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I'm here to talk to you about Indian education higher education in particular
but I'm actually going to start with demography how many of you here are
under 35 okay that seems pretty representative of the country 65 percent
of India is under 35 how many of you are under 25 okay then you're not so
represented because actually we have half the Indian population very much under 25 we are an amazingly young
country in fact if you just take the age group from 10 to 19 there are 226
million Indians poised in other words to enter higher education going through
school and ready for higher education now this is amazing because it's
happening at a time when the rest of the world is aging right if you look at the
average age in India today it's 28 of course don't ask about the gap since we
heard about gaps between the average age of the Indian person and of the Indian
cabinet I think we hold the world record for that but that's that's another matters another another TED talk right
but what you've got with his average age is a time when the rest of the world is
changing so by 2020 the average age in Japan is going to be 47 in China it's going to be heading well past 40 Europe
46 the United States youthful u.s. also 40 and India's average age is going to
be 29 so we have potentially the people who are the youthful productive dynamic young population ready to work and
transform the world the kinds of role that say China played in the last
generation could be ours in the next fact the International Labor
Organization has worked out that by 2020 we'll have a hundred and sixteen million
people in the age group of starting work 22 24 is what they calculate and China
will only have 94 million at the same time so we really are poised to do that
but and and by the way other countries will have a serious deficit it's estimated that the US will have 17
million short in terms of how many people they need in working age we in
India have people but do we have the ability to equip the people to take advantage of
this to be the workhorse of the work engine for the world see we get it right
we educate and train them we really transform not just our own economy and
our society but the world if we get it wrong the demographic dividend I'm
talking about becomes a demographic disaster because we've already seen in
165 of our 625 districts what happens when unemployed frustrated undereducated
young men become prey to the blandishments of the Maoists and and prey to the gun and the bullet so
education in our country is not just a social or economic issue it's even a
national security issue we've got to equip our people to take advantage of
what the 21st century offers though now this is the story in a nutshell for ease
expansion was our first priority in education why because the British and I would even ask of any of you here left
us in 1947 with a 16% literacy rate okay there were only four hundred thousand
four lakh students in the entire country in higher education we had 26
universities fewer than 700 colleges so obviously expansion was essential we've
gone right from that 16 percent to 74 percent literacy today we've gone from
26 universities to 650 universities we've gone from those 400,000 students 4
lakh students to 20 million students in higher education today and we have we
have 35,000 colleges as well instead of the 700 colleges we had then so
expansions taken place we've also had to fight for the second D of equity that is including the excluded from education
trying to reach out to the unreached the people who didn't get a fair shake in
education for reasons they couldn't help gender an obvious reason when we had that 16% literacy rate you know what the
female literacy rate was eight point nine percent of the time of Independence
just one out of eleven Indian women could read and write caste region religion all sorts of people got left
out the system we had to bring them in and that became a big challenge and a
priority for education in getting those two
things more or less right I don't know how well we did on the third e which is
the e of excellence obviously you need quality and we set about setting up
institutions of great quality in our country the IITs are a good example in
fact it's part of Jalal naraz vision that the iit in Kharagpur was
established back in 1956 the year I was born and it was done on the site of a
British Detention Center the agency Detention Center so a symbol of political oppression became instead a
symbol of Hope of Technology of looking to the future but for the IITs Iams a
few good institutions I'm sure you can all pick you a few around the country
these have tended to be islands of excellence floating on a sea of
mediocrity the average Indian higher education institution is simply not of
the quality that you and I all of us in this audience would like to see and that
ties into the forth either I've added to this catechism employability talk to
employers talk to CEOs what do they tell you that they're simply not satisfied
with the quality of the graduates they're getting even in the the tea of
Ted the technological area engineering graduates of half a million engineering
graduates here but if you talk for example to the Federation of Indian
Chambers of Commerce and Industry they did a survey 64% of employers are not
satisfied with the quality of graduates they're getting some companies are
running essentially reeducation places Infosys the gigantic campus and Mysore
and it's not on-the-job training which big companies tend to do it is in fact
really a full years education for the people they've already hired to make up
for the deficiencies of what they've learned and not properly learned in
college now that's the scale of the challenge that we face what are we doing
about it a great deal needs to be done of course we are trying to put in kids
into the system at an early age there are te the right to education act
if kids were out of school in the old days it was their parents fault today
they're out of school it's the state's fault the government is committed to
actually getting them in education we've got more and more money being pumped in
by the system at all levels for example many of you may have gone to prestigious
universities lots of people in India don't they go to state universities
which are grossly under financed we've come up with a scheme to pump central
money into the state universities so they actually have resources to do
something with with the students they have their money isn't the whole answer
there is an entire challenge in terms of addressing things like the gender gap
that's a gap that despite what mr. about what the earlier speaker said we don't
want to embrace right it's a gap we must must overcome right now women's literacy
is 66 percent better than the 8.9 but still means that you know one out of every three Indian women still can't
read and write we have to overcome that we need to catch the ones who've been
left out of the net adult literacy huge challenge I went off to a village in
Tamil Nadu not far from Kanjivaram and I met women who in their 50s and 60s were
learning to read and write and people think sometimes what's the point some of
their own family members their husbands think what's the point
the answer is it changes their lives it empowers them in real ways I spoke to a
woman called Chitra money who told me proudly wrote her name in Tamil on a
piece of paper and I said so what is being able to read mean and read and
write mean to you and she said no I can I can see the destination of the bus
where it's going I don't need anyone to I don't have to ask somebody where that
bus is going I know where I can go when I get to the big city of Kanchipuram I
can read the street signs I can find what I need to go I don't feel helpless
anymore that kind of from that empowerment is what literacy gives people in a very fundamental and real
way and we're trying to do that of course for those who've dropped out early on in the days before we got to
that 74% the younger kids we've got them into school now we have something called
a gross enrolment ratio the percentage of children of a certain age of the age appropriate for a particular level of
education but a primary school now our gross and Roman ratio is 116 percent
we've actually enrolled more kids and we thought existed at that age group
because some of the older ones are coming in - bad news is as you go up the level it starts dropping so by the
eighth grade I'm afraid it's down to 16 69 percent by the tenth grade
39% and College our gross enrolment ratios about
18% against a global average of 29% so clearly we still need to do more our
expansion hasn't gone enough we haven't managed to get everyone to stay in the
system some of them actually need vocational training they're not all
going to become white-collar clark's or officials or IAS officers right so we
need to try and catch them and get them into vocational training but how do you
do that in a culture where for three thousand years if you wanted to be a
cobbler or a carpenter you better have an uncle or a father was a cobbler or a
carpenter because nobody else is going to teach the transmission of knowledge of tradecraft in our country has always
been through the gene pool so one the reason why the sons of politicians tend
to be politicians also you know and and a bollywood movie stars same story so we need to get master craftsmen and why do
why is it with a country of 1.2 billion people that we should have a nationwide shortage of Mason's of plumbers of
certified electricians we need to get more vocational training into the system
we're doing that we're now rolling out the whole concept of community colleges
so that kids can go in have some academic learning lots of vocational
training and at the end of two years if they show tremendous academic promise
they can go back to a university if not they leave with a two-year certificate
and they go off on you're useful trade in a society that is clamoring for these
skills so these are the kinds of changes that we are trying to bring about and
move along but there's a change that the government alone can't do you know if
you look at the need for research and innovation you've had a lot of that I'm
sure in the in the course of the TED Talks research is something which the
government wants to double the amount of money spending on research from one
percent of GDP to two percent we haven't had the money to pump into it yet but
innovation requires new ways of thinking I heard you had a talk about hyper
thinking I missed it but new ways of thinking means learning to think
out-of-the-box learning to create I know we're famous for jugaad right you google the words frugal innovation and the top
20 hits will all relate to Indian inventions we've invented the world's
cheapest electrocardiogram the simplest and cheapest EKG the cheapest insulin
injection the world's keep a small car the Tata Nano all that's come but
all these have been things invented elsewhere that we have stripped down
made more affordable more replicable more relevant to our conditions we need to do things that others haven't done
before which we used to do in our culture where the land that invented the
0 remember how the Romans used to write their numerals and long strings of
letters until an Indian thought of the idea of zero emerging from the notion of
Shunyata in Hindu and Buddhist thinking and that came into the 0sh India which
transformed global mathematics we need to think like that again we need to come
up with ideas with 17% of the world's brains why do we only have 2.8 percent
of the world's research output coming out of our country well perhaps in me we
need to start in the classroom get our kids not just to have their heads filled
full of facts and textbook materials and teachers lectures because frankly that
gives you a well-filled mind but in the era of the internet you don't need a
well-filled mind you've got Google writing find out anything you want with
two clicks of the mouse what you need is a well-formed mind a mind that reacts to
unfamiliar facts and details that can actually synthesize information that it
hasn't studied before a mind in other words that can react to the bigger
examination called life which doesn't actually only give you things you've
prepared for and for that you need a mind that's shaped by original thinking
a mind that doesn't just ask the teacher why but why not I've actually had a
little experience of out-of-the-box thinking myself I wear glasses I don't
need them to read I don't need them to see you folks on the front but if I want
to catch somebody in the back row there I have to look through glasses but
because I hardly ever wear them I keep losing or breaking them I shoved them in a pocket bang against a wall or
something they crack I put them on a lap when I get up they fall down somebody
steps on them they break in the first three months of this year I lost or
broke six pairs of glasses so telling a friend about this this is its simple
solution why can't you think that I said look there is no easy solution because
for a hundred and fifty years glasses have been made in one way right they
joined together the center they hang over your ears that's what I find on
inconvenience I take them off and he said no no no no we'll find a different way you can reimagine glasses in a way
that they're not hangover your years or be joined in the
middle and this is what he did I'm wearing them right now and I want to see
anybody at the back I guess pull that together like two magnets in the middle
that click together and I can see you all of the back now it's just it's a
silly example perhaps but it's an example of how one can think out of the box you can things familiar objects can
be thought of in ways they haven't been thought of before and that way we can
move forward in the world I have no doubt that the challenges are enormous there is simply no question that here in
our country we have to become literate but there is one piece of good news
95% of our 12 year olds across India can read and write so the future looks good
and as far as the workforce is concerned if we can get all these other pieces in
place we can say to the rest of the world
we're coming thank you very much
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you
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