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If India is going to improve its school system, particularly at the university level, and provide adequate human capital to grow its economy, it is going to need collaboration from its top corporations.
“In the United States, there is more collaboration between university and corporations. It becomes almost a feeder for the companies. I don’t see that as much in India,” said Raj Ramachandran, the global enablement lead for Accenture’s Learning & Collaboration Management Consulting Practice.
According to Ramachandran, graduates are coming out of the Indian Institutes of Technology IIT with an education but without any relevant work experience. Thus, companies spend months training graduates in a particular field.
“It is starting to change. You’re seeing emphasis on collaborating more with universities. That needs to happen at many more levels,” Ramachandran said.
Ramachandran was among panelists who spoke about developing human capital on May 15 at Chicago Booth’s annual Tata India Leadership Summit, a daylong event hosted by the student-led South Asia Business Group.
Nobel laureate Gary Becker, University Professor of Economics and of Sociology, said India should look to the history of the United States’s top universities for inspiration. “If you look at the development of the top private institutions in the United States, all of them either had support from a very wealthy individual or a corporation,” he said. “How did the University of Chicago get started? John D. Rockefeller, founder of Standard Oil, gave $50 million in 1890 to start the university. The University of Chicago started from nowhere and in 10 years grew to house one of the best faculties.
“Duke, Stanford, Harvard — they all had private support. Private institutions that rely solely on tuition usually fall to the middle or lower level.”
Moderator Raghuram Rajan, Eric J. Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance and an economic advisor to the prime minister of India, said India’s extremely large young population is entering adulthood, which should serve as an economic engine. But, Rajan asked rhetorically, “Is India ready?
“The number of people working is going up,” Rajan said. “Typically, this has been the sweet spot of every Asian economy that has grown out of poverty. Why? Because we have more people working, therefore more income. There is more savings. There is more capital. And all of that contributes to the growth rate.
“That would be an ideal spot to be in if everybody had appropriate human capital. You need people who are capable of holding jobs, who are capable of doing jobs that the economy is producing.”
Improvement Must Start Early
Panelists also agreed that in order for India to improve its higher education system, it must focus on also improving its lower grade levels. According to some estimates, one-third of India’s schoolchildren drop out of school before fifth grade.
“The number of children going to school has improved, and it has improved considerably,“ said Arvind Sanger, chairman of the board of Pratham-USA, a charity that works to increase literacy in India. “But only about 55 percent are able to read in fifth grade a second grade textbook or do second grade simple arithmetic. There is clearly a failure in outcomes, not a failure in setting up infrastructure and getting kids to school. It’s not a problem that is unique to India. It is a problem that is also present in the United States. You have schools but you do not have motivated or even present teachers.”
The so-called Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, which passed the Indian parliament in 2009 and prescribes a free and compulsory education for children between ages 6 and 14, is well meaning but falls short of its goals, Sanger said.
For example, the act dictates a certain pay scale for teachers and a required facility size for all schools, meaning that successful, yet smaller, private schools in rural communities will be forced to shut down or raise their fees to levels that India’s poor cannot afford.
Sanger suggested that meaningful education reform at the lower levels, similar to what has been suggested in higher education, come from the ground up, and not necessarily from the government.
“Education is for the kids and the parents, not for the state,” Sanger said. “The kids and the parents want it. The strength of India at the end of the day is the bottom-up energy that exists. The top-down energy of the state is often limited in its delivery.”
— Patrick Farrell
Read what experts said at the TATA conference about why reforms are the key to growth.