Utkarsh Mehra Blog

              Flaws in indian education system

Academicians and scholars have criticized the existing education system in India as it presents an obsolete but functional entity that has been little evolved in the last so many decades. There are many flaws in Indian education system and they are quite visible even by having a cursory look.

To a large extent, the Indian college system does not link classroom learning with career options

Without exception, a student joins a college in India to build a better life for himself / herself and his / her family. Long term career growth is something that is the ultimate goal of everyone joining a college. For some people, that translates directly to money: the salary package that a college will equip one to command after graduation. For some people, that translates to being able to learn enough about one aspect of their core discipline to be able to contribute meaningfully to research and knowledge in their field. For some people, that translates to learning the tools necessary to make the world a better place.

Flexibility is majorly lacking in India’s college education system, at all levels

There are three main ways in which the Indian education system at the college level is far less flexible than that in the world’s best education systems:

1.   At the undergraduate level, the choice of major discipline is usually (in India) made before the bachelor’s degree starts. Most of those who study in India are conditioned to thinking that the choice of major has to be made immediately after Class 12, at an age when exposure to what a degree actually entails is understandably low. Making an informed decision at that age is almost impossible; the fact that this decision impacts the overall performance and satisfaction levels of a student for three to five years makes the decision also potentially dangerous. 

2.   The number of compulsory courses is usually higher in India, and the level of customization is much lower than it is abroad. Flexibility in an academic curriculum is hugely increased when the student can fill up his / her basket of courses with many different combinations of interesting courses. In India, at least for the first few semesters of any course at any level, the number of required courses is large; this has a cascading effect down the line where, even if the number of electives is higher in the last few semesters, the level of interest of the students has already reduced to a level where the newfound flexibility is not exploited to the maximum possible extent.

3.   Interdisciplinary flexibility is either lacking or imperfectly developed. From the seemingly simple task of taking many courses from a discipline that is not your major to the difficult task of incorporating a minor program or a minor degree into your portfolio, most Indian universities will not allow you to do either. This is for multiple reasons: many Indian universities do not have the full range of departments, and large numbers and relatively small Teaching Assistant and Lecturer / Professor populations make it logistically difficult to implement true interdisciplinary flexibility.

Funding for college education in India lags behind that abroad

At the highest level, India’s public universities do not have access to the funding pool that top universities worldwide do. This impacts both the number of faculty members, and the quality of faculty members that might be attracted to a university in India, but reject a position due to the salary being lower than in competing institutions in other countries. More dangerously, in the long term, the policies that decide funding for R&D in Indian universities have historically kept it much lower than in other countries. For example, R&D funding at universities as a percentage of GDP is 0.6% to 0.7%, and both these figures lag far behind that in developing economies. Therefore, it is difficult for R&D in Indian universities to make the kind of leap needed to make it competitive on a worldwide level.

As a consequence of lower funding, the number and quality of professors suffers

The R&D output is affected by low funding, and this causes a long-term low global ranking for even our top universities. However, there is a much more immediate effect of the university funding crunch that makes itself felt at a daily level in every college classroom in India: there are just not enough qualified high level professors in our universities.