A well educated mind vs a well formed mind: Dr. Shashi Tharoor at TEDxGateway 2013 (1)

Transcriber: Riaki Poništ Reviewer: Denise RQ

I'm here to talk to you about Indian education,

higher education in particular.

But I'm actually going to start with demography.

How many of you here are under 35?

OK, that seems pretty representative of the country;

65% of India is under 35.

How many of you are under 25?

Then you are not representing

because half of the Indian population is pretty much under 25.

We are an amazingly young country.

In fact, if you just take the age group from 10 to 19,

there are 226 million Indians, poised, in other words, to enter

higher education, going through school and ready for higher education.

This is amazing

because it's happening at the time when the rest of the world is aging.

If you look at the average age in India today, it's 28.

Of course, don't ask about the gap - since we heard about gaps -

between the average age of the Indian person

and of the Indian cabinet.

I think we hold the world record for that.

But, that's another TED talk, right?

But what you've got with the average ages

at a time when the rest of the world is changing,

is that by 2020, the average age in Japan is going to be 47,

in China it's going to be heading well past 40,

Europe, 46, the United States, beautiful US, also 40,

and India's average age is going to be 29.

So we are potentially the people

who are youthful, productive, dynamic, young population,

ready to work, and transform the world, the kinds of role that, say,

China played in the last generation could be ours in the next.

In fact, International Labor Organization has worked out that by 2020,

we'll have 160 million people in the age group of starting work,

- 20 to 24 is what they calculate -

and China will only have 94 million, at the same time.

So we really are poised to do that.

But, and by the way, other countries will have a serious deficit

that's estimated that the US will have 17 million short

in terms of how many people they need of working age.

We, in India, have the people.

But do we have the ability to equip the people to take advantage of this,

to be the workforce of the work engine for the world?

See, if we get it right, we educate and train them, we really transform

not just our own economy and our society, but the world.

If we get it wrong, the demographic dividend

that I'm talking about becomes a demographic disaster.

Because, we've already seen in 165 of our 625 districts

what happens when unemployed, frustrated, undereducated young man

become prey to the blandishments of the Maoists

and prey to the gun and the bullet.

So education in our country is not just a social or economic issue,

it's even a national security issue.

We've got equip our people

to take advantage of what the 21st century offers them.

This is the story in a nutshell:

4 E's, Expansion with our first priority in education.

Why? Because the British

- and I wouldn't even ask if any of you are here -

left us in 1947, with a 16% literacy rate.

there were only 400,000 four-lakh students in the entire country in higher education.

We had 26 universities, fewer than 700 colleges.

So obviously, expansion was essential;

we've gone right from that 16% to 74% literacy today,

we've gone from 26 universities to 650 universities,

we've gone from those 400,000 students, four-lakh students,

to 20 million students in higher education today,

and we have 35,000 colleges as well, instead of 700 colleges we had then.

So expansion has taken place.

We've also had to fight for the second E of Equity.

That is, including the excluded from the education,

trying to reach out to the unreached,

the people who didn't get a fair shake in education

for reasons they couldn't help: gender, an obvious reason.

When we had had that 16% literacy rate,

do you know what the female literacy rate was?

8.9% at the time of the independence.

Just one out of 11 Indian women could read and write.

Caste, region, religion, all sorts people got left out of system.

We had to bring them in.

And that became a big challenge and a priority for education.

In getting those two things more or less right,

I don't know how well we did on the third E,

which is the E of Excellence.

Obviously, you need quality.

And we set about setting up institutions of great quality in our country.

The IITs are a good example, in fact, it's part of Jawaharlal Nehru's vision

that IIT in Kharagpur was established in 1956, the year I was born,

and it was done on the site of a British detention center,

the Hijili detention center.

So a symbol of political oppression became instead a symbol of hope,

of technology, of looking to the future.

But, for the IITs, the IIMs, a few good institutions,

I'm sure you could all pick your few around the country,

these have tended to be islands of excellence

floating on the sea of mediocrity.

The average Indian higher education institution is simply not of the quality

that you and I, all of us, in this audience would like to see.

And that ties into the fourth E I've added to this catechism: Employability.

Talk to employers, talk to CEOs, what would they tell you?

That they're simply not satisfied

with the quality of the graduates they're getting.

Even in the T of TED, the technological area,

engineering graduates, half a million engineering graduates a year,

but if you talk to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry,

they did a survey and 64% of employers are not satisfied

with the quality of graduates they're getting.

Some companies are running, essentially, re-education places,

like the gigantic campus in Mysore.

And it's not on the job training which big companies tend to do,

it is, in fact, a full-year's education for the people they've already hired,

to make up for the deficiencies

of what they've learned or not properly learned in the college.

Now, that's the scale of the challenge that we face.

What are we doing about it? A great deal needs to be done.

Of course, we are trying to put in kids into the system at an early age,

the RTE, the Right to Education Act,

if kids were out of school in the old days,

it was their parents' fault;

today, if there are out of school it's a state's fault.

The government is committed to actually getting them an education.

We've got more and more money

being pumped in by the system at all levels.

For example, many of you may have gone to prestigious universities;

lots of people in India don't.

They go to state universities which are grossly under-financed.

We've come up with a scheme to pump central money into the state universities,

so they actually have the resources to do something

with the students they have there.

Money isn't the whole answer.

There is an entire challenge, in terms of addressing things

like the gender gap - that's a gap, but despite what mister...

or what an earlier speaker said, we don't want to embrace, right? -

that we must, must overcome.

Right now, women's literacy is 66%, better than the 8.9, but it still means

that, you know, one out of every 3 Indian women still can't read and write.

We have to overcome that.

And we need to catch the ones who've been left out of the net:

adult literacy; huge challenge.

I went off to a village in Tamil Nadu, not far from Khan Jibran,

but I've met women, who in their 50s and 60s,

were learning to read and write.

And people think sometimes what's the point,

some of their own family members, their husbands, think what's the point.

The answer is it changes their lives, it empowers them in real ways.

I spoke to a woman called Chitra Mani,

who proudly wrote her name in Tamil on a piece of paper.

I said: "So, what does being able to read and write mean to you?"

And she said: "Now I can see the destination of a bus,

where it's going;

I don't need to ask somebody where that bus is going.

I know where I can go.

When I get to the big city of Gandhi Puram,

I can read the street signs, I can find where I need to go,

I don't feel helpless anymore."

That kind of empowerment is what literacy gives people

in a very fundamental and real way.

And we're trying to do that of course, for those who've dropped out early on,

in the days before we got to that 74%.

Younger kids, we've got them into school now.

We've something called a gross enrollment ratio,

the percentage of children of a certain age,

of the appropriate one for a particular level of education.

But at our primary school now, our gross enrollment ratio is 116%.

We've actually enrolled more kids than we thought existed at that age group,

because some of the older ones are coming in too.

Bad news is, as you go up the level, it starts dropping,

So by the 8th grade, I'm afraid it's down to 69%,

by the 10th grade, 39%,

and by college, our gross enrollment ratio is about 18%,

against the global average of 29%.

So, clearly, we still need to do more. Our expansion hasn't gone enough.

We haven't managed to get everyone to stay in the system.

Some of them actually need vocational training.

They're not all going to become white collar clerks,

or officials, or IAS officers, right?

We need to try and catch them, and get them into vocational training.

But how do you do that in the culture where, for 3,000 years,

if you wanted to become a cobbler or a carpenter,

you'd better have an uncle or father who's a cobbler or a carpenter,

because nobody else is going to teach you.

The transmission of knowledge, of trade craft in our country,

has always been through the gene pool,

the reason why the sons of politicians tend to be politicians also, you know.

And with the Bollywood movies stars, same story. (Laughter)

So we need to get master craftsmen.

Why is it with a country of 1.2 billion that we should have a nationwide shortage

of masons, of plumbers, of certified electricians?

We need to get more vocational training into the system,

we're doing that, we're now rolling out the whole concept of community colleges

so that kids can go in, have some academic learning,

lots of vocational training,

and at the end of 2 years, if they show tremendous academic promise

they can go back to a university, if not,

they leave with a 2-year certificate, and they go off and do a useful trade

in a society that is clamoring for these skills.

So these are the kinds of changes

that we're trying to bring about, and move along.

But there's a change that the government alone can't do.

You know, if you look at the need for research and innovation,

- you've heard a lot of that, I'm sure in the course of the TED talks -

research is something which...

The government wants to double the amount of money

they are spending on research for 1% of GDP to 2%;

we haven't had the money to pump into it yet,

but, innovation requires new ways of thinking.

I heard you had a talk about hyper-thinking; I've missed it.

But new ways of thinking means learning to think out of the box,

learning to create, I know we're famous for ”jugaad”, right?

If you Google the word 'frugal innovation, '

and top 20 hits will all relate to Indian inventions.

We invented the world's cheapest electrocardiogram,

the simplest and cheapest EKG, the cheapest insulin injection,

the world's cheapest small car, the TATA Nano,

but all these've been things invented elsewhere

that we have stripped down, made more affordable, more replicable,

more relevant to our conditions.