Forgetting Everything Else, Prioritize Investments in Education!!! Why?
What's better, giving subsidies or empowering citizens to buy goods on their own? With no doubt, latter should be the answer. But the bigger question is how? How could it be done?
There
are three ways for a person to be rich (or atleast not a poor):
- Inheriting ancestral wealth.
- By luck including hitting a jackpot in financial market or a lottery.
- And the last one is Education.
The
first two can't be controlled. But
Education could be!!! Any government which
strives for socio-economic development of a country, should
make investments on education its top priority. They should
understand that 'an uneducated rich could fall into the trap of
poverty but an educated person can never be poor'.
 |
| Make Education Worth It |
Now, coming to India, in this globalized world only quantity
and quality of human resource is going to
determine our competence. It's pity that India, despite being home to world's first university,
Nalanda, is today facing the shortage of qualified professionals
to fuel its economic growth. It's not that there's dearth of colleges
or students who want quality education, the country today has more than half
a million students studying in more that 12000 colleges and
polytechnics. But forget the numbers and the picture will be clearer. Lack of funds and good faculties has led these colleges to
provide an education which the industry thinks is obsolete.
It's illogical to provide an education which has no use for our own industry. We aspire to be the educational hub of the world by 2020, but
if our institutes are finding it difficult to match up to the Indian
standards than how would they manage to keep up with much more
tech-savvy and financially huge firms.
Indians spend $4bn annually for higher education abroad.
Citing this, many experts are lobbying for allowing profit making
educational institutions(read foreign institutes) to setup their campuses here. But will this
end all the problems. I am sceptical about it. The cost of education in these institutes, will make it a privilege for few. So what
could be the solution? Government Investments. Only government
investments in education could solve the problem. Public support for
education is essential to ensure balance between educational and
social missions. It's essential that funding sources should be
diversified, but excessive commercialization should be forbidden. As
of now, GOI spends merely 3% of the GDP on education (nearly 0.8-1.2%
on higher education) and should increase it to atleast 7-8% of GDP to
ensure our competence globally. But where will the money come
from. Instead of directly subsidizing students, government
should make outgoing students pay for incoming students. This way,
burden will not be on student's parents but on earning professionals.
In addition, Industrial bodies should be asked to provide certain
portion of their profits to these institutes as part of CSR.
However,
cost is only a small part of the problem, there are many others and
availability of good teachers is one of them. More and more students
should be encouraged to take up teaching as a profession and should
be provided some 10% additional teaching incentive than their
industrial counter parts. Also, high ranking officials should be encouraged to be visiting faculties to
institutes. Additionally, before designing syllabus AICTE should
consult industrial representatives to know their exact requirements.
All these steps would take time to show results and in the mean time
top tier institutes should be asked to share classroom lectures
online to enable students from other institutes to access
the best resources.
One
thing is for sure, if India could improve education then 21st century
will be India's and if it can't, we will lose an opportunity of
millennium.
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