Prioritise education to become globally competitive

Gurbachan Jagat

AN article in India Today states that as per the data shared by the government in Parliament recently, there has been a 68 per cent increase in Indian students going abroad for higher education over the past year — 7,50,365 in 2022 as against 4,44,553 in 2021. The amount of money spent for this purpose, to say the least, must be huge. But, what is to be expected when the education budget of the country has not crossed even a measly 3 per cent of the GDP (Centre and States combined, as per the Economic Survey) over the past two decades. For all their clamour, no politician or political party has had the foresight to increase the expenditure on education. The health budget is even lower, hovering between 1.5 per cent and 2 per cent of the GDP.

I guess they want to keep us mostly dumb and broken, standing in line waiting for our doles and the occasional largesse of freebies. Gullible people are easily channelled into vote banks of caste, religion, tribe, etc. Youngsters have no choice but to go abroad for higher studies in the absence of facilities here. Whatever facilities are available get drastically reduced because of reservation under various quotas in order to fulfil political objectives. Also, the expansion of quality educational infrastructure has not kept pace with the growth in our population — we are the country with the highest population in the world.

How long will this trend, this exodus of our children to the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Europe for higher studies and good universities continue? A glance at our educational policies, universities and other places of professional studies does not give one hope for the future. We lack proper facilities, proper conditions for research and development to motivate the youth to think and innovate. Our outdated education system continues to focus on learning by rote which, in today’s technology-driven world of cutting-edge research, leads us nowhere. We seem to be bent upon reinventing our past and projecting it as our future. This will not make us competitive in an intensely competitive world; this will not introduce into our universities and labs concepts of quantum physics, AI, nano technology, robotics, etc. which are shaping the future.

Today, we want to compete with the West, with China in all sectors and fields. However, the two prerequisites for progress, education and health, are not on the political radar. We are spending billions on imports of defence materiel, medical equipment, semiconductors, computers, automobiles, aircraft, ships… name it and we are importing it. This is so because our in-house R&D is negligible. We are already late; we have to take up modernisation of our industries on a war footing and the path to that is through education and health. The Government of India (GoI) has not been able to motivate the private sector to play a major role in investment and upgradation of industry. The GoI must provide a level playing field for all major industrialists and co-opt the MSMEs in a planned manner. Priority sectors should be identified for support, and growth incentives should be given. Unless this is done in a planned, time-bound manner as a national cause, we will not be able to sit at the high table. We have been asking the Russians and western countries, from whom we import to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, to give us the technology for producing these goods in India — with very little success. In the field of computing power, we are still without a supercomputer; in semiconductors, we are still in kindergarten trying to establish a goalpost. In the pharma sector, we still depend on China for API (active pharma ingredients) and on western firms for new cutting-edge inventions. The list is long, but it would be wrong to say that nothing has been achieved — our IITs, IIMs, AIIMS are world-class but too few for our needs and more importantly, we cannot retain the talent we train there. Most of the graduates of these institutions leave for higher studies or work in western countries. A conducive work environment and opportunities which would engage and retain this talent are obviously lacking. An ecosystem on the lines of the Silicon Valley has to be built where we not only retain but attract the top minds. Our brain drain is our loss. The focus should be on a partnership between the industry, universities and the government for purposes of funding and carrying out research. This formula has worked in the developed world, where these three operate in tandem.

We should remember that it is not in the interest of foreign powers to let us become self-sufficient. In the present relationship, they see us as a big market for their produce, from consumer goods to defence equipment. They realise our strategic and geographic position in the world and our worth to them in their looming crisis over China. They see us as a major democratic force in our divided world of autocracies and democracies. The key is to become atmanirbhar or self-sufficient, but that will not happen on a whim or a fancy. It is a long route and one defined by the old seer Tagore: ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head held high; Where knowledge is free… Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit…’

The task of bringing hundreds of millions of citizens of our country out of poverty is no child’s play. Slogans of cleanliness, women’s equality and self-sufficiency cannot be meaningful without providing a wholesome education and healthy environment. Removing the periodic table, Darwin’s theory and democracy from the syllabus is hardly the way forward.

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