India Needs To Spend More On Education To Meet Future Challenge

When Benjamin Franklin, the American polymath and a founding father of the United States of America said that “an investment in knowledge pays the best interest”, he had referred to its uses and not to its mere accumulation.

- Tushar K Mahanti

Franklin said it more than two centuries ago and his concept of the use of knowledge differed completely from what it means today.

Education today is largely considered as a mean to obtain gainful employment. Indeed, many organisations that evaluate the return on investment in education often do it on the basis of the employability quotient.

The data with regard to India are, unfortunately, quite alarming. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), India will again see its unemployment rate at 3.5% in 2018 and 2019, the same which was seen in 2017 and 2016. According to the latest data, there will be 18.9 million jobless people in India next year which will be a little more than 18.6 million for 2018.

One of the reasons behind this is that India has a small number of quality institutions in spite of the growth in the number of higher education providers. Consequently, a large number of self-financed private institutions have mushroomed to cater to the growing demand from the aspiring students. Many of these institutions lack requisite infrastructure facilities and qualified faculty. As a result, a large number of the students coming out of these institutions often lack the aptitude and skills which the employers, particularly in the corporate sector, are looking for.

The big challenge the country faces today is how education can be rewired to focus on imparting knowledge that responds to market demand. That is, how can education make students future-ready? It is critical for India to develop workable paradigms that addresses the knowledge revolution and the challenges the future workforce would need to address. Unless it happens, education and employability cannot be correlated.