India's education sector should be admitted to an intensive care unit. For all practical purposes it has collapsed. This is happening at a time when we want to become a knowledge economy. When our graduates are in demand in the developed world, and there is increasing outsourcing of research activities to India, some are likely to disagree with my observation. Most of the output from our education factories or degree mills is used either in India or abroad for routine activities serving a knowledge economy and not for developing innovative projects. Many even refer to them as IT coolies . Those few who are creators of new products, ground-breaking theories or research have been productive despite our dysfunctional education system. In fact the 'phenomenal success' of the IT sector in India has resulted in Dutch disease which has affected even the education sector.
It is only recently we in India have started to realize that we have failed to develop human capital unlike most western countries which gave importance to education. If one were to suggest one strategic factor for the phenomenal success of the US in reducing poverty, it is education.

Earlier and current education reform…
Problems affecting our education sector were diagnosed way back by the Kothari Commission in 1966. However, some of the strategies suggested by the Kothari Commission to overcome the problems led to over-centralisation of the education sector. Also, it overemphasized engineering and physical sciences to solve India's development problems. Later in 1986 there was the New Education Policy which again stressed the same old problems of rote learning and undue importance to examinations to produce 'clerks' the way Macaulay had planned to reform education during the British Raj.

Education for all still a far cry
1994 saw the implementation of District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) funded by the World Bank and supported by UNICEF. It had the following broad objectives:
Provide all children with access to primary education.
Reduce dropout rates at the primary school level to less than 10 per cent.
Reduce differences in enrolment, dropout rates and learning achievement among   gender and social groups to less than 5 per cent.
Raise the average achievement of students in language and mathematics by 25 per cent and by 40 per cent in other subjects.
Strengthen the capacity of national, state and district level institutions and organizations for planning, management and evaluation of primary education.

Again in 2004 we had a new incarnation of DPEP called Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA), to universalise primary education with the following broad goals.
lAll children in school, education guarantee centres, alternative school,  and back to school camp by 2003.
lAll children complete five years of primary schooling by 2007.
lAll children complete eight years of schooling by 2008.
lFocus on quality primary education with emphasis on education for life.
lBridge social and gender gaps in primary education by 2007 and in elementary education by 2010.
lUniversal retention by 2010.
It is an understatement to write the obvious that both DPEP and SSA have been failures to solve the basic problems of our education sector. This is not just because of the usual problem of corruption, incompetence and poor governance. Underlying strategies to implement the goals which were more or less the same were not sound. Both DPEP and SSA have shown that just allocation of more budgetary resources will not solve the problems in the education sector.

Appalling inequality in access…
We need sound strategic thinking and greater appreciation for ground realties. There have been umpteen studies, reports, commissions, expert committees… to look into the problems of education sector both at national and state levels. But nothing of significance has happened to bring about the needed improvement in education sector. We want to help the down trodden classes and the poor. We want social equity while trying to reach excellence. Today we have neither. It is with depressing accuracy we can predict the level of education one will attain based on one's economic status independent of caste, religion, gender or region as shown in Table-1.

In Table-1, schools are arbitrarily classified into eight categories. In the top class we have expensive residential schools charging from Rs. 80,000 to Rs. 2 lakh a year.  The next category is the private schools. They are either private unaided or aided. All unaided do not give similar kind of education and they are further classified into top tier and second tier. In the private aided also there are two tiers - good and bad. The bottom of the school system are government schools which are grouped into good, average and poor. There are some government schools which are better than or equal to top tier aided or second tier unaided schools. But these are exceptions. It is not that the government is not capable of managing a first rate high school. At one time the Central government-managed Demonstration Multipurpose School in Mysore was the best in the city. However today it does not have such high standards of yester-years.

A child going to residential schools is likely to graduate with a probability of nearly 100 per cent and is likely to go for professional college with a high probability of 80 per cent, whereas a child attending a poor or average government school is likely to complete high school with 25 per cent to 35 per cent probability and he or she is likely to have less than 1 per cent chance of attending a professional or degree college. These statistics should shock any society. More than one hundred years back Swami Vivekananda made a similar observation and since then our society has done very little to change it. But all our political leaders shed crocodile tears on this sorry state of affairs while sending their children to private schools.

It is not that the residential or private schools are able to impart 'true education' to their students by bringing out their inherent ability and creativity to ignite their mind. They are also affected by twin syndromes of rote learning and securing high marks. In the case of most government and even some private schools, educational standards are appallingly low as shown by three successive nationwide surveys done by Pratham, a well known NGO in education sector.

Dreadful quality in rural schools
Since 2005, Pratham has been conducting Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) which can be viewed at www.pratham.org not only to provide district level estimates of enrolment but also of the status of basic learning. ASER involves over 500 organizations and close to 20,000 volunteers who visit more than 16,000 villages, over 300,000 households and close to 715,000 children. Using a common set of tools and a common sampling frame, in each rural district, a local group visits 30 randomly selected villages. Within each village, ASER volunteers meet all children (in the age group 3 to 16) from 20 randomly selected families.

ASER has clearly brought out the success of the government in attracting children to schools. Out of school children in the 6-14 year age group is only 4.2 per cent. Another equally interesting aspect of the survey is that nearly 79 per cent in the age group 3-4 years are in pre-school classes or anganwadis. Even in rural areas 19.9 per cent of children in the age group 7-16 are attending private schools. This is likely to be high for urban areas. Table-2 gives the availability of water, mid-day meals, attendance of teachers, attendance of children, pupil teacher ratio and toilets for 2005 and 2007. On every criterion, there is some improvement with outstanding results in mid day meals.

Across the country, 31.9 per cent of the children cannot even recognize alphabets while only 6.9 per cent can read above level-1. In standard V, only 58.3 per cent can read at level-2.  Table-3 gives the arithmetic levels for children I to VIII standards. This is not a pretty picture.

ASER has reinforced what we already knew that while the government has succeeded in great measures in creating reasonable amount of education infrastructure (number of primary schools exceeds 1.2 millions), the quality of education our children are getting is  abysmal . This is not even considering the finer aspects of 'true education' which is to ignite the minds of students to ask questions. Last year I conducted an experiment in my home town on 'true education' consisting of 20 sessions on different topics. The impact of these sessions was phenomenal. One student commented at the end of these sessions that he learnt more from these 20 sessions than from his fifteen years of education. Another student was lamenting that they would be graduating soon and would be teachers tomorrow. But from 'true education' they have learnt how poorly the college education has prepared them to take up the challenge. This experiment took place in a government-aided private college.

Growing menace of tuitions and private coaching
The growing menace of tuition and coaching classes for higher standards is well-known. Now it has invaded even the lower classes. ASER has found out that on an average even in rural areas, 20.7 per cent of students attending government schools and 24.2 per cent of students attending private schools attend tuition classes. While this shows the interest of parents in assisting their children to get ahead, it also reflects poorly on the quality of education they receive in their schools irrespective of them being private or public.

While ASER has showed high enrollment ratio at primary levels, drop out rates climb to depressing levels as children go to higher standards. As a result India has a poor enrolment of 7 per cent students in higher education. It is an average of 25 per cent in developing countries.

The Knowledge Commission has recommended setting up 30 new Central universities, seven IITs and IIMs, 10 National Institutes of Technology, five research institutes to be called Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research, 20 IIITs, two schools of architecture and 330 colleges in educationally backward districts. This is in addition to existing 400 state universities and 20,000 colleges. This is a misplaced priority without improving educational standards at lower levels.

Knowledge Commission's confidence in private educational institutions to solve India's education sector is misplaced. But for few exceptional private colleges and universities, most are profit-oriented unlike their counter-parts in the US.  Even without specific planning, India's education sector is already being privatised at a rapid rate. This is not only affecting quality of education which is going down from bad to worse but also worsening the rich-poor divide. Knowledge Commission should have applied the concept of strategic planning to develop new ideas to solve the basic problems affecting India's education sector. Instead, they attempted to solve all the problems affecting education sector from pre-schooling to post-doctoral level. As a result they missed the goal.

Need for million mutinies to reform education sector
ASER has also showed the wrong priorities of the political class in implementing caste and class based quota system for institutes of higher education like IITs, IIMs, ISc, AIIMS… Experts have shown that such quota system will help only those who are from higher income levels who can attend either residential schools, or top tier private schools or can afford to pay huge fees to attend coaching classes. What is of critical importance is to improve the standards of education in government schools, both in rural and urban areas. This is not dependent upon the budgetary allocation. Today teachers working in the government schools are better paid, more qualified and have more training. Still students are getting relatively better education in private schools.

Most teachers are trained mainly to cover the syllabus in a mechanical, exam-oriented manner. Teachers encourage rote methods and drilling. The quality of education is a reflection of the quality of teachers. Still our political class wants the appointment of teachers based not on merit but on caste. Even those who are for social equity and are concerned about the development of the backward classes do not agree with these measures.

The Indian government has earmarked a whopping Rs 850 billion ($21 billion) for the education sector in the Eleventh Five Year Plan, which ends in 2012. The budget is almost five times more than the budget allocated for the education sector for the Tenth Five Year Plan.

Unless three strategic reforms, namely, elimination of the public examination system, total decentrali-sation by forming local level education autonomous bodies consisting of educationists, and appointing heads of the institutions who are properly selected for their managerial competence and training, any other measure like DPEP, Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, new National Curriculum Framework,… will not have any impact. We need million mutinies in different parts of India. There are thousands of NGOs working hard to improve the quality of education. Their efforts are a drop in the ocean of state indifference and wrong centralised policies. Partly, literate citizens are also to blame for their indifference.

Inhuman, anti-learning system
 From first day in the class to the last day, teachers emphasise how to secure high marks in the public examinations conducted by faceless people through an inhuman and anti-learning system. This was the system originally implemented by Macaulay to produce clerks for the East India Co. When most of the developed world has given up on such examination system, we in India are unable to reform or drop it. Teachers, while critical of the present day examination system, are against examination reform since the status quo gives them ample opportunities to earn money through coaching, tuition and grading papers. We need to drop the public examination system and move over to a more student- and learning-oriented examination system.

The 73rd and 74th amendment to the constitution was based on total decentralisation to achieve the dream of Mahatma Gandhi. One of the topics to be decentralised was education. Since the education sector gives ample opportunities to earn huge money under the table through transfer of teachers, recruitment of staff, selection of text books… the political class would like to keep all the levers of power at the state capitals. We need to dismantle the elaborate centralisation and allow city or taluk level formation of education autonomous bodies to take over the responsibility of education sector.

Select teachers not on seniority but on merit...
Finally, we need to appoint heads of the institutions not based on some 'donkey years' service’ system. Such a system forces the educational institutions to appoint the senior most teacher as the head irrespective of his or her competence. We need a new cadre of teachers who are selected on a competitive basis. They should have management ability as well as pedagogical competence. They should be held accountable to carry on their responsibilities of imparting quality education to all while giving them all the power to hire and fire teachers like in any well run institutions.