Confucius said, “Give a hungry man a piece of fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and he will never go hungry again.” The tragedy of Indian education, 65 years after Independence, is that for the most part, it does not even attempt to teach fishing.

A crisis pervades all levels, from the primary to the tertiary, but merits only a cursory mention in the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech. Lant Pritchett, the noted Harvard educationist who has worked in India, observed in 2009 that the Indian education system churns out millions of students every year with zero skills. Recent surveys show that even as the cost of professional education skyrockets, no more than 10 to 20 per cent of graduates possess “employable skills”.
While parents can and do attempt to effect some remedies at the primary and secondary levels, mostly they watch their meagre savings go down the drain as they try to equip their children with technical qualifications at mushrooming “teaching factories”.
Professional education in India today resembles the society and can be depicted by a tall, thin needle sitting atop a large, low, flat base. The needle comprises institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), medical education bodies such as the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences and law schools such as National Law Universities. These are the elite, especially the older ones, with fierce competition for entry into them. Their graduates being wooed with remunerations far out of sync with the larger Indian reality, their elite status becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The large, low, flat base comprises some older institutions suffering from lack of resources, archaic curricula and administrative straitjackets, as well as a vast majority of new ones started mostly as diversification ventures by promoters with limited interest in and familiarity with education. Relatively lax regulatory and accreditation procedures may have facilitated their emergence, but the inability of some of them to deliver on their very limited promise of well-paying jobs is now catching up.
Professional education must remain relevant to the specific givens of the country and the times. Teaching and research in such institutions cannot be ends in themselves. Pure research has its own value and we all admire the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the success of their scientists in tracking down the Higgs Boson. Our technological institutions would do well to concentrate on inventing a better mousetrap even as they appreciate the CERN’s endeavours.
The critical requirement for India’s development is an expanding industrial base capable of employing a part of the mass that now bloats the ranks of the unemployed or those depending on agriculture. This calls for creation of skills and abilities needed by modern enterprise in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Two constraints have hobbled India’s industrialisation: indifferent, unreliable quality and uncompetitive costs. Our low-wage advantage is more than offset by poor productivity and inconstant product quality. We are mostly in the artisan mode of production even in the 21st century.
Supervisors of our factories and shops must take the bulk of the blame for this state of affairs. They may hold engineering degrees or diplomas but do not always possess the ability that is best described as “I know quality when I see it.” An orientation towards applicability and practicality is mostly not evident in our professional institutions. The cause is not merely the sad state of laboratories and workshops (or hospitals) used to train students. Most teachers themselves lack the orientation. Over time, teaching has become a less prized occupation. The old cliché “those who can, do, and those who cannot, teach” sums up the reputation of teaching careers in India.
A vicious cycle marks our professional education. Young students, mostly compelled by parents or peer groups, get into sweatshop classes to enter colleges and institutes regardless of their interests, abilities or aptitudes. They are exhausted by the time they get admissions. At colleges and institutions they are taught mostly by those who are themselves products of the same system, thus perpetuating the
malady that already affects it.
This vicious cycle neds to be broken by applying pressure at two critical points. The first is the overhaul of curricula and pedagogy in the broadest sense. This is not easy, but not impossible either. IITs and IIMs in the 1960s and 1970s had no star academics on their rolls — no international names, leave alone Nobel laureates! Yet, with committed and entrepreneurial leaders such as Ravi Matthai of IIM Ahmedabad, N.R. Kamath of IIT Bombay and S.K. Kelkar of IIT Kanpur/Bombay at their helm, they managed to remain autonomous to a large extent even as they became paradigms of excellence relevant to the country.
The second pressure point is a change in the faculty composition and orientation. Improved living conditions and retirement benefits have created an army of retired engineers, managers and other professionals in their 60s with good work records and matching communication skills. Many of them are willing and anxious to share their experience as their contribution to the society at large, and not necessarily as a second career or a source of high remuneration.
This talent pool can be profitably tapped to create adjunct faculty to augment the existing personnel of our professional institutions. They could also become mentors to younger colleagues lacking practical experience.
We admire the MITs and the Harvards. They were not created overnight by any administrative fiat or in a vacuum. They evolved organically by catering to the needs to the society. Some 19th-century land-grant colleges and the so-called Agriculture and Mechanical Universities in various US states are today ranked at the top, with all-star faculty. The redbrick universities in the UK that came up in the last 100 years now compete with the venerable Oxbridge.
We need to learn from this history if we are to teach our vast population to fish.

The writer taught at IIM Ahmedabad and helped set up the Institute of Rural Management, Anand. He writes on economic and policy issues.