Our education system is geared towards teaching and testing knowledge at every level as opposed to teaching skills. “Give a man a fish and you feed him one day, teach him how to catch fishes and you feed him for a lifetime.” I believe that if you teach a man a skill, you enable him for a lifetime. Knowledge is largely forgotten after the semester exam is over. Still, year after year Indian students focus on cramming information. The best crammers are rewarded by the system. This is one of the fundamental flaws of our education system.
The Indian education system is based upon 12 years of schooling (10+2), which includes primary and secondary education. Secondary Schools are affiliated with Central or states boards for conduct of examination. Most of the private schools as well as many government schools like the Kendriya Vidyalayas are affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). All the Indian universities and other institutions of higher education recognize the various 10+2 qualifications from different states as well as all India Boards like the CBSE.
Though Class XIIth is the entry-level qualification for pursuing higher education in any field, passing it in itself does not guarantee admission to a particular course. Like for example, some courses specify pre-requisite subjects that the student must have at the qualifying exam (class XIIth); for professional courses other than the pre-requisite subjects a student may also have to sit for an entrance test e.g. IIT-JEE, CPMT etc. Well known colleges specify cut-off marks (i.e. marks or grade obtained in a particular subject or subjects(s) in class XIIth) for admission in various courses, which may be as high as 85-90% for admission in say B.Sc Hons. (Physics). The cut-off marks or overall entry score can vary between courses in the same university/college, between similar courses in different universities/ colleges and from year to year in the same course. Some courses and some universities/institutions/colleges are in greater demand than others and therefore gaining entry into them is correspondingly more tough.
In all, 460.22 million people — or less than 40% of the population — were employed across various sectors. And the work force expanded only by 2.76 million during the five years.
“Imagine if we can come up with products and solutions to train the under-skilled population, a lot of contribution can be made to India’s development,” said Dilip Chenoy, CEO and managing director of National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC).
NSDC was formed to provide and upgrade skills for 150 million people by 2022 by encouraging the private sector in skill development. It provides funding to build scalable and for-profit vocational training initiatives.
Equipped with a low educational and skill base, the surplus labour from agriculture is generally absorbed in the unorganised segments of both industry and services.
IAMR said in a recent paper, Jobless and Informalisation, Challenges to Inclusive Growth in India, that the second stage of transition — from the unorganised to the organised sector — will happen with a considerable time lag.
Besides, it will depend on access to education for the marginalised sections, proper implementation of legal provisions and skill development initiatives by the government.
The Case of Kerala
The state of Kerala, a small state in the South Western coast of India, has been different from the rest of the country in many ways for the last few decades. It has, for instance, the highest literacy rate among all states, and was declared the first fully literate state about a decade back. Life expectancy, both male and female, is very high, close to that of the developed world. Other parameters such as fertility rate, infant and child mortality are among the best in the country, if not the best. The total fertility rate has been below the replacement rate of 2.1 for the last two decades. Probably as a side-effect of economic and social development, suicide rates and alcoholism are also very high. Government policies also have been very different from the rest of the country, leading to the development model followed in Kerala, with high expenditure in education and welfare, coming to be known as the “Kerala Model“ among economists.
