India, with an abundance of human capital and an increasing per capita income, is fast marching towards becoming one of the world’s largest economies and further competing with countries like the US and China. Millennials in India believe that while the world is brimming with opportunities, they are not confident enough when they are pitted against their global counterparts.
This gaping void is slowly but surely giving way to a change in the Indian education system. One can no longer be satisfied with one’s academic achievements alone as they are fast becoming redundant in a digital economy. New skills have to be learned each day. Set against this backdrop, International educational institutions (IEI) and innovative models of learning are now becoming increasingly popular in the Indian market. There is no dearth of examples to qualify this growing trend. Facebook’s recent investment in the Indian Education market with $50 million in By just is evidence of that fact and their faith in the opportunities in India.
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Education as an opportunity in India
From a statistics stand point, the Indian student population today is the largest in the world at around 315 million, of which around 120 million students are in the age group of 18-22 years. The education market in India is expected to reach over $200 billion by FY17. Currently, higher education constitutes 59.7 percent of the market, school education 38.1 percent, pre-school 1.6 percent, and technology and multi-media the remaining 0.6 percent, according to a study compiled by the India Brand Equity Foundation (January 2016).
The de-globalisation wave impacting Europe with Brexit, shows how we have to be self-sufficient and capable of catering to our own economic needs. Clearly, there is no better way than in investing for the future in Indian millennials who are rearing to become a formidable workforce.
So where do all these mind-blowing facts lead to? We need to open at least 1,000 universities in the coming decade to cater to this spiking demand. I don’t think the solution lies in the existing education system. We need to embrace and adopt world-class facilities and education systems.
Need for globalization of Indian education
International educational institutes have realized this trend and potential and are looking to set up their campuses or partner with Indian institutes to cater to this burgeoning Indian student population. Nearly, 14 percent of the students in US universities are from India. Imagine the impact if those very same universities were to come into our own country to provide us with the same education. We would save a lot on student debts and further be able to build a cohesive education system right here in our backyard.
Take the case of Suresh from an upper middle-class family. He got the best of education available in the city that he lived in. Suresh has now completed his engineering graduation. His father now aspires to give him an Ivy League education towards a fruitful career and can also afford to pay the course fee. But he now finds himself in a quandary as the overall costs are prohibitive when it comes to sending his son abroad, taking care of his expenses and other related costs. Add to this having to stay away from their child during his education is another scary dimension.
There are millions of Indian Millennials like Suresh who harbor dreams of studying in universities like Harvard and Stanford. However, despite having the true potential to succeed in these challenging assignments, it continues to be a dream simply because of the economic and cultural hurdles limiting them. Millennials strongly believe that the Indian education system, the government and other stakeholders in the market should recognize this condition and take the necessary steps to make quality education accessible, relevant and economical.

The failure of Indian education system is stark when seen in the light of the fact that thousands of students every year go abroad for the college education. European universities and even the European governments seem to have a more definite plan for Indian students than India. A graduate degree in India is mostly a farce in most of the colleges. There is hardly any education imparted and it is seen as more a stepping stone for masters or a necessity to do something else. Students file into colleges spend their time in everything but education. Courses are outdated, the faculty is inept, illiterate to the changes around them.
A recent experience in Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University really brought all these issues upfront. The outreach cell of the university organized a seminar on globalization. It roped in a public sector company as a sponsor, tied up with a one-man think tank from Chandigarh. Invited to speak I was piqued as it seemed like an interesting effort. It seems only the invitation was genuine. Neither the university nor the organizers were actually interested in a seminar. All that they were interested in was getting to know a minister. The obsession of the academia in Delhi with politicians is not new. Most faculty appointments are at the behest of the politicians. Huge physical infrastructure but very poor soft infrastructure is not just true of public universities like Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha but it is even worse in private universities.
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The highway from Delhi to Roorkee is dotted with shells of buildings posing as private universities. Actually on any national highway anywhere if you see a glass or fancy building with nothing around it will be a private university. Everything is new and shiny, designed to grab a student’s attention. Large rooms are labeled labs with hardly any equipment inside, huge campus with skeletal staff and even less faculty.
As of 2014, there are 677 universities, 37,204 colleges and 11,443 stand-alone institutions in India, as per the statistics from the website of India’s HRD ministry. There is no dearth of institutions willing to give a degree of money, education or skills are not the concern. Higher education is in rot at all levels, the irony is that these numbers are touted as an indication of the prowess of our education system. Not a sign that this rapid mushrooming has created an edifice that is destroying an aspirational class. There are very little debate and discussion on the fact that our higher education system has completely collapsed.
A study done by a private body says that approximately 18.43 percent of engineering graduates are employable, which means 80 percent of them are unemployable. The situation is worse for plain graduates and that is where the real malaise lies. Employers say just 5 percent of the graduates in other disciplines are actually employable. What these figures mean is that in sum higher education or college education has collapsed. Do we see any concern around this collapse? NO.
The IITs, AIIMs, IIMs are cited as examples of success, not because they have great faculty but because of the students. How many faculty members from our so called Institutes of National Importance have done anything worthy. A committee under Anil Kakodkar was formed in 2011 to revamp the 30 NITs, the second rung of the IITs, and not the 37,204 colleges or the 11,304 institutions. The rationale according to the preamble to this committee says that these 30 NITs can aid in ‘nation building’. So what will the lakhs of students in thousands of colleges do? If they are not involved in aiding the nation building exercise than we have a much bigger problem on hand.
Kakodkar’s report is a bundle of homilies, generalities, and advice from geriatrics. It was submitted in 2014 to the then Education Minister Smriti Irani. Here is a sample of Kakodkar committee’s recommendation: “ICT for the NITs acts like a force multiplier. NITs must deploy and upgrade the IT infrastructure and associated facilities. Each institute must facilitate extensive use of computer-aided / on-line teaching, virtual labs, e-learning resources, connectivity with National Knowledge Network, etc”. This is a recommendation in 2014, in the world of MOOCs, Coursera, and availability of free lectures from MIT or any other university of repute. In a world of mobile internet, ubiquitous internet access. Its recommending National knowledge network !! will a student go there or see and hear the latest lecture from a noble laureate. Even the term ICT referring to Information computer technology harks back to the 60’s when some of the committee members actually did their education.
This is the saddest and the most ironical part of higher education the system is ossified because of its sheer reliance on age, hierarchy or seniority. While the world that their students live and learn in has changed. Higher education will not be revived or pulled out from depths of his failure by people who do not have a stake in its future. A retired nuclear scientist more a bureaucrat should not be recommending anything about the future of anything let along higher education. Bureaucrats should be kept far away when it comes to reinventing.
While we struggle with higher education, Europe seems to be eyeing the conscientious Indian student. More and more students are now traveling abroad for education. Earlier cost used to be the big barrier for a foreign education. But as our higher education system is collapsing other countries are seeing it as an opportunity. German chancellor Angela Merkel has approved a six-year plan to attract Indian students to Germany. Under fire for her liberal immigrant policy, she is pushing German universities to attract Indian students waiving off tuition fees for them. Daria Kulemetyeva, of Germany’s largest public university, Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen, says, Indian students will have to pay just the administrative fees of 300 euros per year if they are selected in a course. The travel and accommodation costs are separate. The rationale, according to Kulemetyeva is to seek diversity in the student population.
It is not just German universities, almost every country in Europe and its public universities are keen to attract Indian student. Universities from Sweden, Norway, Spain, and France have been working very hard for the last few years to attract Indian students. They have adapted their courses in English offering free language lessons for immigrant students, etc. A combination of aging population and fall in interest in higher education among the current generation is forcing these universities to India. British universities have always found India a fertile ground for students.
John Sanders of the University of Sussex, says the lack of standards in Indian higher education means that our Indian student population has always been growing year on year. Harish Lokhun of the University of Edinburgh says, now Indian students go for even liberal arts and humanities whereas earlier they were only interested in engineering and the likes. Even the oldest university in Europe, Sweden’s Uppsala University is looking for Indian students, and for a reason. Lina Solander, of Uppsala University, “When we are looking at health problems, Indian students would have a much more different view of health policy than a local Swedish student.”
Spain has formed a consortium of four universities to target Indian students. Matilde Delgado Chawton represents Universidad Autonoma De Madrid, one of the leading university which is part of
the consortium. She says, that the gaps in higher education in India means that only a small number of students gets access to quality, we are looking at bridging those gaps by offering a quality education with a European exposure. Spain is also looking at funding Indian students. Indian students have traditionally looked at just US universities for graduation, now they have more avenues opening up.
If India does not look at the collapse of its higher education closely not only will we be leading to a new brain drain but a collapse of aspirations. This is especially of concern to the new government that has come to power on the rise of this aspirational class.

The US has always been a magnet for Indian students and now the figures suggest that there is an increase in the number of those joining universities there. The Open Doors, an annual report on international students in the US compiled by the Institute of International Education, says that in 2015 there was a 30% increase in students from other countries going to the US over the previous year. Of this, India is the second leading place of origin for students and 13.6% of the international student population is Indian.
The US system has a number of attractions. The courses are very varied and flexible. Here a student getting into a graduate course has to stick with the subjects chosen, in the US the student has the option to change midstream if he or she wants to. Students who need financial resources are able to access these from a variety of sources and universities help them in this process. In India, private scholarships are difficult to obtain and the conditions for getting a government grant are tough and restricted largely to students in the reservation quota. Students abroad are able to get internships, which helps them later in the job market. Perhaps the one major attraction is the synergy between academics and industry. Many courses are tailored to help students get jobs, again quite a departure from the largely academically-oriented curriculum in India. Research opportunities are also limited in India as many higher educational institutions do not have enough infrastructure or faculty for this.
The US sinks about $300 billion in higher education. India should consider investing much more in higher education as this will not only benefit our students but could be a potentially huge revenue generator. Already students from neighboring and African countries see India as an attractive education destination since it is cheaper and the medium is English. We should cast the net wider. One thing that ought to be done without delay is to ensure that foreign students feel welcome here. This has not always been the case, especially with African students, who face racial slurs and even violence. We must have a proactive policy of going out and seeking students once we have a more flexible and student-friendly system in place. The returns on this could be enormous and we should not miss the bus. There are many lessons we can learn from the US, and how to structure higher education and attract a wider variety of students are certainly some of them.

One of the plenary speakers at a recently held conference on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in Ahmedabad highlighted the need for Environment Education (EE) to be political. EE had been away from politics for long and this, she said, had rendered it weak. Participants were quick to raise questions about the risks this could pose of complicating the issue further, especially given the ability of the facilitators to deliberate on such topics.
The speaker’s response was unambiguous. On one hand, students today have access to most of the information – from the internet and other sources. On the other hand, the onus lies on the facilitators to upgrade their skills and communicate the issues responsibly in an apt manner.
In other words, not talking on the topics was neither an option nor a solution. To underscore her point, she stated how the Cauvery issue could have been discussed with students by talking about factors which had led to the current scenario. Be it the increase in area under ‘summer rice’ in Tamil Nadu, rise in the area cultivating sugarcane in Karnataka or an expanding Bengaluru not maintaining its lakes but seeking water from Cauvery.
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The other issue she raised was that EE was practiced in an unduly polite fashion. Dropping uncomfortable topics did not help EE. Students, who came in SUVs, for example, had to be told that they were not helping the environment. The pollution caused by their vehicles, which most of them did not even car pool in, had to be highlighted. These students, most of them from elite schools, were in a position to influence their parents on such decisions. The elite schools needed to know that, amongst schools, they were the worst polluters.
The session brought out the need to take risks and venture on fresh paths. These debates were the need of the hour for EE, which needs to reinvent itself and respond to the changing times. However, addressing these issues alone may not help unless we address the larger issue at hand.
We appear to be good at moving from old terms and settling, albeit temporarily, on the new ones. ESD has replaced EE by virtue of being more encompassing and holistic, while Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) are considered to be more evolved and tuned into today’s understanding than the Millennium Development Goals (MDG). However, is there any merit in jumping to fresh terms if we do not question the paradigm within which they operate? Terms which, as the discussions brought out, not many beyond the proverbial choir are bothered about!
Our alienation from nature, today, to a significant extent, is the consequence of an ‘education system’ that is the factoid, data, and information drove, devoid of attention to understanding the interconnectedness that is integral to all life forms. The primary goal of this ‘education system’ is to churn out ‘graduates’ who will fit into the economy (read contribute to ‘growth’ and ‘development’).
That we are failing even in this is a separate discussion. Given that EE or ESD is taught within the ambit of this system, the space they occupy and the scope they harbor will be dictated by the economy. The question then is that in an economy fuelled by ‘growth’ and ‘development’ what is the relevance and impact of EE or ESD? Especially when not only is the state’s own vision of ‘development’ myopic but also, for a large chunk of population, the term is synonymous with roads and jobs.
Firstpost asked one of the participants, after her presentation, whether her recommendations would make an impact given the larger system in place and if the system should be challenged. “They may not but we have to work within the system,” was her response Globeinform.
Have we got tuned to not question the system? What then of the ‘critical inquiry’ within Environment Education? Are we unwilling to question our lifestyles as we fear the inconvenience it will bring upon us? After all that we have brought upon the planet do we expect an easy way out? Nothing comes for free, surely not a better future.
The SDG do not explicitly focus on ‘reducing consumption’ or question ‘growth’ and unless we do that the scenario appears bleak. In a perfect world, it would be possible to have an increase in GDP, factory output and other positive indicators of growth on one hand and improved ecological conditions on the other. In the imperfect world, which we inhabit, history has taught us that this is anything but a realistic expectation.
The current scenario is akin to running on a track with the finish line moving further at a faster rate. By the time we will have achieved limited success (assuming we do) our actions, lifestyles, decisions will accentuate the threats and bring forth a scenario that warrants, even more, attention! We not only need to run but also ensure that the finish line remains static. Environment Education, in its current form, does not appear to be helping.

Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar on Tuesday said the answer to country’s sustainable transformation lies in its education system, as he underscored how India was once prosperous in the past due to universities like Nalanda, Takshila, and Vikramshila.
“I always say India had 25% of the world GDP and 35% of world trade for centuries together. Today, we are not even 1% of world trade. We are lagging behind as far as GDP is concerned,” he said.
“And therefore, how the nation can sustainably transform is the real thing. The answers lie in our education system,” he said.
Javadekar was speaking through a video link at an international conclave on higher education organized in Gandhinagar as part of pre-Vibrant Gujarat Investors’ Summit. He could not come here due to injury that prevents him from traveling for 10-15 days, he said.
Javadekar said that had there been a ranking system in the past, universities like Nalanda, Takshila, Vikramshila would have ranked number 1, 2 and 3 in the world.
“Indian universities were the best. The world’s talent used to come here to learn. So I believe that only those countries can prosper which have the best of universities,” he said, stressing the need to improve higher education in the country Planet Amend.
For making higher education better, he said, we first need to improve “the learning outcomes of primary and secondary education”.
“In primary education, we have to inculcate and promote inquisitiveness in a student. Because that is the foundation for any new innovation. Unless you promote inquisitiveness, there will be no new thoughts and people won’t be able to inculcate innovative attitude,” he said.
“But at the higher learning centers, a government’s duty is to provide atmosphere for research, innovation, and improvement of quality,” he further said

Education and pedagogy the world over have constantly evolved to serve the needs of human society. The first recorded models of teaching–be it in the gurukuls of India or the academies in Greece–had restricted attendance only to the children of the most fortunate and influential families, high teacher to student ratios, flexible schedules and syllabi that were highly personalized to every student’s (and their parents’) requirements, and a wide span of subjects from astronomy to zoology. The students most probably thrived in such a model, but this was far from scalable. Formal education remained the realm of the few for centuries, while the bulk of economic output was driven by human labor.

With the advent of the industrial age, we saw rapid technological transformations that reshaped the meaning of scale in human society–from the steam engine, the radio, the harvester, the satellite, and the internet, machines replaced human labor over all the brute force applications. Through this shift, we began to generate a real need for a lot more educated and trained people in the workforce to manage these machines and design better ones. This feedback gave rise to the modern education system as we know it–one that looks very much like an assembly line for the many bureaucracies we surround ourselves with today.
Today’s education systems have adopted the broadcast one-to-many model because that is the most straightforward way to communicate information to a large audience simultaneously. In India, given our challenge of 200+ million students, this factory model seemed the best solution as well. However, the time has come to revisit our fundamental priorities where education is concerned, and to set more ambitious goals for ourselves.

Over the past six decades, the priority in Indian education has clearly been to promote 100 per cent enrollment and rise against the inertia of drop out rates. With a massive slice of the budget (Rs 99,100 Cr between 2005-2012), large-scale policies like Operation Blackboard, the Mid Day Meal program, and Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, the national literacy rate is at 74.04 per cent (2011) for adult literacy and 90.2 per cent (2015) for youth literacy (between ages 15-24). Some states like Kerala are at 94 per cent literacy. Let’s consider this stage of mass onboarding as Education 2.0 – primary education has become a fundamental right and significant effort has been put into enforcing it World Update Reviews.

Now, we need Education 3.0 to focus on quality and to make sure every enrolled student finds the most direct path to achieving their learning goals and job outcomes. Government spending must go into expanding the install base of fundamental layers of innovation – providing free wifi at all educational institutions, a tablet to every student in every school and college in the country, and enable every teacher and school administrator with a smart device. On top of this install base, public spending must invest in and establish incentives for the development of high-quality educational content that is multi-lingual and multi-format and create a free open national knowledge base. The role of teachers must go from information dissemination to content curation and the aiding of problem-solving.

With this intentional expansion of the install base of smart and connected devices, we can create the first universal platform for educational innovation in the world. Tech-enabled pedagogical models to enhance formal education can be unleashed at scale by our most innovative companies. Levers such as personalized and adaptive learning, multi-format simulations and practice environments, improved data-driven continuous assessments, and lifelong learning and training models will lead to a more capable and productive workforce.

Education is no longer the privilege of the few, and that is a good thing. We now need Education 3.0 to crank the flywheel and turn Indian education into the force multiplier it can be.

TV Mohandas Pai is the Chairman of Aarin Capital and the Chairman of Manipal Global Education. He previously served as a Board Member and CFO at Infosys. He has helped co-found over 10 funds that invest in areas like Deep Technology, Life Sciences, and Education.

Pranav Pai is the Founding Partner of 3one4 Capital, an early-stage venture capital fund that leads technology investments in India and the US. He was previously the lead Product Manager at EdCast and graduated from Stanford with a Master’s in Electrical Engineering