No practical knowledge:

In schools and colleges, lots of attention is given to theory and books and practical knowledge is completely ignored. When
these students pass the exam, they forget all the things they have studied due of lack of practical experience. In India, parents
and teachers expect their students to score high in the exam (rather than acquiring the quality knowledge) and thus the
education becomes a rat race. Practical knowledge and skill based education is still far away from the reach of students
studying in schools, colleges and universities.

Lack of Research or critical analysis:

Problems solving skills are one of the most important things that are required when students complete their studies and
look for jobs to earn money and build up their career. This can be learned by participating in problem solving projects
with the use of creative and critical thinking. In India, despite the fact that we have the highest number of engineering
graduates, still we lack technological innovation. Students must have capability to solve the problems and difficulties
that the country is facing today. Most of the students don’t have their own approach towards any problem and they do
so only on the instruction of their parents, teachers, neighbors and friends. Schools and colleges must pay attention to
case studies, research based assignment and problem solving project so that students can get the fresh ideas about
their surroundings and can easily solve the problem they face.

→Absence of personality development program:

Schools and colleges in India demand student’s performance in terms of marks and they are not well exposed to the
external world. When students complete their graduation and enter into the job market, they face problems to get a job
as per their capability simply because they don’t meet the criteria and skills required for the job. Companies want to hire
those individuals that are aware of the course of the action. It is highly essential to start personality development
program is schools and colleges to improve the education standards.

→Absence of Entrepreneurship development scheme:

The majority of the students want to get a job after finishing their education. They don’t like starting their own business
because they are of the view that they can’t become a business person and face the challenges during the circulation of
their business. The absence of Entrepreneurship abilities is halting the progress of our country in several fields. Our
education system should be such that it should generate enthusiasm to become a business person and it should also
produce scientist, writers, thinkers, designers etc only that India can be knowledge based economy and claim to be
regarded as superpower.

→ Cast reservation and paid seat:

In Indian education system, seats are reserved for reserved cast and rich students. The education system should give
equal chance to all students irrespective of their cast and creed. In India, the child of good a rich family gets good
education just because of ample money whereas the child of a poor family hardly gets the primary education. The
government data discloses the better reality that only one child out of 7(that takes birth in India) goes to school. This
problem should be taken into notice as soon as possible and do some serious work to change the situation as soon as
possible.

→Outdated syllabus:
There is an urgent need to change the present system of higher education in the country. We need to ensure quality in
education as well as quantity. Students are getting the knowledge from outdated syllabus. Lots of technological and
scientific improvements are taking place in India and therefore the courses are Graduate and post graduates must be
updated as per the industrial and technological development.

→Other problems:
1) Expenditure in our universities are as high as 50%

2) Many schools and colleges use foreign languages as the medium of instruction which hampers the natural
educational growth of millions of students who are not at home in foreign languages

3) Too much importance to examination and Political interference in schools and colleges
4) Rapid increase of irrelevant college and universities and

5) Absence of library, laboratory and other facilities in

1. Lack of infrastructure
Approximately 95.2 per cent of schools are not yet compliant with the complete set of RTE infrastructure
indicators according to survey conducted in 2010.They lacks drinking water facilities, a functional
common toilet, and do not have separate toilets for girls.

Number of boards causes non uniformity of curriculum throughout India so maintenance of

quality standard is quite difficult.

2. Poor global ranking of institutes

Only 4 universities are featured in first 400 .This is largely because of high faculty-student
ratio and lack of research capacity

4. System of education
Education is information based rather than knowledge based. The whole focus is on
cramming information rather than understanding it and analyzing it.

5. Gap between education provided and industry required education

Industry faces a problem to find suitable employee as education provided is not suitable for
directly working in industry so before that a company is required to spend large amount on
providing training for employee.

6. Gender issues
Traditional Indian society suffers from many kind of discrimination so there are many
hurdles in education of unprivileged sections of society like women, SC, ST and minority

7. Costly higher education

Very minimal amount of subsidy is provided for higher education so if student seeks to get
chances of higher education still he misses out because of lack of economical resources

8. Inadequate government Funding

The demand for financial resources far exceeds the supply. Very small amount is available
for innovative programs and ideas.

How to solve these problems?

1. Adoption of technology
Effective use of technological tools in teaching has many benefits. It will solve the many
problems of infrastructure, quality

2. Teacher training
Teachers' training remains one of the most chaotic, neglected and deficient sectors of India's
vast education system. This needs to be changed as they virtually hold the destiny of the
future generations in their hands

3. More government spending

India targeted towards devoting 6% share of the GDP towards the educational sector, the
performance has definitely fallen short of expectations. Also funding is needed to be spend
on building infrastructure

4. Inclusive education system

Growth in education sector should incorporate all sections of society like rural, urban poor
,woman Backward classes etc.

5. Quality education
Education provided should meet needs of student. e.g. education provided to hearing
impaired or slow learners. It should allow them to enhance their skills and get better
employment options

6. PPP model
Public-Private sources and to encourage the active participation of the private sector in
national development. It is more forcefully advocated when public resources are projected
to be inadequate to meet needs.

7. IES
An All India Education Services should be established which will decide the policies of
education in consultation with educationalists

8. Education policy
Educational policy need frequent update. It should cover personality development aspect of
student It should also imbibe values of culture and social services

What are the problems faced by first generation school goers?

1. Family background and support
Family background is quite different for such children. They might not get same support as
other students have and that will have huge psychological impact .Sometimes their famil;y
can not fulfill their resources need

2. Different socio-economic opportunities

First generation school-goers might come from poor or lower middle class so less socio-
economic opportunities are there for them as compared to other students.

3. Too much pressure on them

First generation school-goers undergo a lot of pressure as their family has a lot of
expectations from them.

4. Lack of guidance at home

 Nobody is able to solve the problems in their studies at home as other members of family
are illiterate. In that case they have to rely largely on guidance at school.

5. Feeling of insecurity
Approach toward them might be different that will cause insecure feeling among them.

What is needed to be done to help them?

1. Change in approach
2. Removing psychological bias towards them
3. Adopting inclusive policy
4. Inclusive attitude
5. Encouragement through scholarships

What do we need to change about the Indian Education System?

Education has been a problem in our country and lack of it has been blamed for all sorts of evil for hundreds of years. Even
Rabindranath Tagore wrote lengthy articles about how Indian education system needs to change. Funny thing is that from the
colonial times, few things have changed. We have established IITs, IIMs, law schools and other institutions of excellence;
students now routinely score 90% marks so that even students with 90+ percentage find it difficult to get into the colleges of
their choice; but we do more of the same old stuff.
Rote learning still plagues our system, students study only to score marks in exams, and sometimes to crack exams like IIT
JEE, AIIMS or CLAT. The colonial masters introduced education systems in India to create clerks and civil servants, and we
have not deviated much from that pattern till today. If once the youngsters prepared en masse for civil services and bank
officers exams, they now prepare to become engineers. If there are a few centres of educational excellence, for each of
those there are thousands of mediocre and terrible schools, colleges and now even universities that do not meet even
minimum standards. If things have changed a little bit somewhere, elsewhere things have sunk into further inertia,
corruption and lack of ambition.
Creating a few more schools or allowing hundreds of colleges and private universities to mushroom is not going to solve the crisis
of education in India. And a crisis it is – we are in a country where people are spending their parent’s life savings and borrowed
money on education – and even then not getting standard education, and struggling to find employment of their choice. In this
country, millions of students are victim of an unrealistic, pointless, mindless rat race. The mind numbing competition and rote
learning do not only crush the creativity and originality of millions of Indian students every year, it also drives brilliant students to
commit suicide.
We also live in a country where the people see education as the means of climbing the social and economic ladder. If the
education system is failing – then it is certainly not due to lack of demand for good education, or because a market for
education does not exist.
Education system in India is failing because of more intrinsic reasons. There are systemic faults that do not let our demand
for good education translate into a great marketplace with excellent education services. I discussed the reasons previously in
this article: Will Education make a comeback in India?
Let’s explore something else in this one: what should change in India education system? What needs to be fixed at the earliest?
Here is my wish list:

Focus on skill based education

Our education system is geared towards teaching and testing knowledge at every level as opposed to teaching skills. “Give a
man a fish and you feed him one day, teach him how to catch fishes and you feed him for a lifetime.” I believe that if you
teach a man a skill, you enable him for a lifetime. Knowledge is largely forgotten after the semester exam is over. Still, year
after year Indian students focus on cramming information. The best crammers are rewarded by the system. This is one of
the fundamental flaws of our education system.

Reward creativity, original thinking, research

and innovation
Our education system rarely rewards what deserves highest academic accolades. Deviance is discouraged. Risk taking is
mocked. Our testing and marking systems need to be built to recognize original contributions, in form of creativity, problem
solving, valuable original research and innovation. If we could do this successfully Indian education system would have
changed overnight.
Memorising is no learning; the biggest flaw in our education system is perhaps that it incentivizes memorizing above
originality.

Get smarter people to teach

For way too long teaching became the sanctuary of the incompetent. Teaching jobs are until today widely regarded as safe,
well-paying, risk-free and low-pressure jobs. Once a teacher told me in high school “Well, if you guys don’t study it is entirely
your loss – I will get my salary at the end of the month anyway.” He could not put across the lack of incentive for being
 good at teaching any better. Thousands of terrible teachers all over India are wasting valuable time of young children every
day all over India.

2.
3. Education for all
4. It is high time to encourage a breed of superstar teachers. The internet has created this possibility – the performance of a
teacher now need not be restricted to a small classroom. Now the performance of a teacher can be opened up for the world
to see. The better teacher will be more popular, and acquire more students. That’s the way of the future. Read here about
why I think that we are closing on to the age of rockstar teachers.
5. We need leaders, entrepreneurs in teaching positions, not salaried people trying to hold on to their mantle.

6. Implement massive technology infrastructure

for education
7. India needs to embrace internet and technology if it has to teach all of its huge population, the majority of which is located
in remote villages. Now that we have computers and internet, it makes sense to invest in technological infrastructure that
will make access to knowledge easier than ever. Instead of focussing on outdated models of brick and mortar colleges and
universities, we need to create educational delivery mechanisms that can actually take the wealth of human knowledge to
the masses. The tools for this dissemination will be cheap smartphones, tablets and computers with high speed internet
connection. While all these are becoming more possible than ever before, there is lot of innovation yet to take place in this
space.

8. Re-define the purpose of the education

system
9. Our education system is still a colonial education system geared towards generating babus and pen-pushers under the newly
acquired skin of modernity. We may have the most number of engineering graduates in the world, but that certainly has not
translated into much technological innovation here. Rather, we are busy running the call centres of the rest of the world –
that is where our engineering skills end.
10. The goal of our new education system should be to create entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, scientists, thinkers and writers
who can establish the foundation of a knowledge based economy rather than the low-quality service provider nation that we
are turning into.

11. Effective deregulation

12. Until today, an institute of higher education in India must be operating on a not-for profit basis. This is discouraging for
entrepreneurs and innovators who could have worked in these spaces. On the other hand, many people are using education
institutions to hide their black money, and often earning a hefty income from education business through clever structuring
and therefore bypassing the rule with respect to not earning profit from recognized educational institutions. As a matter of
fact, private equity companies have been investing in some education service provider companies which in turn provide
services to not-for-profit educational institutions and earn enviable profits. Sometimes these institutes are so costly that they
are outside the rich of most Indian students.
13. There is an urgent need for effective de-regulation of Indian education sector so that there is infusion of sufficient capital
and those who provide or create extraordinary educational products or services are adequately rewarded.

14. Take mediocrity out of the system

15. Our education system today encourages mediocrity – in students, in teachers, throughout the system. It is easy to survive as
a mediocre student, or a mediocre tea
16. cher in an educational institution. No one shuts down a mediocre college or mediocre school. Hard work is always tough, the
path to excellence is fraught with difficulties. Mediocrity is comfortable. Our education system will remain sub-par or
mediocre until we make it clear that it is not ok to be mediocre. If we want excellence, mediocrity cannot be tolerated.
Mediocrity has to be discarded as an option. Life of those who are mediocre must be made difficult so that excellence

17. Personalize education – one size does not fit

all
18. Assembly line education prepares assembly line workers. However, the drift of economic world is away from assembly line
production. Indian education system is built on the presumption that if something is good for one kid, it is good for all kids.
19. Some kids learn faster, some are comparatively slow. Some people are visual learners, others are auditory learners, and still
some others learn faster from exper
20. ience. If one massive monolithic education system has to provide education to everyone, then there is no option but to
assume that one size fits all. If however, we can effectively decentralize education, and if the government did not
obsessively control what would be the “syllabus” and

21.
22. what will be the method of instruction, there could be an explosion of new and innovative courses geared towards serving
various niches of learners,
23. Take for example, the market for learning dancing. There are very different dance forms that attract students with different
tastes. More importantly, different teachers and institutes have developed different ways of teaching dancing. This could
never happen if there was a central board of dancing education which enforced strict standards of what will be taught and
how such things are to be taught.
24. Central regulation kills choice, and stifles innovation too. As far as education is concerned, availability of choices, de-
regulation, profitability, entrepreneurship and emergence of niche courses are all inter-connected.

25. Allow private capital in education

26. The government cannot afford to provide higher education to all the people in the country. It is too costly for the
government to do so. The central government spends about 4% of budget expenditure on education, compared to 40% on
defence. Historically, the government just did not have enough money to spend on even opening new schools and
universities, forget overhauling the entire system and investing in technology and innovation related to the education
system. Still, until today, at least on paper only non-profit organizations are allowed to run educational institutions apart
from government institutions. Naturally, the good money, coming from honest investors who want to earn from honest but
high impact businesses do not get into education sector. Rather, there are crooks, money launderers and politicians opening
“private” educational institutions which extract money from the educational institution through creative structuring. The
focus is on marketing rather than innovation or providing great educational service – one of the major examples of this being
IIPM.
27. Allowing profit making will encourage serious entrepreneurs, innovators and investors to take interest in the education
sector. The government does not have enough money to provide higher education of reasonable quality to all of us, and it
has no excuse to prevent private capital from coming into the educational sector.

28. Make reservation irrelevant

29. We have reservation in education today because education is not available universally. Education has to be rationed. This is
not a long –term solution. If we want to emerge as a country build on a knowledge economy, driven by highly educated
people – we need to make good education so universally available that reservation will lose its meaning.

30.
31. There is no reservation in online education – because it scales. Today top universities worldwide are taking various courses
online, and today you can easily attend a live class taught by a top professor of Harvard University online if you want, no
matter which country is belong to. This is the future, this is the easy way to beat reservation and make it inconsequential.
32. What are the most important changes you want to see in the India education system? Share your ideas.
33.
34.