Dr. Devendra Kothari
Population and Development Analyst
Forum for Population Action
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
Benjamin Franklin
On August 9,
2019, I spent some time in the New York Public Library, located in the city of
New York. The library is housed in a
massive building, and it was opened for the public in 1895. With nearly 10
million books, the New York Public Library is one of the largest libraries in
the World. One displayed phrase in the
library - Knowledge is Power – attracted me the most. The phrase was in red
letters and perhaps was telling
that 'knowledge' is of basic
ingredient for the development of a nation. Libraries are a storehouse of
‘knowledge’, so, it is generally said that ‘when in doubt, go to the library'.
[1] Wheelcher, James Talboys.
1973. India from the earliest ages: Hindu,
Buddhist, and Brahmanical revival. Delhi: Cosmo Publications.
[4] Refer policy paper: “India should be a Knowledge
Superpower!” by Ramanathan
Swaminathan. Download at: https://www.rediff.com/news/2005/feb/04swami.htm
[5] The ‘cutting edge’ (अग्रणी) means the most modern stage of development in a particular type of work or activity. For example, an institute at the cutting edge of mobile communication technology. The Tsinghua University of China is one of such 'cutting edge institutions engaged in extensive research covering a broad range of subjects, including science, engineering, arts and literature, social sciences, law and medicine. Admission to Tsinghua for both undergraduate and graduate schools is extremely competitive.
The phrase
‘Knowledge is Power’ (ज्ञान ही शक्ति है) generally implies that with knowledge and education the
potential or power of a person increases. It is certainly unmatched. The rise
of human beings as the most powerful living-beings on planet is only due to the
knowledge and the proper application of knowledge. In short, knowledge is a
powerful factor that empowers people in achieving great results.
Before we dwell
further, let us discuss briefly what difference between knowledge and education
is. There is not much difference between two as both are correlated
to each other. In fact one leads to another. Education is what
you learn from school or college or an institution or a book. Knowledge is the
things you absorb from what they teach in these institutions or
books. One can also acquire knowledge from practical experiences in
life.
Thanks to
innumerable thinkers, researchers and teachers who absorbed the best in the
world and charted out a path on their own, ancient India emerged as a global
centre of learning and was described as “Vishwaguru” (विश्वगुरु)
or ‘Preceptor of the World’. The world looked up to India as a
source of knowledge. It is believed that when Alexander the Great returned to
Persia after his invasion of India, the most valued treasure that he
took back was not gold or spices, but a guru and spiritual master, Yogi
Kalyan (c. 398 – 323
BC) from Taxila, later called Calanus by the Greeks.[1]
Ancient India was
home to some of the famous centres of learning like Takshashila (Taxila),
Nalanda, Vallabhi and Pushpagiri, which attracted knowledge seekers and pundits from across the country and the
world. The subjects such as philosophy, mathematics, archery, military arts,
surgery, medicine, astronomy, futurology, magic, economics, commerce,
agriculture, music and dance were taught at these centres of higher learning.
Chanakya, the author of Arthashastra and Charaka, famous Ayurvedic physician,
were products of Takshashila. In the 7th century AD, Xuanzang, a
Chinese scholar, studied with many celebrated Buddhist masters at the famous
university at Nalanda. When he returned, he carried with him some 657 Sanskrit
texts. With the emperor’s support, he set up a large translation bureau in
Xi’an with collaborators from all over East Asia. [2]
As per the 2011 census, about 8.2 per cent (68 million) of
Indians were graduates; and current higher education system of India is the
third largest in the world after USA and China. It has expanded at a fast pace by
adding nearly 20,000 colleges and more than 8 million students in a decade from
2000–01 to 2010–11. As of today, India has more than 800 universities, with a
break up of Central,
State, Deemed and Private universities along with many
institutions of National
Importance - which include Indian Institutes of
Technology (IITs), National Institute of Technology (NITs), All India
Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Indian
Institute of Science, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), International
Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Universities
of Calcutta, Madras and Mumbai (1857) and Jawaharlal Nehru
University, have been globally acclaimed for their standard of
education. However, Indian universities still lag far behind universities
such as Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, Stanford and Tsinghua.
In the last 30
years, higher education in India has witnessed rapid and impressive growth, and
as such, India should be a Knowledge
Superpower! But higher education in India suffers from several systemic
deficiencies. It continues to provide graduates that are unemployable despite
emerging shortages of skilled manpower in an increasing number of sectors. The
standards of academic research are low and declining. Some of the problems of
the Indian higher education, such as the unwieldy affiliating system,
inflexible academic structure, uneven capacity across various subjects, eroding
autonomy of academic institutions, and the low level of public funding are well
known.
As a result, for
the first time since 2012, there is not a single Indian entry in the world’s
top 300 institutes as per the Times Higher Education’s 2020 rankings. [3] The Indian Institute of
Science (IISC) in Bengaluru — the only Indian entry in the top 300 last year —
dropped into the 301-350 group after “a significant fall in its citation impact
score offsetting improvements in research environment, teaching environment and
industry income.” IITs in Mumbai, Delhi and Kharagpur have been placed in the
401-500 ranking bracket. Similarly, Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru
University was for the first time ranked in the 601-800 grouping.
According to the
THE 2020 rankings, the University of Oxford held its top position for the fourth
year, while the California Institute of Technology rose from fifth to second.
The University of Cambridge, Stanford University and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology slip one place to third, fourth and fifth, respectively.
Globally, the US continues
to dominate the ranking, with 60 institutions in the top 200. US universities
make up 14 of the global top 20 and seven of the top 10, with the country’s
leading institutions performing particularly well in the area of citation
impact. China has emerged another top leaning institutions with 24 of its
universities finding spot in the top 200 in the list. Its two centres –
Tsinghua University (globally ranked 22nd) and Peking
University (23rd) are among the
world’s top 30 universities.
Can India be a knowledge super power? Ellie
Bothwell, THE rankings editor, said: “India has a huge amount of potential in
global higher education, given its rapidly growing youth population and economy
and use of English-language instruction. However, it is disappointing to see
the country fall out of the top 300 of the rankings this year, with only a
small number of institutions registering progress.”
While a high
economic growth, requiring specific skill sets, has generated employment, it
has led to a situation where education shops have cropped up imparting skills
without adding real knowledge. Also, this has affected the well known leaning
institutions. It means the rapid growth of 'just skills' education
is eroding our knowledge base. “What such a decline has led to is the
diminishing Indian presence in the global knowledge creation process. What an
editor in a prominent publishing house told this columnist will reveal the
extent of this reduction. In the last decade the number of Indian authors
publishing social sciences books has dropped by over 20 per cent, while the
number of proposals for publishing social sciences guidebooks has increased by
35 per cent”, noted by Dr. Swaminathan of Uppsala
University, Sweden. [4]
So what India
should be doing? The key to maintaining and enhancing our knowledge
base is to -- borrowing a tech terminology -- declare certain institutions as
'cutting edge institutions'.[5] These
institutions should be spread across disciplines, unlike the current emphasis
on applied science. Such an approach is essential if India is to maintain the
knowledge base that it has painfully created over the last five
decades. This will also allow India to once again begin contributing in a
systematic way to the global knowledge creation process and eventually
establish its hegemony. The entry into such institutions, whether of research
faculty or students, should involve the crossing of multiple barriers and only
the very best should get into it. Very best, of course, means the absence of
quotas of any kind and a whetting process that weeds out those not interested
in conducting research. Entry into a 'cutting edge institution' should also
mean a guarantee of tenure. For instance, a research student should have the
path to move up the ladder and get international exposure. If such an approach
is adopted, in next 30 years India will be a Knowledge Superpower.
But, for the genuine
growth of the ‘cutting edge’ institutions, we require an
effective education system to supply talented students, particularly at the
school level, as argued in my paper: Managing school education in India.
[6] Is India’s school education system geared
enough to produce a good quality of students? Considering India’s poor
education system from top to bottom, one cannot be too optimistic about it.
With primary school enrollment reaching around 97 per cent since 2009, and
girls making up 55 per cent of new students between 2007 and 2015, it is clear
that many problems of access to schooling have been addressed. The problem is
now of quality, not that of numbers. More than half of India’s students can be
classified as functionally under-educated or simply half-educated. India has
failed miserably in translating schooling into genuine learning.
The Annual Status of Education Report 2017 reveals that nearly one-fourth of India’s government-school-going
youngsters aged 14-18 cannot read their own language fluently. The report also
reveals that 57 per cent of the children assessed struggled to solve a simple
sum of division - exposing chinks in the quality of education imparted in the
country. Further, 47 per cent of all 14 year-olds in the sample could not read
English sentences. In addition, 64 per cent had never used the internet. This shows a high
degree of learning poverty – being unable to read and understand a simple
age-appropriate text at the primary level.
The findings based
the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), conducted by the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), further
reveal that the Indian education system is in very bad shape. Every three years PISA tests 15-year-old
students from all over the world in reading, mathematics and science. The tests
are designed to gauge how well the student’s master key subjects in order to be
prepared for real-life situations in the adult world. India first
participated in PISA in 2009 with 16,000 students from 400
schools across Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. However, the students performed
miserably in the test, placing India at 73rd among the 74
participating countries. Following the poor score, India decided to
stay away from PISA in 2012 and 2015. The GoI has now officially
decided to participate in the PISA test to be conducted in 2020.
Above findings points that India’s schools have
become ‘factories’ producing unskilled labour force, thus promoting deprivation at a large
scale. India
accounts a large number of deprived people due to low level of human
development. The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), developed by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development
Initiative (OPHI) and UNDP, identifies how people are being left behind across three key
dimensions of human development: health, education and living standards. More than half of India’s population (55.3%) is
living under multi-dimensional poverty, compared to 5.2 per cent in China. It means
around 700 million (70 crore) out of the total population of
1350 million in 2018 can be classified as deprived or vanchit Indians.
If India wishes to
promote knowledge to be “Vishwaguru” again, we have to focus on deprived population. Bill
Gates and Ratan Tata rightly noted: “Human
capital is one of India’s greatest assets. Yet, the world’s fastest growing
economy hasn’t touched millions of Indian citizens at the bottom of the
economic pyramid”. [7]
Further, if a child cannot read
age-appropriate text, as noted earlier, his or her learning curve is likely to
plateau, as he or she will be unable to move on from identifying words to
grasping subject concepts. “Put another way, all later schooling becomes a
waste.”, as noted by the TOI editorial – Read is Right. [8] For this, India has to unlock the human
potential through a dedicated human development approach right from the primary
level. .
Delhi-born
Harvard Professor Raj Chetty notes, "I am interested in understanding how
we can help the most disadvantaged groups in India -- who have not benefited as
much from the growth of the past 20 years as we'd like. Based on my research, I
think that improving elementary education (rather than just college education)
is likely to be a key answer to the problem." [9]
UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) include a commitment to ensure that all
young people have access to good quality primary and lower secondary education
by 2030. Reaching the goal requires improved educational quality for the most
disadvantaged children from the earliest years.
In addition, we need
a holistic approach in imparting education, since the quality of education
cannot be seen in isolation. We have to recognize the importance of primary
health, water and sanitation in promoting quality education.
The policy monograph - Nurturing
Human Development: A Strategy for New India - proposes such a
strategy to unlock the human potential and it is christened as “HDPlus”
(Human Development Plus). [10] It
is a dynamic agenda based on a ‘whole child’ concept, that is
school-going child and his/her family (that is HDPlus family) should be the
fulcrum of quality education leading to human development efforts. The concept is
being described by policies, practices, and relationships which ensure that
each child is healthy, educated, engaged, supported and encouraged. For this,
integrating the child and his or her family more deeply into the day-to-day
life of school and home activities represents an untapped instrument for
raising the overall achievements including learning skills and health
parameters, and hence improving overall productivity. In other words, creating
an enabling environment at family and school levels is a way to promoting
quality education, as shown in Box A. Investments
in education, health, living environment and its determinants – the social
sector – therefore, should be made a priority.
Box A: HDPlus strategy in action
Govt. Elementary School
·
Ensure total involvement of community/panchayat in
the management of school
·
Select all students (As per
the Annual Economic Survey 2018, around 80% of students in the govt.
elementary schools are from the weaker sections of the society).
|
HDPlus Family
·
After selecting students, go to their families and
provide all basic requirements for better living: water, toilet, electricity,
cooking gas, primary health among others, if they are not having.
|
Human Competency
·
All these interventions will ensure
that the 8th graders are well prepared to read, write and be
efficient in mathematics & basic digital technology before moving to
further education.
|
→ →
In short, India can
be Vishwaguru again
only if we can make the quest for excellence the norm. For this, we have to
start working at the school level, and for this, HDPlus strategy provides a way
out.
[1] Wheelcher, James Talboys.
1973. India from the earliest ages: Hindu,
Buddhist, and Brahmanical revival. Delhi: Cosmo Publications.
[2] Singh, Sahana.
2017. The Educational Heritage of Ancient India – How An Ecosystem of
Learning Was Laid to Waste. New Delhi: Notion Press. Also refer article: “Make
India Vishwaguru again” by M Venkaiah Naidu, The Indian Express, Sept, 5,
2018.. Download at: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/make-india-vishwaguru-again-indian-education-system-5340058/
[3] Refer news paper
article - Indian universities out of top 300 in global rankings at:
[4] Refer policy paper: “India should be a Knowledge
Superpower!” by Ramanathan
Swaminathan. Download at: https://www.rediff.com/news/2005/feb/04swami.htm
[6] Kothari, Devendra.
2017. “Managing school education in India”, in Administrative Change, Vol. XLIV
(2): 78-89.
[7]
Gates,
Bill and Ratan Tata. 2016. “New nutrition report underscores the importance of
leadership in addressing stunting in India” at: https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-editorials/new-nutrition-report-underscores-the-importance-of-leadership-in-addressing-stunting-in-india.
[8]
Refer at: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/toi-editorials/read-it-right-fix-learning-poverty-to-tackle-actual-poverty/
[9] Refer interview:
Good elementary education can spell success in adulthood: Raj Chetty at:
//economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/19732807.cms?from=mdr&utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
//economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/19732807.cms?from=mdr&utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
[10] For details, see: Kothari,
Devendra. 2019. Nurturing Human Development: A Strategy for New
India, New Delhi: Paragoan International Publishers.
