Winning Shot: Education And Developing India

India.s recent economic growth rates have generated much optimism about its general social and economic development. But has there been accompanying progress in indicators of educational outcomes? How good are Indian educational achievements in relation to China.s, the country withwhich it is increasingly compared? What are the most significant developments in Indian school education and what has been the impact of various education policy initiatives? This paper presents a critical overview of the school education sector in India using newly released data and a survey of existing studies.

The story of India.s educational achievements is one of mixed success. On the down side, India has 22 per cent of the world.s population but 46 per cent of the world.s illiterates, and is home to a high proportion of the world.s out of school children and youth.

On the positive side, it has made encouraging recent progress in raising schooling participation. While the base of India.s education pyramid may be weak, it has emerged as an important player in the worldwide information technology revolution on the back of substantial (absolute) numbers of well educated computing and other graduates.

Indian educational achievements in international perspective

Table 1 presents India.s adult and youth literacy rates alongside equivalent figures for its regional neighbours, as well as for countries in the BRIC grouping (Brazil, Russian Federation, India and China). While India does well compared to Bangladesh and Pakistan, it lags substantially behind all the other BRIC countries and Sri Lanka. Indeed it is striking that its overall adult literacy rate is similar to and female adult literacy rate lower than that of Sub Saharan Africa.

The comparison with China is of particular interest and it shows India to be at a considerable educational disadvantage:

India.s adult literacy in the early 2000s was wholly 30 percentage points below China.s. Even focusing more narrowly at only the youth literacy rates, India.s disadvantage with respect to China is a large 22.5 percentage points.

India.s disadvantage vis a vis other countries in primary school participation rates is much smaller compared to that for youth literacy rates, since 93.4% of Indian elementary school age children were enrolled in school in 2006 according to ASER survey (Pratham, 2007). However, as

Figure 1 shows, at the secondary school level, India is again at a large disadvantage with respect to all three other BRIC countries where secondary enrolment rates are far above those predicted for countries at their levels of per capita GDP. Brazilian and Russian secondary school net enrolment rates are 27 percentage points higher than India.s. Figure 2 shows that India is more than 30 years behind China in terms of the proportion of the population with completed secondary and post secondary schooling.

Table 1

Adult and youth literacy rates

Adult Literacy rates (15+ year olds) Youth Literacy rates (15-24 year olds)
Total male female Total male female

Bangladesh 42.6 51.7 33.1 51.5 59.4 43.1

Pakistan 49.9 63.0 36.0 65.5 75.8 54.7

Sri Lanka 90.7 92.3 89.1 95.6 95.1 96.1

India 61.0 73.4 47.8 76.4 84.2 67.7

China 90.9 95.1 86.5 98.9 99.2 98.5

Brazil 88.6 88.4 88.8 96.8 95.8 97.9

Russian 99.4 99.7 99.2 99.7 99.7 99.8

World 82.2 87.2 77.3 87.3 90.5 84.1

Developing countries 76.8 83.5 70.1 84.8 88.6 80.9

Sub-Saharan Africa 61.2 69.5 53.3 72.9 77.8 68.3

Source: 2000-2004 data from the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO (2006).