India has been experiencing episodes of rapid growth since the 1980s, but the growth always seem accompanied by a question mark. Thus, V. Anantha Nageswaran and Gulzar Natarajan write in their report Can India Grow? Challenges, Opportunities, and the Way Forward (published by Carnegie India, November 2016):
“Indeed, in the past twenty-five years, every time India achieved a slightly higher economic growth rate, it was followed by some combination of an external financing deficit, a rise in nonperforming assets in the banking system, a high rate of inflation with consequent currency overvaluation, and other problems. This was the case at the end of the 1970s, at the end of the 1980s, and again in 2012–2013.”
A main theme of the report the problems that India needs to overcome to lay a firm foundation for sustained economic growth into the future. While the report often takes a moderately optimistic glass-half-full tone, discussing what policies are being undertaken, I found that I was more struck by the glass-half-empty interpretation–that is, the depth and severity of many of these issues. Here are some examples (with footnotes omitted throughout for readability).
India’s education system has gotten children into school, but is failing to teach them
“If education were only about schools, about physical infrastructure, materials, and ensuring universal enrollment, then India has succeeded spectacularly. Every large population center has a school; most schools have buildings and teachers assigned; and students have study materials. It was hoped or assumed that once the schooling inputs were in place, education and learning outcomes would somehow follow automatically. But this has proved not to be the case. Lant Pritchett, an education researcher with Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, has evocatively described the situation as `schooling ain’t learning.’ And schooling without learning leads to very poor educational outcomes, a finding supported by the 2014 Annual Status of Education Report, the largest nongovernmental household survey undertaken in rural India:
“`51.9% of Class 5 children in rural India cannot read a Class 2 text; only 25% of children in Class 5 and 46.8% in Class 8 could read simple English sentences; just 25.3% of Class 3 children could do a two-digit subtraction, 26.1% of Class 5 children and 44.1% of Class 8 students could do division. …’
“A 2010 study by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai found that only 10 percent of new graduates and 25 percent of graduates of engineering and MBA programs had adequate skills to be employable. Numerous other surveys have confirmed the results.”
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