How Fast Can India Grow?

The New Economist notes that India's higher education system has enormous problems:

New Economist: Indian higher education in disarray : Bloomberg columnist Andy Mukherjee warns that substandard higher education may thwart India's call-center dream:

To maintain its global share of 65 percent in information technology and 46 percent in business-process outsourcing, the country will need 2.3 million professionals by 2010. According to McKinsey's calculations, India may face a deficit of as many as 500,000 workers. As much as 70 percent of the shortage will crop up in call centers and other back-office businesses, where proficiency in English is the No. 1 prerequisite for landing a job.

People within the Indian outsourcing industry are aware of the problem: A number of executives cite high employee attrition and galloping wages as signs that the labor market for undergraduates in India is getting tighter.

It isn't obvious why that should be so. In a country where millions of educated young people are unemployed, why do call centers feel compelled to give pay raises of 10 percent to 15 percent a year? Why don't they boot out the highly paid workers and grab the eager aspirants? And why do they offer their employees free dance lessons on top of a $4,000 annual wage -- worth $36,000 when adjusted for purchasing power in the local currency -- when they can't pass on the increase in costs to the U.S. bank or the European insurance company that is paying for the call centers' services? The answers may have a lot to do with India's education system... only about "10-15 percent of general college graduates are suitable for employment" in the outsourcing industry.... About 8 million students in India begin their undergraduate studies each year.... Mukherjee... discusses the well known problems of affilated colleges:

The globally renowned Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management are islands of excellence; they produce India's technological and managerial elite. The foot soldiers of India's knowledge economy are produced in lesser institutions, the so-called affiliated colleges.... A typical Indian university has scores of -- sometimes several hundred -- related colleges. The university administers examinations and distributes degrees. Other than that, "the entire higher education in India takes place only in the ill-equipped, understaffed, affiliated colleges" that produce 89 percent of India's undergraduates, Kulandaiswamy wrote in May in India's Hindu newspaper. Large, single-campus universities that have economies of scale must replace the affiliated colleges, most of which don't even have decent libraries.... [A]ll university students in India should be able to pick up the minimum English language skills required for call-center employment. That doesn't happen now.

Comments

[Abi]

I like this new spotlight on the issue of 'quality of education' in India. Our government has been interested primarily in making education affordable to all. Nothing wrong with that, except that it's not offering big subsidies or generous handouts to our cash-starved universities. It has chosen instead to enact laws that mandate low fees even for private colleges.

Result: a system that needs money to improve the quality of education doesn't get it from the government, nor from the students.

[Aniruddha G. Kulkarni]

Abi above is not stating historical facts when he/she says "Our government has been interested primarily in making education affordable to all.". For first 50 years or so, Indian government was content in creating elite schools like IIT's and IIM's and not enough for making education universal.

But the overall messgae that India is likely to have problems on account of quality of higher education is correct.

Unievrsities are cash strapped and have poor quality of teaching staff. If India has any chance of competing with US /Europe/ East asia with innovation and higher learning, she nneds to take experts like Prof. Yashpal far more seriously and act on what they suggest.

[ilsm]

India produces over 600,000 engineers a year.

Where to find work for them is an issue.

And what is an undergrad engineer worth, by the hundred thousand.

However, there may be a Newton or Einstein in the affiliate production.

[dsquared]

If the idea here is that in order to maintain "global leadership", India needs to chuck 350,000 university graduates into call centres, then if I was an Indian I would be asking a few questions about what the prize money was like for "global leadership" and whether it was actually worth maintaining.

[RT]

After having done battle for nearly three months, trying to explain a recurring problem to the personnel at United Air Lines' call center in India, before finally being allowed to talk to an American who was able to figure it out, it's clear to me that India shouldn't be putting more of its scarce intellectual resources into call centers, but rather using those resources to create wealth in ways that aren't based on constant communication in another language.

Indians are smart, surely, and an increasing number are very well-educated to boot. Putting some of them in call centers makes sense. But that should be at most a fallback source of employment for their university grads.

[A. Zarkov]

“ ...why do call centers feel compelled to give pay raises of 10 percent to 15 percent a year? Why don't they boot out the highly paid workers and grab the eager aspirants?”

They give generous raises to retain qualified workers who are evidently in shortage. The shortage has to do with English proficiency and other personality factors that make one suitable for a call-center job. Moreover working in a call center is a stressful occupation. Frustrated customers are frequently abusive to the person at the other end of the line, particularly after they have been on hold for an hour, and have experienced several disconnects. Getting a university degree is no guarantee of that someone will perform well in a job. Why do you think these “eager aspirants” are so wonderful?

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/25/international/asia/25kumar.html?ex=1277352000&en=eaaf73c44c99cc50&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

June 25, 2005

A Vision of Stars, Grounded in the Dust of Rural India
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

PATNA, India

ANUPAM KUMAR, 17, is the eldest son of a scooter-rickshaw driver. He lives in a three-room house made of bricks and mortar and a hot tin roof, where water rarely comes out of the tap and the electricity is off more than on, along a narrow unpaved alley here in one of India's most destitute corners.

Anupam is good at math. He has taught himself practically everything he knows, and when he grows up he wants to investigate whether there is life in outer space. He wants to work at NASA.

"It's becoming very important to explore other planets because this planet is becoming too polluted," he said with deadly seriousness. Next door to his house, pigs rifled through a pile of garbage on an empty lot. His mother, Sudha Devi, a savvy woman with a 6th-grade education, cooled him with a palm-frond fan.

His father, Srikrishna Jaiswal, who made it through 10th grade, flashed a bemused smile. "He has high-level aims," he said.

"I'm not so concerned about reaching the peak," Anupam clarified. "I'm more interested in doing something good for the world."

For now, Anupam's sole obsession is to gain admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology, or I.I.T., a network of seven elite colleges established shortly after Indian independence in 1947 that produces an annual crop of tech wizards and corporate titans.

It is difficult to overstate the difficulty of getting in. Of 198,059 Indians who took the rigorous admissions tests in 2005, 3,890 got in, an acceptance rate of under 2 percent. (Harvard accepts 10 percent.)

Anupam does not know anyone who has attended the institutes, nor do his parents. But they all know this: If he makes it, it would change his family's fortunes forever.

"I feel a lot of pressure," he said. "It's from inside."

A VOICE in his head, he says, tells him he must do something to rescue his family from want, and that he must do it very soon. No wonder, then, that Anupam's mother forces him to wash his hair with henna, a traditional Indian hair-dying technique: At 17, Anupam is going gray.

In Anupam's story lies a glimpse of the aspirations of boys and girls in India today, a country that arguably offers greater opportunities than it did for their parents, but one that is also more competitive and a great deal more stressful.

More than half of India's one billion people are under 25, and for all but the most privileged, adolescence in this country can be a Darwinian juggernaut. To be average, or even slightly above average, is to be left behind. Nowhere is that more true than here in Bihar, India's iconic left-behind state, making the drive to get out all the more fierce....

[Julian Elson]

Maybe I'm being naïve here, but it seems to me that the reason that the affiliate colleges are poor in India is that the entire country is, as a whole, rather poor. Frankly, were I an Indian policy wonk, I think the fact that 1/4 of men and 1/2 of women are illiterate would be a cause for greater concern to me than the fact that India's post-secondary education system isn't quite up to snuff. Sometimes one gets the impression that India's main priority should be making Mumbai richer and more high-tech over addressing the huge problems affecting the other 99% of Indians, because, well, supplying Mumbai's need for IT workers is just more l33t and global, or something.

[ben aneja]

hey people,
im a 17 year old indian(india indian) and have lived there for a century and half of my life which as you know is 15. (im trying to be funny). i agree with julian here about 1/4 and whatever. we people back in india dont even have people who know the difference between drinkning pure and uncleaned water. its just not right. somehow the people who get out of schools there are so so so so smart that american kids wouldnt be anywhere near them. im not saying this because im an indian or i like praising myself because i was always a below average student. now that im here suddenly im in the honour roll. excuse me im in a hurry. ill come back

[Pouncer]

"However, there may be a Newton or Einstein in the affiliate production."

Or a Chandrasekhar. :)

[Arun Khanna]

First, there is a lot of quality variance in standards of Indian universities. University Grants Commission (UGC) in India needs to learn from UGC of Hong Kong (and others) about how to foster higher educational standards and how to encourage good quality research.
Second, the most attractive jobs for Indian university graduates are in computer software industry not in call centers.
Third, I wonder if anyone has examined the macro social consequences of a key section of society adopting fake accents and mannerisms. Also I wonder if anyone has examined the micro social impact (in terms of self esteem) of adopting fake accents and mannerisms.

[sun bin]

0.5M out of 1bn population is tiny. 0.05%.

the problem lies in the opportunity to receive proper education and to utilize the potential talent.

my estimate is that India is keeping more than 1/3 of its population from the workforce. (vs. < 1/5 for many other countries, including China and E&SE Asia)
http://sun-bin.blogspot.com/2005/08/china-vs-india-and-muslim-world.html

[steven davies]

The affiliate colleges in India are poor because they don't have a lot of opportunities.I think that there must be some affiliate elite review and some of them to have a bit of luck.