New Delhi: The youth protests at Jantar Mantar have put the spotlight back on India’s education system. The Economist takes a look at India’s failing education system and highlights three factors responsible for the failure.
After Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which led the movement at Jantar Mantar, has encouraged people to report on schools providing sub-par facilities and infrastructure to students.
As videos surface from across the country, The Economist argues that there are three factors responsible for the inadequate education system—from lack of good quality education to lack of jobs.
The first reason, according to the magazine, is that “the country’s early leaders neglected mass education, believing industrial modernisation could be achieved with a small number of elite schools and universities”.
It says that the mass education system has remained largely “elitist” with a small number of higher-quality education schools and colleges.
“We never designed a system focused on the median child,” Amit Basole of Azim Premji University tells The Economist.
The second factor, it says, is that education has become a “racket” of sorts.
“Private schools take in perhaps $30bn or so a year, and coaches more than $8bn. Both prey on aspiration,” the column says, referring to the massive coaching industry which claims to specialise in training students for competitive entrance exams.
India’s booming private education sector needs some form of regulation, it adds.
The third factor is “misallocation”. The column says that even as India’s education system becomes a poor return on investment, it keeps growing due to its multi-purpose function.
“For families a degree is a social-status signal. For women it is often a way of improving marriage prospects. Even manual jobs often now, needlessly, demand degrees.”
Although the CJP movement has raised education’s salience for Indians, the column says that problems are deeply entrenched, and it cannot be fixed as easily as a leaky roof.
Veena Venugopal, writing in the India Business Briefing newsletter in Financial Times, asks whether the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) would be forced to raise rates next month.
“With the US Fed increasing interest rates for the first time since 2023, analyst expectations in India, too, seem to be converging around the prospect of an October rise,” she writes.
But for now, Venugopal says, India can take some comfort in the fact its economy has grown by 7.8 percent in the last quarter despite predictions of 7 percent growth. “There is room in the economy to absorb at least some of the impact of tighter monetary policy.”
However, as Financial Times also notes, inflation is projected to be upwards. Even as inflation remains within the RBI’s 2-6 percent tolerance band, it has risen from 3.93 percent in May to 4.82 percent in August.
“The RBI’s own projections see inflation peaking at 5.9 per cent in the third quarter of this financial year, before moderating,” Venugopal writes.
RBI Governor Sanjay Malhotra, she writes, said that evidence of higher food, fuel and input costs turning into broader inflationary pressures could require policy tightening.
“The RBI has so far stayed out of the global tightening cycle, but that position is getting harder to hold. The Fed itself is pencilling in another increase before the year is out, so waiting is unlikely to make the decision any easier,” she adds.
Writing for the BBC, Nikhil Inamdar says that India is producing more green energy than ever, but also “wasting a lot of it”.
In July, electricity generated from renewable energy briefly met over half of India’s peak power demand, the report says.
“While it was only briefly that power generated from solar, wind, hydro and nuclear sources collectively outstripped coal-based output, it was a milestone moment reflecting the astonishing growth of non-fossil fuels to the country’s electricity mix over the last decade.”
However, even as India’s renewable energy grows significantly, several challenges plague efficient use of the energy generated.
“Foremost among them is a shortage of grid capacity. The renewables’ build out has significantly outpaced transmission infrastructure, a point of major concern for policymakers,” Inamdar writes.
Storage capacity has not grown in turn due to a huge jump in the price of batteries, raw material shortages due to the West Asia war, and a fall in the value of the Rupee, which have cumulatively raised financing costs for Indian companies.
“While ample global capital is available for green transition across the developed world, getting access to it remains a persistent struggle for Indian clean energy companies, despite the strides that the country has made in its renewables commitments.”
Mujib Mashal, the South Asia bureau chief of The New York Times (NYT), writes about poet Gulzar’s decades-long journey with Bollywood and songs. He visited the poet-cum-lyricist’s house in June.
“Over his six decades in Mumbai, the seaside metropolis where he found shelter as a teenage refugee, Gulzar has had an outsize hand in shaping the idea of tender romance in India,” Mashal writes about the poet-lyricist’s contribution to the Indian film industry.
“He has put his imagination to children’s books, short stories, and volumes of poetry that have only grown in ambition. Through it all, he has maintained a wonder at the beauty in the mundane.”
Mujib writes that in addition to directing a dozen films of his own, Gulzar has provided lyrics for 150 Bollywood musicals.
For one of his recent projects, Gulzar has collected contemporary poetry from nearly 300 poets writing in several languages from across India to make it all accessible to a wider audience through renditions in Hindi and English, in a book titled, ‘A Poem a Day’.
Mashal notes that at 92, the poet maintains the same discipline that allowed him to produce the body of work, waking up at sunrise and being on his desk for work. “The sky opens up, like a roll of fabric. Nothing like seeing a sunrise,” Gulzar told NYT.
(Edited by Tony Rai)