In India, we have many examples of outstanding performance by students both in India and in foreign Universities. But the number of such students is not the exact representation of the present primary education system in India. There exists lack of reforms in the primary education system, which has affected the quality of education.

India is rich with talents

For example, a student from Kolkata has made it to the list of toppers in the economics course at the Cambridge University. The student named Mahima Khanna has won the prestigious Stevenson prize, which was earlier won by Amartya Sen in 1956 and by Parthadas Gupta in 1967. There are even many who make it to the top ranks in many of the foreign universities. This are some thing that makes every Indian happy.

We have much more to achieve

What keeps us worrying is that, on one end we have outstanding students, while on the other hand we have a poor primary education system. We should think whether we should be happy with the achievements that few Indians make or should we think about serious reforms in the primary education system. An important problem with Indians is that we get satisfied with too little too early.

India has produced some of the outstanding intellectuals such as C V Raman, Rabindranath Tagore, Abdul Kalam etc. But now it is high time for us to stop and think whether the achievements in the field of education can justify the lack of reforms in the educational sector.

Reason for the drop in quality in our primary education

There has been a drop in quality of education and lack of proper infrastructure in the Indian education system after the middle class stopped preferring the government schools. The government schools today are not getting proper attention as the number of students has reduced drastically. The Navodaya and other central schools which are a part of the government institutions has been able provide finest education in the country which help them to outperform any other schools in the private sector. So it is clear that the government is capable of delivering quality primary education, but it has failed to deliver in the case of government schools. With the lack of support from politicians and government servants, the primary education has reached a point where the quality of education offered is very low.

The outstanding performances are a result of hard work and commitment

It may surprise us how such outstanding performers emerge from such a poor primary education system.The credit goes to the hard working students and committed teachers who are dedicated in bringing out better results. So the question that we should ask ourselves is “what should we do to turn around these schools so that they offer quality education to the students and thus contribute to the development of the country”. We have a very good higher education system to boast off, and most of the highest performing institutes do fall in the government category. So in spite of having such a good higher education system, what is preventing our government from adopting the same with primary education?

How to improve the primary education system?

One way to bring about reforms in the primary education is by making it compulsory for the politicians and government employees to send their children to government schools. This will make the primary schools gain attention. As a result important requirements such as resources, infrastructure, development of new content, and training of teachers will automatically follow. Waiting for improvement in quality with out such a reform is not going give positive results. So until such a reform is brought in, the government will have to spend highly on developing quality content for different subjects.

India has a pool of high quality higher education institutes such as IITs, IIMs, NITs, IIScs, and AIIMS etc. which produce top class professionals. As a part of improving the primary education in India, government should think of making use of such professional institutes. Students from these institutes should be motivated to develop study materials for primary school children. They should be asked to develop materials on the subject that they liked during their school days in the form of multimedia or animations in different local languages that they are comfortable with. This will lead to development of content which is of high quality which can be reviewed by the teachers or some one else who is in charge. These materials can be then uploaded to the internet which can be accessed by the students using their own computers or can be downloaded at each and every post office in the country. In India we have more the 1.5 lakh post offices across the country which connects 6.5 lakh villages. So by making use of the post offices the content can be delivered across schools in 6.5 lakh villages.

The benefit and barriers for this approach

With free availability and easy access to quality content, the teachers will be able to improve the learning outcome drastically. Since this idea is not developed by any committee authorized by the government or by the planning commission, it will be considered as not attention worthy. Another reason that the government may raise is the lack of resources for developing a platform for posting such content and reviewing them. In our country there is always scarcity of resources when it comes to matters of the disadvantaged. In addition to this government introduces reforms and take steps that will fetch votes and quite often such reforms are directed at those who do not really deserve it.

Now conditions have started to change. Many of the voters have started to give importance to quality of education and so they cast their votes based on the efforts made by the political parties in improving the quality of education. It is proven that Indian students are talented and can achieve more if they have easy access to quality primary education.