<b>Kanika Datta:</b> Schooled for underperformance

Earlier this week, reports of yet another private corporate group setting up a university on a plush campus in the National Capital Region provided an ironic contrast to the dismaying findings of a Delhi government assessment of school education that released Monday. If anything reflects the many conundrums in our education system, it is this. They matter because they have implications for jobs, the centrepiece of this regime's pre-election promises and the reason for its popularity among youthful voters.

The promoters of the new university employed all the familiar key words. It would provide "best-in-class" education in "world class" facilities, form partnerships with "leading global universities" and faculty and so on and so forth. These superlative cliches can readily be found in the plush promo brochures of hundreds of private universities that have come up since the 2000s to capture middle class India's growing demand and ability to pay for higher education. There are now more than 200 of them under University Grants Commission umbrella.

The language in the Delhi government's survey of 1,011 state schools, on the other hand, was prosaically pessimistic. It reported that the overwhelming majority of students in Class VI did not match Class II levels in basic academic. Seventy-four per cent of students could not read a paragraph from their Hindi textbooks and 75 per cent could not read a basic Class II-level English story. Worse, for a country that prides itself on its apparent math prowess, 67 per cent could not do basic three-digit/one-digit division.

These results are unlikely to shock many Indians, though they should. The ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) from Pratham, which provides the all-India picture of schooling and basic leaning levels, has offered depressing variations on this theme for some years. ASER's findings for all levels of schooling are even more worrying because, being a household-based survey, they capture both private and government schooling as well as those delivered by religious institutions.

If this is the quality of education being delivered at the school level by public and private sectors, what's happening to those students who stay the course (which is to say, they don't drop out) and enter the university system, many of them heading for those "world-class" corporate-promoted institutions.

India graduates 5 million students annually, which means that number is ready to join the workforce each year. But surveys by Aspiring Minds have shown that half of India's graduates and 80 per cent of engineering graduates are unemployable. The IITs and IIMs are excluded from this analysis because they are outliers to the general trend, though their global reputations do reflect skewed priorities when set against dismal schooling standards.

This is one dimension of the education challenge that has defied solutions by successive governments, despite some heroic efforts to get millions of children into school and keep them there - a 12 percentage point fall in overall school dropout rates since 2006-7 is testimony to this. The reason for the poor quality of education can be found in another set of statistics: The pupil-teacher ratio.

Between 2006-7 and 2013-14, this ratio has certainly improved at the primary and upper primary school level (from 44 to 28 in the first and 34 to 30 in the second). At the secondary school level, though, it has been almost static at 33 and 28. At upper secondary level - that is, when students are approaching their all-important school finals - the ratio has actually worsened from 37 to 40. To get an idea of the lag, Brazil and China have a pupil-teacher ratio of 15 and even Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh do better on this score, as they do at the primary level as well.

Statistics for the tertiary level are not available but it is possible to infer from the high "unemployability" numbers that the quality of teachers coming out of our education system couldn't be all that great either. So the persistent low quality of the education is creating a vicious cycle of underachievement that plays into the job market.

Bureaucrats involved in the education sector say the ASER findings are a little unfair because they do not account for the sheer numbers the government has to deal with. Keeping this large number of kids in school is the first challenge, they aver. Sure, but delivering a low quality of education will eventually create a social blowback too. How many youngsters will, for instance, be able to take advantage of the government's Start-Up India loans without the wherewithal of a decent basic education (after all, even college dropout Bill Gates had one)?

So far, governments have displayed less urgency about addressing this issue because there aren't enough jobs to go round - about one in three graduates up to the age of 29 are said to be unemployed. And corporate India is mostly disinclined to invest too much in skill development for the same reason. Which is why the growing cohort of "best-in-class" private universities may advertise their wares in lush terms, but they won't be contributing much towards making Indian youth acquire a more meaningful education.