Prime Minister's decision to constitute a committee, headed by NITI Aayog Vice Chairman, to suggest a framework for putting in place a new body subsuming AICTE, UGC, MCI, etc, can be seen as a step in that direction
India, with around 650 million people from newborns to up to 24 years, has a quarter of the total population in the world in this age bracket. Unlike China, the south Asian nation has the ability to pull global economy ahead not only directly but also by contributing skilled workforce to the world.
Over the next 15-20 years, all of the major world economies, with their large dependent population, will struggle to provide workforce for maintaining economic growth.
Within next 5 years, India will be the largest importer of commodities (oil & gas, arms and infrastructure goods) and would need “exportable skill base” to meet its foreign exchange requirements.
In 10 years, it will be the largest populated country in the world requiring most pass-outs to be employable or self-employable and working population to be retrainable. In 15 years, most of India’s population will be urbanised thus requiring a significant portion of workforce to be deployable in urban infrastructure services (energy, telecom, IT, Transportation, infrastructure O&M, education).
India’s ability to transform its education system (primary, secondary, higher and vocational) shall determine whether this opportunity gets leveraged in a timely manner or this becomes a cause of social unrest due to large-scale unemployment or lack of deployability of educated youth.
Prime Minister’s decision to constitute a committee, headed by NITI Aayog Vice Chairman, to suggest a framework for putting in place a new body subsuming AICTE, UGC, MCI, etc, can be seen as a step in that direction. As an interim measure in this direction, the functions of MCI have already been taken over by a committee headed by Justice RM lodha.
The challenge is bigger but much less complicated than it is projected to be. It is big as it encompasses futuristically empowering citizens of 2 to 25 years and much less complicated as the solutions are obvious.
landscape of education sector
Today, India has around 450 million students studying in more than 48,000 education institutions. Size of education sector is estimated to be $100 billion in 2015, of which private sector constitutes $95.8 billion.
If we take into account the latent demand of the entire educational value chain, service providers’ potential, technology and infrastructure potential, education will easily qualify for one of the top 5 industries in the country and in view of that, it should receive commensurate attention.
Given the potential size of the market, it must have an eco-system of an “industry” in terms of funding options and structures, foreign investment, a level playing field and ease of doing business parameters. States happily enjoying revenues from liquor and petroleum products can easily promote private investment in this sector with taxable revenues with a far better and qualitative social outcome.
Yet the educational framework requires urgent attention to achieve a clear and enforceable regulatory framework, incentivised role for private and foreign investment, integration and transferability of grades across courses, institutions, involvement of industry, social forums, global and cultural institutions and State and Central Governments being brought in sync in terms of delivering a demographic dividend through education.
Higher education
India with approximately 750 universities and 39,000 colleges has world’s biggest higher education set-up and with 30 million enrolments in 2015, ranks second globally. In 2015, State private universities enrolled around 50 per cent students, followed by State universities at 30 per cent and Central Universities at 3 per cent. Despite double-digit growth in enrolment, the quality of higher educational institutions has not kept pace. In 2010, 62 per cent of universities and 90 per cent of colleges were rated below average by NAAC.
While the Central Government funded-higher educational institutions account for 6 per cent of the total institutions, the problem of quality and quantity of faculties at its premier institutions such as IITs (41 per cent faculty shortage) pervades the country’s entire higher education system.
As against prescribed teacher-student ratio of 1:10, higher educational institutions are struggling with a 1:17 ratio. Of the total, 45 per cent are State universities, 29 per cent are State private universities and 17 per cent are deemed universities.
Curriculum, content and pedagogy are still not being addressed at a broader level and the use of IT for curriculum and pedagogy at a very large scale has been missing.
In pedagogy, the stress on making students understand the application of the subject matter has far less rigor than required.
The concepts and content of classroom, labs, library, teaching, projects, assignment, summer and industrial training and specialisation are beyond upgrade. They either require a complete overhaul or redefining in most cases.
In his Budget speech, the Finance Minister’s intent for using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for entrepreneurship education and training is a step in the right direction as India ranks 3rd in terms of number of people having access to internet even though this is merely 20 per cent of the population.
Assessment & certification of skills are not standardised, as 15-18 million students take around 200 million examinations at various higher education levels.
Even within a domain, different universities have different scales for measuring a skill set or knowledge for the same desired outcome. Similar confusion prevails in assessment of teachers.
The education industry must develop acceptable frameworks to source teachers from all disciplines and every walk of life and career teachers must upgrade faster than their students with frequent interinstitutional and industry stints.
Regulatory framework
Earlier this year, Niti Aayog submitted to the Central Government a report making 12 recommendations around overall education setup in India.
Major suggestions include building up of 10-20 world-class institutions with adequate autonomy, setting up of guidelines to rationalise small schools for elementary education and introducing demand-driven vocational courses in 15 per cent secondary classes by the end of FY17.
Despite these challenges, private institutions are expanding to tier 2/3 cities for a multi-city campus model. last five years have witnessed M&A deals worth around $6 million in this space.
Vocational Training
4.5 million students are studying at 18,000 vocational training centers with annual intake of 1.8 million. Polytechnic institutions and ITCs constitute 2,250 & 7,200 numbers, respectively.
Around 50 per cent of vocational training students currently undergo training in computer, electrical & electronics and mechanical engineering domains. Another 20 per cent are trained in skills related to textile, health & paramedical services and driving.
Facing the challenge of identifying a sustainable business model (non-MES / Govt. schemes), vocational training companies are now transforming business models to make them B2B heavy.
National Policy on Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (2015) has replaced National Policy on Skill Development (NPSD) 2009.
This is country’s first integrated national policy for developing skills and promoting entrepreneurship on a large scale and tries to address 4 key challenges to skilling, including low aspirational value, lack of integration into formal education, lack of focus on outcomes and low quality of training infrastructure and trainers.
At the K12 level (including preschools), 227 million students are there in 1.4 million schools (1.08 Govt. & 0.32 private) with annual intake of approximately 18 million students.
Competition is intensifying in K12 education domain as private chains are aggressively adopting franchise & owned school model & as chains such as Kidzee & Eurokids are upscaling to full K12 format to optimise operations in face of relatively low enrolment traction.
Dropout rates of girls have witnessed an increase in comparison to boys across primary and secondary level.
Most explosive growth, 25 per cent, is being witnessed in pre-school segment as pre-school chains are slowly penetrating into the still-virgin tier 2 and 3 space.
The private tutoring space is witnessing unprecedented traction from the organised players with deals such as Meritnation raising $4.09 million and Toppr (a Mumbai based e-learning portal) $10.45 million. last five years has witnessed deals worth around $18 million in this space.
In next 15 years, most of India’s population will get urbanised and what worked for a country of 6 lakh villages may not work anymore. In that scenario, education sector will be required to rise to the challenge of unlocking demographic dividend by making youth globally employable.
That will require the education sector to be boundary free (local, State, Centre, foreign, private, public), flexi mode (online, distance, classroom, on the job), modular and integrated (a high school Plumbing certificate credits transferable to Diploma in Sanitation with credits transfers to specialisation in Effluent plants or Degree in Civil engineering with a bridge course).
(The author is founder president of University of Petroleum and Energy Studies and founder Chancellor of University of Technology and Management (UTM). The views expressed in this article are personal.)