Every 1 rupee invested in Health and Education gives us returns of 7 rupees according to the WHO. For crores of Indians, education is the only way out of a life of poverty and misery. Indeed, it is the only way India can get out of the low – middle income trap that other developing nations have fallen into. Education is also the key to social reforms, women’s rights, climate change mitigation, life expectancy, children’s health – pretty much every parameter of Quality of Life for all citizens. Let us first look at the state of Indian education and then zoom in to Pune. It is often said that the purpose of school education is to create good citizens.  While this is a lofty goal, the reality is that we are far from doing so.

In reality our education systems are systems of sorting students by their educational ability and achievement.  Most of our effort goes in Classifying students for higher education and then for jobs.  As this graph by researcher and writer Prof  Karthik Muralidharan shows, a vast number of  school students fall way behind their syllabus.

This gap increases  with each passing grade such that for many students there is absolutely no learning from 6th to 8th grade as they have fallen so far behind that they cannot cope.

Blue Line is where the students should be. Red Line is where they are on average https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/learning-levels-will-not-improve-by-spending-more-on-education/story-Ej6tQgP6f9JOTQi6HuvniO.html Indian education is in crisis. While much work has been done on the input side – government spending, building of schools and toilets, hiring more teachers (and much more needs to be done) – we struggle to arrive at definitions for good outcomes. The government spends 2.9% of our GDP (Union and State governments combined) on education, while countries like Vietnam spend over 4%. But unless we define what outcomes we want, much of the money will be a waste. Also we need to define outcomes so that we know what we are holding the system accountable for.  Apart from these old issues and challenges, we are now faced with the challenges of the digital world:

1. Young people with worse attention spans.
2. Cheap access to the world’s knowledge, but everybody is watching the same narrow things, living in their digital bubbles and echo chambers. Often filled with hatred and fake news.
3. Pornography is accessible to kids as young as seven years.

Skill based education: For a majority of kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, skill based education is mooted as a solution, as a quick entry into the workforce. But this idea does not take into account the socio-cultural reality of India. You see, getting a professional degree (Engineer, Doctor, Lawyer, MBA etc) is not just a way of earning a better living. As these professions were the bastion of the Savarnas for decades, for a majority of Bahujans this is the only way to transcend their caste.  There are a lot of great organisations and experts working to improve literacy, functional literacy, prevention of dropouts, focus on primary education etc. But much more needs to be done, especially by the state.

School Education in Pune: Dropping enrolments and increasing dropouts. Largely due to the lack of Govt English medium schools. Number of government Primary schools is greater than secondary schools The English medium ones still have better enrollment, but they end at grade 8. The only affordable English high schools are run by private players like Akanksha and Iteach. So no pathway to an English medium graduation.  There has been a growth of low cost private schools, because they are affordable. But they have worse infra than government schools. They offer the promise of English and also have more school days than government schools, which is important for working parents. 40% of Pune citizens live in slums. This is a vast number of children who are left behind with  inferior quality and quantity of education. The abysmal infrastructure, student – teacher ratio are all pressing problems, but the problem is much deeper than that.

A] Accountability of System:

1. Voucher system. What if we let the market dictate. You pay (poor) parents and allow them to choose schools. If nobody opts for a government school, then perhaps it should not exist. I’m not pro privatisation in the absolute sense. Rather, I’m pro-parent-choice. If parents could choose between more than one free school, how amazing would that be? The biggest stakeholders in education are parents. We need to explore voucher systems.
2. Put accountability systems in place for schools. Generate school report cards and publish them. Their budgets (public schools) and licenses (private schools) are not permanent and can be allotted as per their performance. If we cannot penalise bad performance, at least reward good performance. We must study the Delhi Model of government schools.
3. School Committees (Shala Samiti) of Parents + teachers + local representatives etc are defunct in many places. We need to replace these with the Mohalla Committee model for Education :

As we have mentioned before, the Mohalla Committees act as powerful checks and balances, accountability platforms for the System. The same Mohalla Committees can also take up the issue of quality of education in schools by regularly reviewing the enrollment and dropouts in their area, the functioning of the schools, fee structures and increase, enforcement of after school camps and programs for disadvantaged children and so on. There is no better way to induce good behaviour and outcomes than to have the collective pressure of all the citizens in that area on the schools and the education department.

 

B] Syllabus and Textbooks:

3. Our entire syllabus and textbooks are stuck in the 19th century. We are still stuck in the same fact based and rote based learning for exams cycle. Present educational institutions are aimed at gaining maximum marks or grades.

We do not focus on the most important subjects in our schools:  Critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. Digital skills.Financial literacy.  Social and emotional learning curriculum: SEL encompasses everything kids need for their mental and emotional well being. I have been speaking at the top corporates and colleges of Pune about mental and emotional well being and the idea of ‘happiness’. I have realised that this needs to be incorporated into schools. We should also explore See Delhi’s happiness curriculum.

News Literacy: How to deal with fake news and propaganda. All of these need to be added to our curriculum along with technology related hard skills like AI, Automation, Coding etc. Create and publish supplementary materials to the textbooks as getting these topics in to the mainstream textbooks – although highly critical – is a long term task that involves the state and national governments. But we as part of the Pune Model should not wait for that.

C] Teaching Methodologies:  Integrating technology into the education system can make learning more engaging and effective. Providing schools with digital resources, e-learning platforms, and educational apps will enhance students’ access to educational materials and interactive learning experiences. Ensuring schools have access to a stable internet connection is crucial for leveraging digital tools effectively.

Promoting innovative teaching methods such as experiential learning, project-based learning, and interactive teaching can significantly improve the understanding and retention of concepts among students.  I have been working on a project called ‘Kudachi Shala’ or ‘School for the Future’ that combines constructivism, Gandhi’s Nai Talim and the latest research on neuroscience and pedagogy to deliver 21st century education. Every Assembly constituency in Maharashtra needs such a project.  There is a lot of research that has happened in this field and many organisations like ours are working towards this. We need to enlist their support and get them to work for the city of Pune. But all of this means nothing unless we work on the most important part of the entire education system – the teachers.

 

D] Quality of teacher training Our teachers are some of the most hard working people. However the system has failed them completely by not creating a process for them to learn, grow and expand their own knowledge and skills. Teachers in the most reputed schools in the city havent updated their pedagogical skills and methods in decades – so the situation in government, semi government and small private schools can only be imagined. We have to create / run a comprehensive and cutting edge training program to bring our teachers into the 21st century. This along with accountability through the mohalla committees will bring about such a transformation that the world will sit up and take notice.

 

E] Apart from these fundamental initiatives we also need to look at:

1. We need to study the success of the Delhi model of education including the Specialized high schools.
2.  Allow for private public partnerships (PPPs) like Akanksha. ITeach, Aseema, Muktangan etc. Allow better quality private management. Refer to the US model of KIPP for example.
3. Maximally use government school buildings by holding classes and extra programs in the evenings. Create Spaces to study, learn new things, have fun, listen to stories. Evenings are the worst time in slums and most parents fight hard to keep their kids indoors.
4. Run Camps in bastis. Young people teaching younger people. Then more specialised camps (coding/ design) run in the neighbourhood government schools in the evenings. All slums have a government school near them.

I repeat – overhauling the school education is one of the biggest foundations of our country and definitely of our Pune Model. Failure to do so will have catastrophic effects on generations to come.

Higher Education: Education Pune’s reputation as the ‘Oxford of the East’ contrasts starkly with its struggling higher educational system marked by high fees, subpar quality, staff shortages, and elitist gatekeeping practices. The education framework remains outdated, primarily focused on rote learning and standardized testing, except for privileged segments.

Transforming this system necessitates uniting students, parents, teachers, and school & college administrations to devise innovative solutions. Corruption & political interference further exacerbates issues, impacting student admissions, accreditation, and certifications.  We have no IIT, IIM or AIIMS. We do not even have a large startup in the edu-tech sector.I speak at atelast a couple of colleges every month and meet thousands of students. My personal experience is that students from top tier colleges like ILS, COEP, Gokhale institute, Symbiosis, MIT are way ahead of students from smaller colleges. Even within these elite schools, students that come from smaller towns are way behind in all indices. Just like schools, our colleges are also ‘sorting godwons’ where students are sorted according to their existing abilities and then hawked to the private sectors.

Indians Studying Abroad Do you know how much money is spent by Indians every year in sending their children abroad to study? Direct spending on study abroad by Indian students has been pegged at US$47 billion for 2022. That figure includes tuition spending as well as housing and other living expenses. This figure was US$37 Billion in 2019 and is projected to reach as high as US$70 billion by 2025.

That is INR 5.6 lakh crore spent by Indians every year on education abroad for almost 20 lakh students. These are not just the super rich, even upper middle class parents are taking loans of 50-60 lakhs to do this.  While I am definitely not against getting an international education – mainly for the exposure and networking opportunities – but why cant India and specifically my Pune tap into this huge market? We need to have not 1 but many institutes that will be among the top 100 in the world. This would have a huge impact on everything else in Pune. We must work on this in mission mode as part of the

Pune Model. Apart from fixing school and college education, we need to focus on a completely neglected part of education as well. For the past few years I have been working with my father on creating leadership in all spheres of life under our Borderless Laboratory Project.

Society is in need of good  leaders in all spheres of life including political, social, media, civil society, bureaucracy, judicial, medical, industrial, educational etc but  there are no institutions to help create such  leaders. Unless we train the current generations who are already in the workforce to upskill and become leaders, we cannot take this city and country ahead.  And just creating leaders is not enough, every person at every level has to commit to continued learning. This can be done through online training, weekend classrooms but most importantly by coming together to learn from each other.

The Mohalla Committee can be a great platform to facilitate this training. I read Peter Senge’s seminal book “ The Fifth Discipline “ back in the early 90s when I was in school. The subtitle of this book from my father’s library was “The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. At age 13, it introduced me to “group problem solving using the systems thinking method in order to convert companies into learning organizations that learn to create results that matter as an organization.” Recently, I asked my friend and Pune IT honcho Anand Deshpande, Chairman of Persistent Systems, what his new years resolution would be for the city of Pune . This was part of my radio program where I am asking Punekars from all strata of society to come up with a resolution not just for themselves but also for their beloved city.

Anand said he would love for Pune to become a city of continuous learners, who would learn from each other.  I had articulated the idea of Pune as a city of innovation in my Tedx talk, which I qualified by saying that we need to also be the city of compassion where we are nice to each other when we fail, because otherwise we will be too afraid to try anything new. The city of Learning is the missing link in this chain.

We need to be a city of compassion so we are not afraid to fail. But before we can become the city of innovation, we must become the city of continuous learning, because innovation can happen only when we learn from our failures! Imagine the change we can bring about if we embrace this vision of City of Compassion – Learning – Innovation.

This is the city of Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule. It deserves to be a world leader in education.