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Education System Plagued by Underfunding, Outdated Curriculums, Corruption
Much of the western world would not disagree that India has a reputation for producing math and science geniuses. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), with its 17 campuses, have produced many illustrious alumni, including Vend Khosla, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems.
Critics claim that the reason IIT produces high-quality graduates is not the excellence of its academic programs, but that the students are the smartest students drawn from a population of 1.2 billion—it wouldn’t matter where these students went to college because they would excel no matter what.
The story on the ground for Indian students is very different from the media-reported perception that Indian schools are like IIT and are producing very qualified graduates.
A recent Wall Street Journal article has uncovered that many schools in India are woefully underfunded and generally incapable of teaching their students the proper skills to obtain jobs—as evidenced by the sparse numbers of qualified applicants to Indian companies.
24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd., a call center company, claims that only 3 out of every 100 applicants is hirable, according to the WSJ report. Although India’s economy has been increasingly liberalized in the last two decades, its education system has remained burdened with regulation and mostly unchanged since the days of Soviet-style socialism. The result is a dearth of capable workers.
Tuition costs remain low for Indian schools, but that means teacher salaries and budgets are also insufficient. This translates to outdated curriculums and methods of rote learning rather than emphasizing critical thinking and comprehension.
The failure comes not just at the grade and secondary school levels, but at the university level as well. 75 percent of technical graduates and over 85 percent of general college graduates are unfit for employment by the standards of Indian’s information technology and call center companies.
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India’s reputation as producing excellent scientists and engineers is often based on the reputation of the graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology.
creative commons
The attitude at Indian colleges is pervasive laziness and general apathy, from both the teachers as well as the students. Students routinely miss classes and can easily pass end-of-term exams with a few days of textbook cramming. Cheating is also prevalent, as there have been numerous stories of teachers accepting bribes in exchange for granting passing grades.
Now, businesses are forced to pick up the slack where the schools have left off. Internal training programs at large companies like Tata, a consulting company, and Wipro, a software company, have extended their employee training programs to absurd lengths (72 days and 90 days, respectively), just to ensure their employees’ inadequacies are addressed.
While this certainly costs the businesses extra time and money, it also points out that private industry is able to teach in three months what the education system is unable to do over the course of many years.
The final problem is the youthfulness of India’s overall population. Over 50% of Indian’s population is under the age of 25, and over the next decade, nearly one million new people per month are expected to enter the job market. The future stability of the Indian economy is at stake with such an unqualified job pool.
While we only see India’s best and brightest here in the west as they seek to take advantage of our superior university system, those millions left behind in India are at the mercy of a corrupt wasteland of ineptitude, one that leaves them sorely underprepared to accomplish even the most basic tasks and threatens to squander the future potential of India.
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