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The answer: an inadequate and outdated educational system.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?
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