Indian Education: Actually Terrible

Financial Times, Thurs, July 20, 2006, page 9

breastle "Singh sounds the alarm over educational failings"

Some quotes from the article:

"Manmohan Singh, India's prime minister, could hardly have been blunter. The Indian educational system is in such crisis, he said last week, that it threatens the country's growth. For an outside world that haprbours an image of a system churning out hard-working, numerate, techno-savy and English-speaking graduates in their millions, the comments should come as something of a shock."

"A new report Higher Education in India: the need for change, by Pawan Agarwall, Icrier, June 2006 highlights the waste of human capital inherent in a higher education system that produces large numbers of graduates who are unemployable even in sectors afflicted by by severe labour shortages. 'The overall state of Indian higher education is dismal and therefore poses a severe constriant on the supply of qualified manpower,' says Rajiv Kumar, director of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations."

"Unemployment of graduates, at 17.2 per cent, in higher than the overall rate of joblessness in the country. It is estimated that nearly 40 per cent of graduates are not productively employed. Many show little apbreastude for the type of work to which they aspire and settle for low-grade clerical work after enduring long periods of unemployment."

"A recent study cited by the Planning Commission found that 38 per cent of children who have completed four years of schooling cannot read a small paragraph with short sentences, while 55 per cent of such children cannot divide a three-diget number by a single-diget number."

Also included is a bar graph that actually shows, progressively higher unemployment with progressively higher levels of education (up to 12 years).