Education – the sector which plays a vital role in the development of any nation. India is an ancient country and the place where earliest civilizations on earth took place. It is the place with loads and loads of wealth not only in terms of precious stones but also with huge intellectual property. The alma maters like Nalanda University and Allahabad University (considered as Oxford of East) remain as the colossal examples of the golden era of Indian education. It is the nation which produced many eminent scholars like Aryabhatta, Bhaskaracharya and Ramanujan in field of mathematics, Charka in Medicine, Sir C.V.Raman, Jagadish Chandra Bose and Satyendranath Bose in the field of science. Today all this became history. These days the contribution of Indian students to global education industry has been burgeoning as the number of students who are interested in pursuing higher studies are rising day by day. When we question them to know what propelled them to make this decision, the short comings of Indian education system came out. They are
1) Lack of sufficient support to Research and Development
Several Nobel laureates like Venkataraman Ramakrishnan (Chemistry) and Amartya Sen (Economics) spend most of their time in U.S. the reason for that might be the availability of sufficient infrastructure facilities like research labs and financial support from the Government of that nation. We were unable share their expertise with our nationals and budding researchers in those fields except patting our backs saying those people are of Indian origin.
2) Scarcity of teaching staff
The research scholars are the people who are essential and capable of teaching graduates and post graduates in respective fields. With the lack of sufficient infrastructure these people are migrating to foreign nations and causing a paucity of sufficient staff in India. At present India possess 16 IIT’s, 20 NIT’s, 13 IIM’s, 355 registered medical institutes like AIMS, NIMS and many more deemed universities. Several professors in these in institutes work on deputation (i.e. they receive salary from one institute but asked to teach even in other institutes). These kind of things sometimes reduce their morale.
If these are the some drawbacks of higher education in India, the primary and secondary schools have their own short comings. They are
1) Improper maintenance of Government schools
Even though GOI introduced schemes like Sarva Shikha Abiyaan to make education as a right for all the children below 14 years of age, the Government schools are unable to attract students because of aspects like poor class room facilities, improper sanitation and inadequate teaching staff. And the facilities like library and computer labs are out of sight for them.
2) Opportunistic nature of private schools
All the short comings of Government schools turned as boon to private industrialists. Showing all these facilities, they started demanding more tuition fees from parents and spending very less on payment of salaries to teachers. These types of activities which impact the morale of teachers are making teaching profession very less yielding.
The government of India should take necessary corrective measures in order to prevent the brain drain in India. The strategy should comprise aspects like
a) Increase of percentage spending of GDP for education (at present it is 4.1).
b) Establishing more institutes like TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) and BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) to provide research facilities even in other fields of sciences.
c) Strengthening the government schools by providing sufficient infrastructure facilities.
d) Dictate terms to heavy private industries to establish schools as a part of social corporate responsibility.
Apart from this every individual should try to find the innate talents of their children and should encourage them to reach peaks in those fields but not to secure more and more marks.
