IIPM, MBA, BBA, Professor Arindam Chaudhuri, 4ps Business and Marketing, Business and Economy

Q. Enrolment in government-run schools has decreased in the last decade. There is a trend in both urban and rural areas to opt for private education. How can this gap be bridged?

A. Government pumping in more money to build schools and hire teachers as government employees is not really going to be a viable solution, as that is going to cost a lot, will take a long time and will have all kinds of implementation problems. A solution that is actually working in the United States and the United Kingdom is for the government to give vouchers to parents, which can be used by parents to send children to private schools. There can always be an equal distribution of vouchers, so that education is subsidised and children from poor families are not deprived of education.

The private schools would then compete to attract children and that would obviously go a long way towards improving the quality and efficiency of the schools. Of course it requires a big policy-level rethinking but it can be one effective solution, provided the distribution of these vouchers is made fairly effectual and efficient.

Q. Many of the government initiatives to improve internal efficiency and quality of secondary education have not really clicked. What are the probable reasons for it?

A. Improving the internal efficiency of existing government schools is an extremely challenging task everywhere in the world and it is so because reforms cannot be implemented unless teachers want to change. Teachers tend to have their own set ways of behaving and if they do not change, it would not make much of a difference.

Q. With over 350 universities and 17,000 colleges, India boasts of having the third largest number of graduates after the United States and China. But we still lag behind on the education front. Why so?

A. Firstly, I would not necessarily say that we are behind China because overall the quality of education there is not very impressive. The scenario is quite similar in both India and China. In the last ten years, the number of students graduating in both nations has multiplied several folds. Click here to read more..

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