To meaningfully celebrate the 5th Anniversary of EducationWorld, we deemed it incumbent upon ourselves to ask several educationists and industry leaders with proven commitment to improving the education system to write prescriptions for a renaissance of Indian education. Dilip Thakore reports It’s a rising irreversible tide. though not a few within the political class and the nation’s powerful bureaucracy are in denial, there is an emerging consensus within India’s 5 million-strong academic community that the nation’s moribund, moth-eaten education system fashioned by Lord Macaulay over a century ago, needs an urgent makeover. With 21st century India burdened with the world’s largest population of illiterate citizens, an estimated 59 million children in the six-14 age group out of school, and the aggregate number of names and addresses of job-seekers in the registers of employment exchanges across the country having swollen to 41 million — not because there aren’t sufficient jobs, but because youth streaming out of the obsolete education system are unemployable — alarm sirens are wailing in all sections of Indian society. The starkest evidence of the rising tide of anxiety about the quantity and quality of education being provided to genext is indicated by the unprecedented provision made in the Union budget presented to Parliament on July 8, to impose a 2 percent cess on all Central taxes to raise additional resources for elementary education. Moreover in his budget speech Union finance minister P. Chidambaram committed the 100-days-old United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre to raising the national outlay for education from the current 3.5-4 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) to 6 percent in the near future. Coterminously upgradation of the nation’s languishing public education and healthcare systems are top priority on the agenda of the National Advisory Council (NAC) chaired by Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi. Inevitably, there is considerable scepticism about the declarations of intent and grand pronouncements made by governments at the Centre and in the states which are seldom followed up with policy implementation programmes. But even within civic society and the general public there is a never-before, new millennium awareness that quality education is the best social leveller and passport to gainful employment, affluence and social respect. Hence despite the rigours and travails of licence-permit raj which has migrated from industry to education, there’s a flurry of activity in terms of promotion of new schools, colleges and institutes of professional education, particularly in the private sector. For example, during the decade past, over 100 next generation, capital-intensive, privately promoted primary-secondary schools such as the G.D. Goenka World School, Delhi; The International School, Bangalore; Pathways International, Gurgaon; The Selaqui School, Dehradun; Ecole Mondiale and Dhirubhai Ambani International, Mumbai among others which benchmark themselves globally, have sprung up across the country. Affiliated to international syllabus-setting and examination boards such as the Geneva-based IBO (International Baccalaureate Organisation) and UCLES (University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate), these schools offer world-class secondary education which almost guarantees admission into the best universities worldwide. Even in higher education the bar is continuously being raised…
