In a world where data is currency and digital tools are the new chalk, this is a crisis, not a statistic.
Literacy ≠ Education: Time to Burn the Old Playbook
🎓 What is the soul of education?
Is it just about literacy rates, skilling youth for jobs, or reducing unemployment? Or does it go deeper—into shaping minds that can think freely, question boldly, and respond wisely to a rapidly evolving world?
Mahatma Gandhi once said,
“Literacy in itself is no education… Education means the all-round drawing out of the best in child and man—body, mind, and spirit.”
In a world shaken by war, artificial intelligence, climate breakdown, and social fragmentation, that Gandhian vision rings louder than ever. India stands at a historic threshold—not just to improve education statistics, but to redefine what education must mean for the 21st century.
🌍 Adapatability – The New Survival Skill
We live in a time when tomorrow feels like uncharted territory. Pandemics, polarised politics, job market disruptions, and algorithmic dominance have made adaptability—not academic degrees—the new survival skill.
In such a world, rote learning of textbooks has little value. The real test is whether learners can:
- Solve real problems
- Think creatively across disciplines
- Collaborate across cultures
- Learn, unlearn, and relearn constantly
The dual responsibilities of modern education are clear:
- Prepare every learner for life—not just exams
- Allow each learner to learn at their own pace, in their own way
📉 Where Do We Stand Today?
India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 set the stage for ambitious reform. Its ideas are visionary. But ideas without implementation are just ink on paper.
Let’s examine what the data says:
🔎 Foundational Learning: Still Fragile
- According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), fewer than 45% of students can perform basic math or reading tasks.
- The rise in skills is encouraging—but we started from a disturbingly low baseline.
🖥️ Digital Divide in Classrooms
- Only 54% of schools have access to the internet.
- Only 50% have working computers for students.
In a world where data is currency and digital tools are the new chalk, this is a crisis, not a statistic.
🎓 Higher Education: Wide in Quantity, Wobbly in Quality
India boasts the second-largest higher education system in the world—with 58,000+ institutions. Yet, only 28% of eligible students are enrolled in higher education.
Even where seats exist, quality doesn’t always follow. For instance:
- Almost half the mechanical engineering seats go vacant every year.
- Lack of skilled faculty makes expansion of new colleges a hollow gesture.
In research output, India fares better in numbers than in depth:
- We produce 29,000 PhDs/year, while China produces 56,000, and the US 71,000.
- Many Indian doctoral theses, however, fail to meet global benchmarks in originality and relevance.
💰 Investment: Just Enough to Stay Behind?
India spends around 4% of GDP on education—technically within the global 4–6% benchmark. But here’s the catch:
- The majority of funds go to salaries, not innovation.
- Curriculum upgrades, teacher training, or new assessment techniques often get little attention.
If we truly want to prepare learners for a different future, we must invest differently—in content, creativity, and classrooms that empower.
⚖️ Public vs Private: The Equity Conundrum
Private institutions have mushroomed, offering modern facilities—but not everyone can afford them. This deepens the class divide in education.
What’s the solution?
- Strengthen public institutions
- Offer financial support for deserving students to access private education
- Bridge the opportunity gap, not widen it
🌐 Global Models: What Top-Performing Nations Teach Us
Nations like Finland, Estonia, and South Korea have cracked the education puzzle by focusing on:
- Comprehensive teacher training
- Strong national curricula
- Smart use of assessment
- Societal respect for education
- Equitable access and emotional well-being
India can—and must—adapt these lessons to its own context.
🔄 Deschooling Societies
Back in 1971, Ivan Illich provocatively argued in Deschooling Society:
“We have become unable to think of better education except in terms of more complex schools and teachers trained for ever longer periods.”
He urged us to dismantle the one-size-fits-all funnel, and instead imagine networks of learning opportunities—flexible, diverse, and lifelong.
✅ The Bottom Line: Towards a Learning Republic
The NEP 2020 gives us a scaffold, but the house of Indian education needs more than blueprints:
- It needs willpower
- It needs investment beyond budgets—into ideas
- And above all, it needs a cultural shift: from viewing education as a tool for jobs to a foundation for life itself
Because in a world where the only certainty is uncertainty, the greatest skill we can teach is the ability to keep learning, forever.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.