Education system must focus on job skills

THOUSANDS of youngsters, including students, marching peacefully towards Parliament on July 20 to demand accountability from a system that had betrayed their trust, were “brutally welcomed” with batons, barricades and pellet guns wielded by the police and Rapid Action Force personnel.

Broken bones and pellet wounds were the government’s reply to a generation seeking nothing more than the right to a fair shot at their future. It was the moral nadir of an establishment that treats aspiration as nuisance, and its own repeated institutional failures as a “public relations problem” to be managed.

The resignation of the Education Minister is all but mere tokenism. Proposed amendments to the anti-paper-leak law may expedite investigation and trials, but the deterrent effect remains an open-ended question in a country that is over-legislated and under-enforced.

The fundamental truth is that the Indian education system is broken, perhaps irretrievably. It does not catalyse critical thinking or creativity. Rote learning is still the name of the game. Until we encourage pre-primary, primary, middle and high schoolers to think for themselves and incentivise audacity that demolishes conformism, we will only build a society that will continue to pay obeisance to a feudal social order. It is only the ability to think and act freely that can break the chains of patriarchy. Band-aid solutions cannot do it.

That is what Parliament should have discussed — how to liberate the next generation from the shackles of mental slavery that is intrinsic to the DNA of India’s education system and, by extension, its political and social milieu.

Nonetheless, imagine a utopian scenario: all higher education seats are filled on merit free from paper leaks and all sanctioned government posts are filled. The majority of India’s youth would still be trapped in a limbo of unemployability, for the simple reason that the number of aspirants exceeds available government jobs and quality institutional seats by multiples that no examination reform can bridge.

For decades, the education policy has been obsessed with access, measured by enrolment ratios, while neglecting learning outcomes and their translation into livelihoods. India Skills Report 2026 puts the aggregate employability at 56.35%, with the deficit concentrated in non-technical competencies (communication, problem-solving and digital fluency). Ergo, one in two graduates emerges from the system not readily employable in any industry.

This chasm between ‘credentials’ and ‘capability’ is a consequence of an academic architecture that relegates employment integration to residual luck of campus placements and prestige hierarchy of limited eminent institutes. The vast majority of students enrolled in tier-2 and tier-3 city colleges, state universities and private self-financing institutions traverse their entire college life without any structured interface with a productive economy. Every education and training facility needs a minimum industry interface as a design principle that determines local or regional demand for particular skills.

Curricula from the secondary stage onwards (under the National Skills Qualifications Framework) and across all undergraduate/postgraduate programmes must embed mandatory apprenticeships, internships and live industry projects. Public sector enterprises, joint ventures under the PPP (public-private partnership) model and private corporations, including through their CSR (corporate social responsibility) mandate, must be enjoined to organise placement-linked training opportunities in collaboration with education departments.

The failure of the education system to produce skilled workers is compounded by chronic underinvestment. Public expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP remains stagnant at about 4%, far below the 6% target.

The government school enrolment share dropped from 71% in 2005 to 49.24% in 2024-25 (as per NITI Aayog’s School Education Report), despite massive outlays under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, PM-SHRI and PM-POSHAN. This signals that the problem is not only of resources but of resource effectiveness.

The rising cost of education has pushed families into a brutal calculus. The 381st Report of the Parliamentary Committee on Education bespeaks the need for fixing the financial architecture for higher education. The committee’s recommendation, reiterated after an unsatisfactory government response, is that the annual family income ceiling be uniformly enhanced to Rs 8 lakh across all schemes, all types of courses and all institutions, without any conditionality based on quality rankings. On the priority sector lending front, the RBI’s revision of the education loan limit from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 25 lakh falls far short of the committee’s recommendation of Rs 50 lakh, which reflects real escalation in the cost of higher education.

An equally pernicious dimension of the rising costs is unregulated commercialisation of coaching, which has metastasised from a supplementary aid into a parallel system. Coaching centres have proliferated like kirana stores, operating with no regulatory oversight and extracting heavy financial and psychological toll from families already stretched thin. Non-schooling educational institutes must be brought under a regulatory framework that mandates transparency in fee structures, faculty qualifications, verifiable outcome disclosures and minimum pedagogical standards.

Compounding the cost problem is the pedagogical damage wrought by the automatic promotion policy, which has done more to hollow out the quality of education than any other measure.

It has produced a swelling cohort of the uneducated literate, promoted grade-to-grade without academic knowledge or employable skill that a performance-based evaluation system would have enforced. The 2024 ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) and PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development) findings reveal that nearly half of Grade-5 children in rural India cannot read a Grade-2 text; fewer than 55% of Grade-3 students can handle basic money transactions, and less than 30% of Grade-6 students have adequate fraction competency.

The crisis in higher education is no less acute. Over 4.5 crore students are enrolled in higher education, but the resources available to serve them are continuously shrinking in per capita terms. Faculty shortages are endemic and infrastructure is shambolic.

Meanwhile, India’s gross expenditure on R&D remains stuck at around 0.64% of GDP against a global average of 2.9%. A higher education system that neither produces employable graduates nor generates meaningful research output is not an engine of national development but a vast credentialing ritual sustained by public patience and private despair.

The path forward cannot be a series of disjointed fire-fighting measures triggered by another paper leak or protest. It must be a comprehensive reimagining of the education-to-employment pipeline, built on the recognition that the outcomes we measure — employability, learning proficiency, research output — are the only legitimate benchmarks of public investment.

The young men and women who braved lathis and pellet guns are demanding that the world’s largest democracy treat their future as worth protecting. The most fitting tribute to their courage would be a serious reform agenda that matches the scale of their aspirations.