WASHINGTON – The labor force in India is about to explode — with more than 100 million young Indians joining the workforce by 2020. This rapid growth could make India a go-to source for workers, but only if the country educates improves its education system to create a highly skilled workforce, according to a top Indian official.
“This will be a great potential resource only if they are empowered and educated,” said Kapil Sibal, India’s minister for human resources and development, at a recent summit on how the U.S. and India can collaborate on higher education.
To sustain its own economic growth, India requires a skilled workforce of 500 million by 2022, Sibel said.
In addition, “the global community will require a suitably skilled workforce to serve its needs,” he said. “Our demographic advantage could therefore become an integral part of the global workforce.”
But India needs to change its education system to achieve the goal of producing highly skilled workers in large numbers by embracing three principles: reducing national barriers to ensure access to education, providing universal access to educations and ensuring quality with accountability.
At 100 million, the young Indians coming into the workforce equal the workforces of Great Britain, France, Italy and Spain combined.
Reducing national barriers
About 15% of Indians enroll in higher education, 10 % below the world average, according to Sibel. By 2020, he hopes to double the enrollment number.
During those years, about 40 million Indians will become college age, according to George Joseph, a Yale University administrator specializing in Asia.
“India will become the largest education market in the world in the next decade,” Joseph said in a phone interview.
Such a leap would require the addition of 1,000 universities and 50,000 colleges in India, Sibel said, which is why the country is exploring education beyond its own borders.
In addition India is exploring online learning and distance education, while also inviting foreign institutions to help.
“I foresee a day where an engineering student from the Indian Institute of Technology can register for a liberal arts course at Yale … while simultaneously enrolling for an economics course at Stanford,” Sibel said.
Access to education
In 2009, the Indian parliament passed the Right to Education Act, which most notably guaranteed free and compulsory education for all children between 6 and 14 and reserved 25 % of seats in private schools for poor families.
The bill became effective on April 1, 2010, but India’s education system still has many flaws due to a lack of enforcement, experts caution.
“If they’re not able to enforce the provisions of the Right to Education Act, it’s just another piece of paper,” said Lavanya Murali Proctor, an anthropology professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, in a phone interview.
And many families are unwilling to send their children to school. Proctor, who grew up in India and has studied its education system, said that poorer families often choose to keep their children at home because they are needed to work for the money.
Other families are just unaware of the law.
“If you’re talking about your average extremely poor, below the poverty line, uneducated parent who doesn’t read, I don’t know if many of them are aware if their child has the right to go to school and get an education for free,” Proctor said.
Ensuring quality with accountability
Like the U.S., India is wrestling with how best to create teacher and school accountability for student outcomes.
This week a Senate committee was marking up legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Also know as No Child Left Behind, part of the bill focuses on how the United States evaluates its teachers and students.
India has had mixed results in evaluating teachers and schools. Private schools have typically raised teacher accountability standards, often including student analysis on each teacher.
“They are very, very conscious of that,” said Dinesh Singh, vice chancellor of the University of Delhi. “They ensure quality from these feedback mechanisms.”
According to Proctor, she is not aware of any government schools that have students evaluate teachers, and she is concerned that the teachers are not fulfilling their students’ desire to learn.
“I’ve been to English (language) government schools where children who are in the 12th grade and are finishing school cannot put a sentence together in English because the teachers don’t teach them in English,” Proctor said.