Why Does India Have an Education Crisis?

Although India has the world’s largest population of young, school-aged children — around 260 million — the quality of education in the country remains far behind that of other developing or industrializing countries in Asia. India will soon have the world’s largest population; it would be foolish to not harness this population to fuel the growth one of the world’s fastest growing economies, as China did starting the 1980s. Yet most Indian students lack the skills needed to succeed in a modernizing economy.

As The Economist explained:

India may be famous for its elite doctors and engineers, but half of its nine-year-olds cannot do a sum as simple as eight plus nine. Half of ten-year-old Indians cannot read a paragraph meant for seven-year-olds. At 15, pupils in Tamil Nadu and Himachal Pradesh are five years behind their (better-off) peers in Shanghai. The average 15-year-old from these states would be in the bottom 2 percent of an American class.

Perhaps due to this shocking lack of achievement, in 2015 the Indian government refused to participate in a global survey on educational standards, PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). The last time it participated, in 2009, India placed 72nd among the 74 participating countries. This is not surprising, given the abysmal quality of primary education throughout much of the country and the neglect of most post-independence governments in seriously pushing for universal literacy.

The predicament of Indian education today can be explained partially by the country’s culture and history. Traditionally, knowledge was seen as the province of higher castes; there was simply no need or interest in imparting literacy to lower castes and those engaged in agriculture and manual labor. Castes engaged in religion, administration, and trade often developed their own caste-based scripts for writing; there was little in the way of a shared literary culture across social groups. Unlike in Christian, Muslim, and Confucian societies, there was no canon of sacred literary texts that anyone, including peasants, in theory could aspire to master in order to advance socially. The Vedas, Hinduism’s most ancient and sacred works, were generally passed on orally by Brahmins.

Similar attitudes persisted during the Mughal and British periods. Both empires were interested in education only insofar as it was needed to create a small group of elite bureaucrats, civil servants, and administrators. It was thought that in a land of villages and farmers, education was unnecessary for the great mass of individuals. In fact, primary education only became compulsory in 2009, well after the Indian economy began to boom on the back of the information revolution.

While some Indian universities, for example the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), are fairly well regarded within their fields, India’s primary school system leaves much to be desired. In their book An Uncertain Glory, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze describe India’s schooling situation as a story of “sustained neglect” by the state. After independence, the Indian government poured “money into top-notch colleges to supply engineers to state-owned industries,” while moves toward mass education were sluggish at best. This neglect is especially evident in the poor quality of schools and teachers, which impacts the quality of learning for children. Based on data from the last few years, up to 46 percent of teachers were absent from schools in some states during random visits (the national average is 24 percent). On top of this, many Indian students suffer from a host of other issues in schools. Malnourishment is a common problem in rural areas, though it is partially being addressed through a variety of measures such as a mid-day meals program. Additionally, a still large but decreasing number of schools do not have toilets. Although these problems are gradually disappearing, the pace at which the government has moved to combat these issues has been almost unfathomably slow.

In addition to problems stemming from generally poor infrastructure, another barrier to the quality of schooling in the country has been social attitudes. However, this too is also changing. At the local level in India, it was not appreciated until recently that education, especially for women, was essential not only for utilitarian reasons (to get a good job in a big city), but for uplifting society in general. From reading the contents of a package of food, to opening up a bank account, accessing health care, using social media, understanding laws, and grasping the notion of family planning, no aspect of modern society is untouched by literacy. Education in India, thus, is no longer a luxury for well-off males intending to work in the so-called “higher professions.” Nor can India’s economy truly grow without universal literacy. A thriving capitalist economy needs both a firm manufacturing base, which requires basic literacy and numeracy to operate machinery, and a literate market that is receptive to advertising and commercialization. More than just improving infrastructure, changing social norms will help improve the quality of Indian education. While farmers might not need to know how to read, their children undoubtedly will want to use their phones for entertainment and communication, if not for knowledge, tasks which require literacy. Despite widespread poverty, India has remarkable mobile phone penetration rates, presenting immense opportunity.

Nonetheless, some other problems still need to be addressed in order to improve India’s educational standards. One is the spread of private schooling. Over 50 percent of children in urban areas are enrolled in private schools, and, even in rural areas, the number of children in such schools is not insignificant. While there is an undoubtedly true public perception that government schools are generally of poor quality, private schools do not necessarily solve the systemic problems facing Indian education, even though they sometimes provide a heavily demanded service. In many rural areas, private schools take advantage of social perceptions to charge enormous fees while providing low-quality services; even when government schools are better, many parents enroll their children in private schools. Moreover, the only private schools that will truly provide high-quality services are those used by rich and upper middle class urban individuals, due to both economic reasons and to the problem of scale — private schools cannot be expected to uniformly service a population of hundreds of millions of students from an array of socioeconomic backgrounds. As Amartya Sen has pointed out, unless the government provides good public schooling to all segments of society, private schooling will result in an unevenly educated society in which educational achievement will be heavily skewed toward the rich and powerful.

The language of education is a problem as well; while most private schools use English as their medium of teaching, this is only useful to those from the upper and middle classes, who are exposed to English frequently enough on a daily basis to make learning in English feasible. However, since English is associated with a high-quality education everywhere in India, even the most isolated regions in India now want so-called English-medium schools. While English is undoubtedly important and should be taught as a subject in all schools, such a strong focus on teaching in English, in a country where most people's first language is not English, leads to poor educational outcomes. In most schools in rural areas where English textbooks are used, teachers explain the lessons from the textbooks in the region’s native language; that is, if the teachers themselves can even read English well. It is much easier to explain a concept to a person in their native language over a language that they have difficulty understanding and it is unreasonable to believe that in a country with such low educational standards to begin with, the entire population will learn good English. According to a report from UNESCO, a child’s first language is the optimal language for literacy and learning throughout primary school. Thus, is it no surprise that a child being taught subjects in a language he or she does not understand has difficulty absorbing the lessons, which partially explains India’s low PISA scores. True, English is necessary in certain higher fields, but for the general purpose of mass education, and teaching the general population how to read food labels, handle a machine, and comprehend a newspaper, the native languages of India are more than sufficient.

India needs to deal with these problems, as well as issues of malnourishment and infrastructure, as it struggles to improve its education system. Nonetheless, there are some signs of hope. Enrollment of school-aged children in schools, in both rural and urban areas is now over 95 percent, meaning that at the very least, almost every child in India is being exposed to some education, no matter how rudimentary. In other words, there few children (relatively) outside the schooling system. What now remains to be done is to improve the education system, lifting up millions in the process.