Against the backdrop of dismal conditions in Indian education, a mint new report authored by LoEstro Advisors, a Hyderabad-based education focused investment banking and consulting firm, says that a positive sea change is manifesting in private K-12 education countrywide writes Dilip Thakore Seven decades after under the inspiring leadership of Mahatma Gandhi the country won its freedom from oppressive foreign rule, strong winds of change are blowing over post-independence India’s moribund education sector. Especially after the belated liberalisation and deregulation of industry in 1991 and after EducationWorld was launched in 1999 with the avowed mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. New awareness has dawned that resuscitating and upgrading the country’s 1.7 million pre-primaries, 1.50 million primary-secondary schools, 45,473 colleges and 1,168 universities is the essential precondition of 21st century India harvesting its demographic dividend — 700 million citizens are aged below 30 — and attaining the status of a middle class nation. First, the back story of open, continuous and uninterrupted neglect of Indian education is necessary. In the first flush of freedom against the advice of Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Patel, under the guidance of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who was enamoured with the communist Soviet Union, independent India adopted inorganic socialism as its official ideology. But although communist/socialist Soviet Union (now Russia) and the communist People’s Republic of China accorded high priority to the State providing universal high quality primary education, for various reasons (canalisation of national savings into capital-intensive white elephant public sector enterprises; neglect of agriculture, binding tax revenue-generating private sector enterprises in red tape) public education was under-funded ab initio. In 1967, a high-powered Kothari Commission strongly recommended investment of 6 percent of annual GDP (Centre plus states) in public education. That recommendation has remained on the back burner with national expenditure averaging 3.5 percent of GDP for over seven decades. Moreover with 40 percent of meagre budget outlays of the Central and state governments allocated for over-subsidised higher education, the government school system has all but collapsed, especially in rural India which even seven decades after independence still grudgingly hosts 60 percent of the country’s 1.40 billion population. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) of the Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994), over 50 percent of (neglected and recklessly promoted) class VII children in rural India can’t read class II textbooks and solve simple three by one digit division sums. Pratham has been highlighting the growing illiteracy of rural India for over 25 years, to no avail. In the Union Budget 2024-25 presented to Parliament on February 1, the Central government’s allocation for public education was Rs.1.2 lakh crore, equivalent to 0.4 percent of GDP. The national outlay (after the allocations of 29 state governments and seven Union territories are added) has reportedly crept up to 4 percent of GDP. The damage of continuous under-funding of public education has been augmented by low quality teaching-learning in India’s 1.20 million mainly state…
