EDUCATION AS NATIONAL SECURITY

India’s educational system is falling into the danger of leaving the country behind countries with higher educational and innovation standards. This has adverse implications for Indian security, warns AMIT GUPTA

- AMIT GUPTA

National security strategies are usually woven around military and economic capabilities: does the country have the economic ability to prosecute a military campaign? But there is another capability that determines a country’s ability to prosecute a national security strategy and that is the educational level of its people. In the current global system, there are two sets of nations—those that are knowledge economies that are incorporating the latest technologies into their societies, economies, and militaries and the rest who continue with educational programmes from the 1950s and 1960s and are thus not producing globalized labor or innovation-driven economies. It is this educational divide that will drive the development and security of nation-states in the coming decades.

India Literacy Standards at Independence

Indian literacy rates at independence were abysmal as only 16.1 per cent of the country was literate and that number went up to about 18 per cent by the census of 1951—and these numbers were probably generous since there is a huge difference between functional literacy which gives one the ability to function in a technological, industrial, or academic setting and being merely able to read and write at a very basic level.

Nehru’s objective was to create an indigenous pool of talented and educated Indians; hence we saw the building of IITs with the cooperation of the Europeans, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Additionally, the core universities in India were slowly expanded to give a quality education to the masses. To do this, the government kept tuition and other fees low to make higher education affordable to the middle to lower-middle-class in India.