This is a continuation of my modest proposal for making India 100 percent literate within three years, Part 1, and Part 2.
I am a firm believer in the use of technology for development, including information and communications technologies (ICT). There is an urgent need for economic growth and development and unless we use the best possible tools available anywhere in the world, we are unlikely to solve the problems which confront us.
Continue reading “A Modest Proposal — Part 3”
Today I continue exploring my modest proposal for making India 100% literate. One may exclaim “How can a proposal which seeks to spend $60 billion be considered modest!?” It is a modest proposal considered in relation to the task at hand. We have around 400 million (give or take a hundred million) illiterate humans living in this day and age within the boundaries of India. It is not a small number. Educating one person at the cost of $200 is not an extravagent sum. What I am outlining is a way to use the modest amount efficiently and effectively so as to lay the foundation for a true transformation of India. Continue reading “A Modest Proposal — Part 2”
In yesterday’s musings on whether education promotes development, I had promised to outline a proposal for making India 100 percent literate within three years. Here is the modest proposal. Continue reading “A Modest Proposal for Making India 100 Percent Literate within Three Years”
Back in February I had examined the matter of why education is underprovided in India. My insistence that basic education was a necessity for development prompted Alok Mittal to ask about the connection between economic development and education. Continue reading “Does Educational Spending Promote Growth?”
A friend of mine, who was a fellow grad student at UC Berkeley, gave me as a gift Michael Bishop’s How to Win the Nobel Prize [Harvad Univ Press 2003]. “In 1989 Micheal Bishop and Harold Varmus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their discovery tha normal genes under certain conditions can cause cancer”. I’d like to quote from the chapter, People and Pestilence, because it is relevant to my obsession with India’s population problem. Continue reading “Readings: “How to Win the Nobel Prize””
In the last three posts, I went on about the need to adopt innovations whereever we find them. There is nothing new under the sun. No problem we face is novel. Someone somewhere has encountered and solved every problem we face today. We have to have the smarts to understand what ails us, and then go out and find the solution.
Let’s discuss education. India has the largest collection of illiterates and semi-literates in the whole universe. India is also very poor and therefore cannot afford the luxury of going the traditional route as regards education. The tradition route of having fancy classrooms and well-paid teachers is beyond the reach of the majority. What is the way out, then?
Here is a comment by Bob Wyman which he left recently at Rajesh Jain’s Emergic weblog:
You wrote:”1. Education: Education is perhaps the most important investment that people can make in their future.”
India is *NOT* taking advantage of some very cheap and simple ways to spread education throughout the country. The most glaring example is that there is virtually no “educational television” available in India — even though TV has a surprisingly high penetration in India. For “schools without teachers”, one solution might simply be to install TV sets, hire “teaching assistants” and have the India’s *best* teachers broadcast from a central site. The teaching assistants would then keep order in the classroom, issue standardized tests, etc. This is, of course, not the ideal way to teach. However, it is much better than doing nothing. We have gained, in many countries, a tremendous amount of experience in teaching without teachers. Television, Radio, etc. have all been successfully used provide “distance learning” to students in the Australian outback, the Alaskan wilderness or some of the more remote parts of Africa. The fact that there aren’t enough teachers shouldn’t prevent teaching from happening — it should only change the method for deliverying the teaching. In fact, if one takes seriously the suggestion that only India’s best teachers should be used in educational TV, it is even possible that students “forced” to learn over TV would be better taught than some who had their own teachers.
Rajesh and I have proposed pretty much the same idea in a separate paper which was presented at a conference in Sydney last July. The idea was to create first-class content and then distribute it using the most cost-effective ICT tools, and have the “last mile” delivery done at the village level.
Bob added a very important bit that I am ashamed to say that I had not thought about. I am ashamed because I should have thought of that considering a number of things. I have spent over 20 years in the US, many of which were in university campuses. I am confident that as much as I learnt in universities, I leant a great deal from the excellent public radio and television in the US. I am more than familiar with the content available in radio and TV there — I swear by it. The most logical thing would have been for me to propose that we beg, buy, borrow or steal some of that content and translate it appropriately for educating our people in India. But it was Bob who wrote another comment on Rajesh’s blog and said:
You wrote: “The challenge lies in the creation of content.” NO!, NO!, NO!
Educational Content development is notorious for consuming vast quantities of money and producing little. To get started, with a reasonable budget, you MUST accept that you can not reach everyone on day one. Do first what CAN be done. So, exploit the vast quantities of recorded content (TV, Radio, etc) that exists in English in the US, England, Canada, Australia, etc. Billions of dollars worth of content has been produced by schools, non-profits, and governments and much of it is easily and cheaply obtained. Use this content first to establish the concept and the network and to convince people of the value of the idea. Only after you have exploited this material to its fullest extent should you get involved in the exceptionally expensive process of developing new, original content. While English language content may not be ideal and may not reach the full breadth of students desired, English is the second language in India and there are a vast number of students who would be! nefit from content in English.
With English language content, you could create a real “educational TV” network for India for little more than the cost of a tape recorder in one of the cable-TV head-end offices and someone to change tapes every half-hour or so. The real challenge would be the politics of getting a channel assigned and dealing with those who insist on coverage of vedic astrology… Nonetheless, the cost of such an effort can be kept to such a low level that it should be embarrasing to anyone to oppose it. Start small and then grow. Use English first and expand over time only as your budget allows.
Thank you, Bob, for that excellent recommendation.
I have had the misfortune of seeing what is on Indian TV. There is standard Indian stuff — song and dance and movies (with more song and dance.) Then there is Indian news and some other stuff such as sports. Then there are the imports. Among imports there is news (BBC, CNN, etc) and then there is good stuff such as Discovery and nature channels. Then we have the average American crappy sitcoms such as Friends (although I confess that I really really like Will & Grace, especially the character, Karen in it). But for real disgusting stuff, you have American wrestling. If we have the spare bandwidth for Wrestle Mania, I cannot fathom why we can’t have a 24-hour educational channel.
Like they say on TV, more to come. I will continue this one tomorrow.
Rajesh Jain is continuing on his series of posts on As India Develops. His focus is on education and it set me thinking.
India is a land of opportunities. By that I mean, that we have so much to accomplish, so much to get done, so much has been neglected for so long, that everywhere we look, we find things that need to be done. There is a veritable surfeit of opportunities and one has a hard time figuring out where to begin. The whole set of opportunities is overwhelming. More so because we have severe resource limitations. So much to do, and so little to do it with. Consequently, one has to prioritize the tasks. To my mind, one issue wins hands down when it comes to priority. It is education.
Continue reading “Education as the linchpin”
This is a rant. Displaying equanimity in the face of adversity is an admirable quality. I am afraid that there are times when one has to give vent to one’s true feelings and come out openly and call a steaming pile of excrement a steaming pile of excrement without mincing words. I am refering to the recent Supreme Court decision to support the reduction of fees for the IIMs from Rs 1.5 lakhs to Rs 30,000.
Today’s Times of India editorial calls it a senseless subsidy. {In the original draft, I had expressed my opinion of the Supreme Court in blunt language. A friend called up to say that in India one is liable to be thrown in jail for doing so since it a non-bailable offense. It seems that one cannot freely express one’s opinion of the President of India and the judges of the Supreme Court. I don’t know for sure but this must be the legacy of the British — royalty being above criticism. Be that as it may, I am removing the honest criticism from here and publishing it elsewhere where one can freely express one’s opinion.}
India is poor by choice. The policy of subsidizing higher education and neglecting primary education is one such policy choice that has condemned India to being a poor third-world irrelevant nation which has the highest number of impoverished illiterates in the universe.
We are poor by choice. We don’t need adverse external shocks to keep us illiterate and poor; India’s leaders and its courts will do the job of keeping India a chronically ailing over-populated collective of starving illiterates without any help from abroad.
The importance of primary education cannot be overstated — ever. No amount of India Shining campaigns can paper over the fact that India is doomed unless it focuses on primary education. I have been writing about the shocking neglect of primary education and the regressive subsidy of higher education for years. (See Who Paid for my Education? for instance.) It is not rocket science. A moment’s reflection is all that it takes for one to realize the importance of primary education. Allow me to quote from Venkatesh Hariharan in a recent exchange at the India-gii mailing list:
… How can India be shining when we have [an education] minister who doesn’t care a damn for the pathetic lack of a primary education? The man is, instead, taking a sledgehammer and applying it diligently to what are the crown jewels of India–the IITs and IIMs. Our current success is IT is just a “flash in the pan,” whatever NASSCOM may say. We happened to be in the right place at the right time when the IT and BPO booms happened but to sustain it we need more than luck. In the knowledge economy, our lack of a primary education system is a serious handicap.
Many years ago, I met with MIT’s noted economist, Lester Thurow and he said that India’s lack of a primary education system was one of its biggest handicaps. I recently met him again for an extended interview that appeared in MIT’s Technology Review. Here are some excerpts from the interview:
- In the knowledge economy, Thurow says, countries that wish to stay ahead must pay great attention to education. “Ask yourselves this question–30 or 50 years from now what job will an illiterate do? By that time you will have robots to do what an illiterate does now.”
- “When we talk about the knowledge economy, we are not talking about just information technology or programming,” says Thurow. “Every job will have a big knowledge component. For example, in a modern steel mill, a worker is more likely to sit behind a computer screen than lift anything physically. When we are talking about knowledge workers, we are talking about any job that has a knowledge component.” Fewer and fewer jobs fall outside of that description, he says. Countries that aim to progress in the global economy therefore have to ensure that everybody becomes literate as fast as possible.
- According to Thurow, the lack of widespread, basic education is one of the reasons that India has problems competing with China. “The worst educated province in China is better than the best educated province in India. Indian universities are better than Chinese universities but more people are in Chinese grade schools than are in Indian grade schools. This will hurt India and you cannot allow this to continue in the long-run. You have a top-down strategy versus the bottom-up strategy that China has. You better have a strategy that gets everybody educated,” he says.He praised China’s approach of getting everybody educated up to the third grade, then to the sixth grade, tenth grade, twelfth grade and so on. Globalization strategies have to carry the masses with it or they would not succeed. A knowledge based economy is not one where only the elite get educated, he says.
Our education system, our national IT strategies are all deeply elitist. As a country, we need to broadbase our education system and leverage IT for the dispersion of knowledge. Instead, what we have are crumbling schools, absent (and often underpaid) teachers, and students who will emerge completely unprepared for the kowledge economy. And what we have is a thin elite layer that is happily using IT as a milch cow that showers dollars and pays scant attention to how it can be deployed for our country’s benefit. India shining? Not unless you are smoking pot!
When one ponders the factors that account for India’s backwardness, one is struck by how significant is the role of luck. It is sheer bad luck that India got saddled with mostly self-serving ignorant power-hungry narrow-minded short-sighted bunch of leaders and policy makers. How long it will be before the billion plus people of India find within them enlightened leaders is hard to tell. If ever there was a time for good leadership to emerge, now it is.
[I have written earlier on Pricing Management Education in this blog which looks at the arithmetic of subsidizing IIM education.]
Gary Becker, a Chicago economist, has an opinion piece in the Business Week of Feb 16th titled What India can do to catch up with China.
Unsurprisingly, he makes the point that education is the primary requirement for India to lift itself out of grinding poverty.
To compete effectively in world markets, India needs to expand its secondary school education. It also has to vastly improve its health services. There is abundant evidence that returns on such investments in India’s human capital would be high.
Economists are deservedly known to disagree on many issues. But on one matter there is consensus: the absolute necessity of an educated population for an economy to develop. This fact has been known for ages by almost all who have ever pondered the question of economic development and growth. The puzzle therefore is to explain why education is broadly neglected in India. What is it about education that makes it a scarce good in any poor economy? I believe that there are two factors that explain this unfortunate phenomenon. First, education is a public good. And second, the socially optimal provisioning of public goods require collective action. India is particularly prone to a failure of collective action, which in turn leads to an under-provisioning of public goods, including the most fundamental of public goods — education.
It is important to distinguish between public goods and private goods. To start off, public goods are not goods that are provided by the public sector, although the public sector is often required to provide public goods. What makes a good a public good is not who provides it but rather the nature of the good itself. Public goods are best defined as goods that are not private goods. And private goods are those goods that are rival, excludable and do not have externalities in consumption. By contrast, public goods are nonrival, non-excludable, and have positive consumption externalities. These are terms that need to be defined precisely so that we can reason further why a collective action problem leads to an under-educated population. Only by fully understanding the causes of the failure can be begin to find a solution to the problem. I hope to investigate this more in the days to come.
This is a continuation of my previous post on HRD and management institutes. I had ended that post with the recommendation: Increase fees to be more aligned to the fees for comparable schools around the world and provide student loans to all students who require it to pay for their IIM education.
Continue reading “Pricing Management Education”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 