Education is considered to be the third eye of man. Highly educated persons command respect everywhere. But a new trend is picking up of late, wherein the students from India are getting passionate for admission in institutes of higher learning in developed countries like Canada, America, Australia and Russia. Their passion for getting educated from the institutes of developed countries is becoming so momentous that it is compelling parents to take loan or sell ancestral property to send children abroad. We have seen recently seen the utter failure of recent policies like 'Digital India', 'Skill India', 'Jan Dhan Yojna', Demonetization etc. speaks volume about the flawed planning of our policymakers.
Infact, this unproductive and inefficient system is taking a toll on all the stakeholders may it be students, parents, management of the institutes or the economy itself? As mentioned, even after the attainment of degree from these institutions, students and their parents get compelled to look for the opportunities abroad thereby reinvesting their time, money and efforts. Where on one hand, it drains out the resources from our country, on the other; trust in our own educational system is getting eroded. As a result the fear of closing down of these colleges and universities loom high due to the absence of admissions, thereby pressing the management of these institutions to adopt all such corrupt practices which can ensure their subsistence.
Secondly, there is a marked difference between what the corporate sector wants from the job seekers and what the skill set our graduate youth possess. To be precise, these students are ill equipped for working in sunrise industries as they are trained with the ages old curricula. When it comes to the revision of curricula in public sector institutions, academicians shirking away from hard work do not allow the syllabi reviewing committees to alter the syllabi as per the corporate needs. Outdated and conventional syllabus thus gets percolated down to the colleges’ level too. For instance, the marketing syllabus at undergraduate and postgraduate levels in different colleges and universities, still do not contain digital marketing in the contents, although we are talking about artificial intelligence and robotics.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE We need to emulate the Chinese growth model here. China which is also highly populated first transformed its human resources to human wealth to earn the tag of ‘factory of the world’. China made substantial investment in modernizing the education and technical education sectors. Further, the Chinese intellectuals who had settled overseas were provided attractive incentives to return. We also need to make substantial investment in the education sector. Rotten learning system should be replaced with a system which stimulates creative thinking. Approval to continue in the academics for even the private institutions should only be granted based on their academic performance. The permanency of all teachers should only be for three to five years which can further be renewed for another term depending upon the quality of their teaching and results. Only by taking corrective actions in time can we save the plundering of our economic and human resources in the hands of foreign players.