The Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh in one of his recent speeches observed that the Indian higher education system is in serious crisis. The concern raised by him assumes significance as education has a direct impact on the growth of the Indian economy on a long term basis. When we look at the Indian education system from one angle, it might seem so perfect with thousands of Indian graduates working with prestigious organizations across the world. When we look at the Indian education much more closely and critically, we can observe that the real situation of the Indian education system is not at all encouraging. The Indian education system cannot be generalized based on the position held by those who graduate from leading institutions in India such as IITs and IIMs.

Demand not met

Those who have conducted studies on the Indian education system have found out that human resources are being wastedand majority of the Indian graduates are unemployable. There is not enough supply of skilled and talented employees to meet the demand from the industry. Diminishing quality in teaching is one prime factor attributed to this decline of education standard in India. There is also lack of meaningful research in the Indian colleges and universities. In a global ranking of the universities recently published, only IIT Bombay managed to be in the top 300 institutions list.

There are three important drawbacks with the Indian higher education system which we need to understand before we go further to take measures to improve the same.

Drawbacks in Indian higher education system

Teachers with vast experience in the Indian education say that the education system in India is failing to nurture the thinking capability of the students. Compared to the western countries, the Indian education gives more prominence to exams and grades compared to the depth of learning and strengthening of basic fundamental knowledge in different streams of study. This tends to reduce the resourcefulness and the academic confidence of the students over a period of time.

The three important drawbacks usually associated with the Indian higher education system are:

Emphasis to Engineering and Technology courses

The Indian higher education system is a combination of government funded institutions and private institutions. A major portion of the Indian students seek admission in private education institutions and majority of the private institutions are in the area of engineering and technology, mainly offering IT related courses. In India, all the top engineering colleges are stand alone institutions, where students are offered areas of specializations in the field of engineering and technology.

Such a system is in direct contrast with that which is followed in the developed countries such as US. In the United States, the leading engineering colleges form a part of a university which also has colleges in the area of subjects other than engineering. They give more importance to interdisciplinary programmes which exposes the students and the faculty to an environment which encourages them to make contributions to different fields.

But in the Indian context, the engineering colleges with a narrow outlook will not be able to offer such an atmosphere. To make the condition worse, the Indian government is encouraging the setting up of such standalone engineering colleges, rather than expanding the universities. This will for sure help in increasing the number of engineering graduates, but what will be the fate of research and cross disciplinary learning in these institutes. The focus on such engineering colleges does not contribute to the creation of knowledge. The top engineering colleges in India which includes the IITs and NITs are too small and narrow focused limiting their potential to become world class research institutes.

Centralized Policy making and improper funding

Even though most of the Universities in the country enjoy a great level of autonomy in terms of curriculum and administration, it the central government that directly or indirectly regulates the supply of fund. The government has imposed restrictions on the universities in the matter of fee structures and the compensation to highly performing teachers. To develop a better research institute requires high quality professors, who are highly paid. But in India, there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that highly performing professors are well rewarded. This is the important reason for the migration of highly qualified professors to developed countries.

In addition to this, there is discrimination by the central government in providing financial assistance to universities in the country. For instance, the Indian Institutes of Technology enjoys 7 to 8 times more financial assistance than any other engineering colleges that is out of the IIT category. The IITs represents only a very small portion of the Indian engineering students’ community and they are given more funds, while others are left to look after themselves.

Too much importance attached to examinations

The unwanted importance on examinations has been highlighted by C N R Rao, Head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. He has described tests as a menace and says that we in India have an examination system instead of an education system. In India we need an education system, where there is only one examination before joining for different courses in colleges.

Rao has advised the Prime Minster to have a relook at the examination system that covers the students’ life. In one’s life, there are many exams such as entrance exams at primary level, term examinations, final examination, semester exam, entrance exam and the list goes on. He says that students lose the excitement in studies after writing exams, particularly in the case of JEE for IITs. It is one of the toughest exams across the world and the students suffer too much to clear the exams and those who do not get admitted in IITs get tired and their performance goes down.

In India there is not even a single institution or university that can be compared with the best institutions or universities in the developed countries. The government should initiate steps on a war footing to develop such institutions in India so that skilled manpower will be available in India which can really compete with the global work force.

Move from examination to education system

To summarize the thoughts here, we need to think about how we can transform our examination system to an education system which is targeted at overall development of knowledge base of students than limiting them to specific narrow focused disciplines.