has a very well-known teacher certification program which I was considering earlier. (Teaching in a high school is on my list of '30 before 30')

-> The Union passed a law a few years ago, that went something like this...every school in India that is surrounded by slums, should allocate an appropriate percentage of their admits for students from these communities. However, there was a lot of hullabaloo on the inefficiency of such a law. Kids from poor communities don't integrate well with the rest of the crowd, don't perform well and hence feel ousted and eventually drop-out. An extension of this is the discussion of reservations in higher levels of the Indian education system. I don't particularly oppose reservations because it is a decent quick-fix and just that. By no means is it a permanent solution. Now, if kids from poor families don't fit in a primary school, where then do you start changing things to improve the system?!

-> Another prominent personal debate I can think of, is the rule of compulsory internships in rural areas for medical students in India. The comments that I heard from leaders of medical students' unions were atrocious. They complained about lack of safety in villages and such. I think it's wrong to say "I will not go" instead of saying "I will go if you make sure I am safe".

-> Along those lines, I also think, engineers should be made to teach basic subjects in government schools. Think about the number of engineers that India makes every year and the govt. schools that they could serve, even if each of them worked for 3 months in the 4 years of their engineering study.

-> During my high school years when we were living in Hyderabad, we had a maid at home who was 3 years older. I taught her alphabets and she was pretty thrilled that she could recognize alphabets after that, if not make sense of words. The inability to decipher the script of a language you speak is quite frustrating.

I come back to the issue of Indian demographics and allocation of resources to the needful sectors again.

People between the ages of 0 and 14 yrs - 31.1% of the population, in 2009.
Allocation to education, a meagre 2% of GDP.


and finally (on a lighter note), for Atanu Dey much 'respekt' (in the words of Ali-G) is coming, and this is why.

I do know people who want to give back to the communities that made their degrees cheaper, but there are also those who care not, and for that the 'respekt'. Not out of grudge, although I have many reasons for that too :P