Greg Mankiw has a lively discussion on his blog about the best non-textbook book on economics. Some great recommendations, there.
This got me thinking about my college education in India, in the 1980s. The economics textbooks we used then (Dutt & Sundaram, KK Dewett and such like) were so terrible that just thinking […]
This is an op-ed piece of mine that appeared in the March 8th issue of Mint.
Unknown Education Revolution
There is a silent and telling revolt against the poor performance of government schools
Naveen Mandava
Walking around the hot summer streets of Sangam Vihar—Delhi’s largest […]
The American Heritage dictionary defines “hoopla” as
1. Boisterous, jovial commotion or excitement.
2. Extravagant publicity: The new sedan was introduced to the public with much hoopla.
3. Talk intended to mislead or confuse.
Reading about the PanIIT 2006 brought that word to mind.
There will be much […]
This is a true story. The faculty member involved emailed me a few days ago. Scene: an IIT professor interviewing a potential candidate for PhD in a technical subject.
“Suppose you have two integers, each between 0 and 5. You add them up. What is the range of their sum?”
“It can vary.”
“Sure, it can vary, but […]
As a follow up to Edwards post titled “English language schools in Karnataka” yesterday, heres an update from the Indian Express. 15 of 30 current cabinet ministers in Karnataka send their children to, well, English medium schools.
The point of contention behind closing the schools is apprently a rule dated 1994 that mandates that “children attending […]
As a practitioner and student of public policy for the last four years, I have been pleasantly surprised at the outrage expressed in the reservations issue. Maybe I have become un-necessarily skeptical. The Supreme Court has intervened and ordered the government to table the facts related to the proposed increase of OBC reservations.
A […]
I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. — Stephen Jay Gould
The criminal neglect of education, in my considered opinion, is the most important charge upon which the policy makers of […]
For long Delhi had an “Essentiality Certificate” (EC) requirement for opening a school. Moreover, the number of ECs were limited depending upon school-eligible population in each district of Delhi. The ostensible motive was to regulate competition and allow only schools which were deemed “essential”. So that existing schools did not suffer the consequences of the […]
Shortages and Nehruvian socialism go hand in hand. Just take scooters, for instance. You could not just take scooters some years ago, actually, thanks to the quota permit license control raj. You had to wait for years before you could lay your hands on one. You could jump the queue if you paid with “hard […]
George Bernard Shaw with characteristic cynicism noted that a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. Regardless of their specific stripes, all Indian governments, because they are “democratically” elected, naturally solve the problem of identifying the Peters and the Pauls by a numbers game: Pauls must outnumber […]
The sorry tale of free secondary education for the single girl child
Badri Sheshadri tells the story of how yet another item from the UPA government’s entitlement agenda fell flat for the want of, you guessed it, careful consideration.
A few months ago the Central Board of Secondary Education announced free secondary education for the single […]
Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian of the IMF have written an excellent op-ed in the Financial Times in which they diagnose a new problem, one they call the Bangalore Bug, and one whose symptoms have been addressed several times on this blog. I’ve reproduced the piece almost in full since I figured most of you […]
It is time to correct India’s lopsided education budget
Salaries in India, especially for skilled workers, are rising. This is almost invariably attributed to the projected shortage in the number of workers available to sustain the rapid growth in India’s IT, biotech and other services. Those alarmed by rising wages contend that this will make India […]
The Indian government permits IIMs to set up overseas campuses
IEB’s posted earlier about the woeful state of education in India. On that note, Sebastian Mallaby has an interesting column in the Washington Post about changes afoot in India’s educational system, courtesy the private sector…
..the Indian school system…has experienced a huge growth in private provision. Since the early 1990s the percentage of 6-to-14-year-olds attending […]
The answer: an inadequate and outdated educational system.
Ajay Shah writes
One of the key reasons why India is doing well today is the revolution in services exports, where white collar staff in India are plugged into globalisation, thanks to improvements in telecom. Today, there are probably a million people working in export-oriented IT […]
You could have one or more of the four kinds of accountability in education.
1. Bureaucratic accountability (sarkar will take care through rules and regulations)
2. Professional accountability (teachers and principals are educated and they will take care)
3. Performance-based accountability (the sarkar will take care through measurements of performance in tests)
4. Market accountability (if you don’t take care, I will take to somebody who cares)
Can China build proficiency in English faster than India can build infrastructure?