दृष्टिकोण – Indra's Viewpoint

Wanted a million teachers for the elementary level and half a-million at the secondary level.. Great numbers for the unemployment scene! Will the Next Gen take a note of it and be a good teacher and help making India a superpower in its own right?

I was stunned to see this number in an article in Business Today. India in hurry to cash on with its demographic dividend will need teachers for all levels and for all subjects. Indians if qualified and skilled will fill up the vacancies all around the globe and perhaps on other planets too as and when that gets inhabited.

And interestingly, one can be freelancer, a self-employed tutor or a big entrepreneur in education sector.

The better ones will have good entry salaries. The private school chains are even today ready to pay up to Rs 30,000 a month to fresh primary school teachers. It appears to me a dream run for teachers. My great primary teacher, Ganga Dayal Pandey used to get just Rs 15 in village school and my grandfather even at the end of his teaching career was getting a little over Rs 100 a month in a school run by a Birla’s company.

As reported, India plans an investment of $400 billion in education over the next decade. India will see at least 30,000 new colleges and between 800 and 900 universities.

But the leadership and administration of education sector will have to appreciate the need of quality education and must not replicate only the poor quality institutions that are in majority.

According to an independent expert assessment, less than 10 per cent of the current teachers are worth hiring, and 80 per cent of the total in profession chose to become teachers because they had no other choice.

The country will need a huge number of good teachers training institutes and few research institutes for education that keep on innovating the system. The existing teachers training facilities simply cannot meet the quantitative and qualitative requirement of the country on move.

According to government estimates, India has a shortage of 800,000 teachers in primary and upper primary schools. Over the next 10 years, secondary schools will have to add 500,000 teachers.

One can easily imagine the requirements of the teachers at various levels for the colleges and universities that are being planned to increase the percentage of students going for higher education from existing level of 12% to the level of other developing and developed economies of the world that goes up to 60% and more.

ITIs, polytechnics, and trade schools for specialized skills will again need teachers in abundance to meet the replacement requirements of the existing 5,975 ITIs for craftsmen training. Moreover, 1,500 new ITIs and 5,000 Skill Development Centres are being planned. Surprisingly, the present capacity for training instructors for the trade schools is only 1,100 trainers per year in its six instructor training institutes run by Directorate General of Employment and Training (DGET).
Even as on today, IITs are short of 1,284 teachers, when in years to come almost all states will have an IIT. IIMs have similar situation.

So it’s going to be the teachers’ decade for India to lead. And why anyone should complain about unemployment with so huge a potential in just one sector?

Can digital technology or Internet take care of the shortages of teachers? All experts be it the education minister or Sam Pitroda are for using all forms of technology to impart education. According to estimates, around 40,000 schools in India have adopted 2D multi-media technology in the last five years, a long way to go, for there are 1 million schools in India with 5 million classrooms. Technocrats are talking of using 3D. Lessons in biology, geography and chemistry are especially believed to have a better impact on children using 3D. Many other technologies are also in use and will come to aid the teaching. And many perks, incentives and awards are getting added to motivate the teaching community. Who knows one day some business house such as one of Premji, Ambani or Tata may initiate an award of Rs 1 crore for the outstanding teachers of the country?

It will certainly make the life of a teacher easy but can’t eliminate him. Will the community take the advantage of the vacuum?

I never knew of the SC scare about China poising to overtake India in English proficiency. And that it may take away the leadership of Indians’ globally recognized advantages in IT/BPO sector. Does India aim to depend on one sector so much so to appear helpless without English?

The annual audit report by Pratham, the well-known education NGO, reported on Friday has added fuel to the scare. As reported in the audit report, the ability to read and comprehend English varied wildly across India and only 43.8% of Class 1 kids could read the alphabets, even in big capital letters.

I don’t know if the country as whole has switched over to English as medium of instruction. However, with the popularity of English medium schools growing exponentially, it will happen very soon. Proficiency in English will require the kids to be in schools and hostels with English as a mandatory communication language between the inmates. I don’t know if India can put so much of its resources for propagating English.

Surprisingly, as reported, ‘in the case of English, performance improves after class V. Till class V many states show the falling trend of students either able to read words or sentences. It can be gauged from the fact that while in class V the all-India average of students who can read sentences is 25.7%; by class VIII it goes up to 60.2%.’ It appears to be pretty logical. With good teachers, teaching practices and technological aids, the proficiency in English can be made up fast effectively. Moreover, along with the knowledge of the English language, the need is to learn the soft skill of modulation and mannerism for effective communication.

My main worry is about mathematics where it’s only marginally better. Just 69% of class 1 students could recognize numbers between one and nine. But things get worse as kids go up to higher classes. By class II, the national average of children who can recognize numbers between 11 and 99 declines to 54.6. And by class V, percentage of children who can do division comes down to 38%.

Perhaps, India lacks better trained and motivated teachers, and the government, NGOs as well as private entrepreneurs must do their best to improve the quality of teachers. Unfortunately because of poor teaching quality at schools, more and more parents are getting totally dependent on private or organized tuitions. And naturally, it requires a support for the children from the deprived class where the parents are neither educated enough to help their children nor having resources for increasing cost of tuitions.

However, according to the audit, as many as 96% children in the age-group of 6-14 are in schools. Thus the access to education has dramatically improved. But the quality of education being imparted is a big question and requires solution and too fast. Let the government work to eliminate the dropping outs before completing class XII or at least Class X that can get them into trade schools easily. For anyone wishing to have a good enough employment must be proficient at least in English communication and working knowledge of computer application.

More important is the acceptance of English by Dalit leaders. Some leaders of Dalits including Mayawati see English as social leveler.

But another news item is more shocking. A good number of the diplomats-in-making get selected in Indian Foreign Services by writing in regional language, particularly Hindi. And that according to report demand a special training for developing their skill of English that is essential for working in foreign office assignments abroad.

Let the people at large not listen to politicians and regional leaders with vested interests and learn as many foreign languages as possible to have better opportunity for prosperity in this globalized scenario.