India needs a new education vision
Mass migration for further education and jobs is now the obsession with Indians!
Indian democracy is world’s biggest! So, we need more bold initiatives in sciences and technology and creative arts, culture and innovations. See, what a tiny European country like Croatia (where is it?) has done! Where are our young geniuses?
You see education is both a soft area as well as a hard one. Today, education has spread fast and almost every Indian village has access to a primary school. We can say with some confidence that education has become a mass movement. This is welcome and must create much good for the welfare of the people. As far as the elementary education is concerned; this segment of education has become a mass movement and must contribute to the general well-being of people and must be contributing to the health, general awareness and economic advancement of the people, more so in the lower social category of the poorer sections of society. But then there are other aspects of education.
The quality of education is another important issue. So are other segments – the college education, the technical education and the so-called higher education. There are complicated issues in the higher education sector. If you go to a state like Tamil Nadu you see the very unhealthy expansion of technical institutions like engineering colleges in hundreds, if not in thousands. You can almost walk into an engineering college in TN or AP and get accepted without even getting check-up for your previous education! Such is the drive in commercialisation.
The current status of Indian education is such that besides the coaching institutes there are certain historical trends. One dominant trend is that Indian students, besides the Chinese ones, some few lakhs of Indian and Chinese students every year migrate for further higher education so that they get a status-oriented degree and also, hopefully, jobs. As per the statistics cited by us already, to UK and USA alone something like 7,57,681 students had gone to the two countries, namely, UK and USA every year (here the figures are for 2019-2020 academic year alone). And the outgo runs to about billion dollars, the revenue fall last year owing to the Covid 19 was 4 billion dollars! This is so much of precious foreign exchange outflow.
May be, keeping this reality in mind, the Delhi State government’s education minister Manish Sisodia has spoken at the North Zone Vice-Chancellors meet. Mr. Sisodia has deplored on the “brain drain”.
Now the Indian education sector is facing a new crisis. The crisis is about the post- New Education Policy) scenario! How to prevent the wastage of very valuable human resources.
Also one more example is we have migrated more towards USA and now a sort of minor power in Information Technology and related areas. But see, how Europe, though composed of smaller countries now have learnt to create new innovations, say, electric car technology and surprise the world! From the very small country, like Croatia, one young innovator, name: a 33 year old youngster, Mate Rimac, had produced the world’s fastest car! The hyper car! This is like Tesla’s Elon Musk! The Europeans don’t have that obsession like us, Indians, to migrate for education and jobs! They stay at home and create innovations. Our education must create this mindset. This is the new message for the post-NEP Indian education scenario!