Reviving the education system....

The new government that is going to be formed at the centre is going to be inundated with huge works of reforms and a plethora of expectation. And this time the expectations are going to be highest from the most crucial assets of the nation i.e. the youths.

It would not be a hypocritical thing to mention here that India is a nation of talent and talent resides in the mind of Indian youths and if the nation wants to progress indeed by leaps and bounds then the youth of the nation cannot be snubbed out. Youth of the nation today holds a deluge of expectation from the upcoming and this is evident from the fact that this time more than 150 million have voted in this recently concluded election of 2014. One of the expectations of Indian youth is of a good higher education system.

Today the most challenging problem that the whole Indian subcontinent faces is the lack of a sophisticated higher education system and that’s the main reason why most of the talented youths of India are in US or UK not in India. India’s higher education system nurtures more than 450 million youths of the nation but I am aggrieved to say that the quality education that needs to be allocated to such a crucial generation of the nation is unsatisfactory. Despite of progressing in all other fields of development, India has lacked excessively in reviving the higher education system and now this problem needs to be discussed with utter seriousness.

Today if we talk about good and high levelled institutions in India, then we are definitely facing a dearth of them. To quote an example, I would like to refer to the case of IITs. Every year more than ten lakh students give the Joint Entrance Exam with an aspiration to crack the IITs but what’s ludicrous is that we have only 15 IITs to cater their needs, the other problem that we face today is of a lack of well experienced and good teachers. The level of higher education has become so much uninspiring in India that now it’s pretty difficult to revamp it again, the other thing is of rote learning. Even today in various colleges, marks important more than concept and that’s the point where we are behind the American colleges. If you get to watch an MIT(Massachusetts Institute of Technology)  lecture and compare than with the lecture of an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), in the very first minute of the commencement of lecture, you would be convinced to say that no Indian institution is better than them. This is the main problem that again we face today. Now our budding engineers are able to unravel contemporary topics and problems but they are not able to create something new and interesting. And what’s more amusing is that we are not having any great institution teaching space science, biotechnology and aeronautical science. No good institution in India teaches these subjects (IIT has recently started teaching these subjects but has a long way to cover to become reliable for the students). Most important subjects like biotechnology have been neglected for a long time till now and this is also one of our worst goof ups.

Today the whole education system of India needs to be renovated if we want to halt the problem of brain drain and to again make sure that Indians get the best of it. Now the upcoming union government needs to effect some radical changes in order to get the best results.

First of all a government funding of educational institution should become a reality. Presently a lot of institutions face the problem of shortage of funding and that’s why these colleges are not able to manage good laboratories and well qualified teachers as per the student’s demand. The government can definitely play a huge role in funding these institutions and channelling them through an untainted governmental body to promote equality among different institution and also to help these institutions raise the bar of their teaching. In this respect we can learn from China which enabled the state funded policies for educational institutions and is now getting great results.

The other thing that the new government can try is of establishing more and more educational institutions in India and also negotiating with some international institutions to have their branches in India so that the Indian students could also see how education is imparted internationally in famous institutions like Harvard, Yale etc. With this the government can also arrange for internationally acclaimed teachers to come and teach at good institutions alike IIMs and IITs.

One more thing is to heavily exploit technology for the betterment of educational institutions. Today so much teaching technology is available through which the dissemination of information can be done easily. We can use a lot of advanced technologies in order to build up a digit environment in the classes to promote understanding of the concept and creativity among students.

If the upcoming government exercises these steps in the education system then a lot can change. We can still carve out a robust education system aimed at producing the highest and the best talents of the world, what we need is tampering of our wrong policies in order to enhance the education system.