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Transcriber: Riaki Poništ
Reviewer: Denise RQ
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I'm here to talk to you about
Indian education,
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higher education in particular.
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But I'm actually going to
start with demography.
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How many of you here are under 35?
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OK, that seems pretty
representative of the country;
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65% of India is under 35.
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How many of you are under 25?
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Then you are not representing
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because half of the Indian population
is pretty much under 25.
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We are an amazingly young country.
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In fact, if you just take
the age group from 10 to 19,
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there are 226 million Indians,
poised, in other words, to enter
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higher education, going through school
and ready for higher education.
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This is amazing
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because it's happening at the time
when the rest of the world is aging.
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If you look at the average age
in India today, it's 28.
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Of course, don't ask about the gap
- since we heard about gaps -
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between the average age
of the Indian person
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and of the Indian cabinet.
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I think we hold the world record for that.
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But, that's another TED talk, right?
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But what you've got
with the average ages
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at a time when the rest
of the world is changing,
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is that by 2020, the average age
in Japan is going to be 47,
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in China it's going to be
heading well past 40,
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Europe, 46, the United States,
beautiful US, also 40,
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and India's average age
is going to be 29.
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So we are potentially the people
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who are youthful, productive,
dynamic, young population,
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ready to work, and transform
the world, the kinds of role that, say,
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China played in the last generation
could be ours in the next.
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In fact, International Labor Organization
has worked out that by 2020,
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we'll have 160 million people
in the age group of starting work,
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- 20 to 24 is what they calculate -
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and China will only have 94 million,
at the same time.
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So we really are poised to do that.
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But, and by the way, other countries
will have a serious deficit
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that's estimated
that the US will have 17 million short
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in terms of how many people
they need of working age.
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We, in India, have the people.
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But do we have the ability to equip
the people to take advantage of this,
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to be the workforce
of the work engine for the world?
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See, if we get it right, we educate
and train them, we really transform
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not just our own economy
and our society, but the world.
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If we get it wrong,
the demographic dividend
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that I'm talking about becomes
a demographic disaster.
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Because, we've already seen
in 165 of our 625 districts
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what happens when unemployed,
frustrated, undereducated young man
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become prey to
the blandishments of the Maoists
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and prey to the gun and the bullet.
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So education in our country is
not just a social or economic issue,
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it's even a national security issue.
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We've got equip our people
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to take advantage
of what the 21st century offers them.
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This is the story in a nutshell:
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4 E's, Expansion with our
first priority in education.
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Why? Because the British
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- and I wouldn't even ask
if any of you are here -
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left us in 1947, with a 16% literacy rate.
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there were only 400,000 four-lakh students
in the entire country in higher education.
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We had 26 universities,
fewer than 700 colleges.
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So obviously, expansion was essential;
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we've gone right from that 16%
to 74% literacy today,
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we've gone from 26 universities
to 650 universities,
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we've gone from those
400,000 students, four-lakh students,
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to 20 million students
in higher education today,
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and we have 35,000 colleges as well,
instead of 700 colleges we had then.
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So expansion has taken place.
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We've also had to fight
for the second E of Equity.
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That is, including the excluded
from the education,
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trying to reach out to the unreached,
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the people who didn't get
a fair shake in education
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for reasons they couldn't help:
gender, an obvious reason.
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When we had had that 16% literacy rate,
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do you know what
the female literacy rate was?
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8.9% at the time of the independence.
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Just one out of 11 Indian women
could read and write.
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Caste, region, religion, all sorts
people got left out of system.
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We had to bring them in.
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And that became a big challenge
and a priority for education.
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In getting those two things
more or less right,
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I don't know how well
we did on the third E,
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which is the E of Excellence.
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Obviously, you need quality.
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And we set about setting up institutions
of great quality in our country.
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The IITs are a good example, in fact,
it's part of Jawaharlal Nehru's vision
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that IIT in Kharagpur was
established in 1956, the year I was born,
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and it was done on the site
of a British detention center,
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the Hijili detention center.
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So a symbol of political oppression
became instead a symbol of hope,
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of technology, of looking to the future.
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But, for the IITs, the IIMs,
a few good institutions,
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I'm sure you could all pick
your few around the country,
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these have tended to be
islands of excellence
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floating on the sea of mediocrity.
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The average Indian higher education
institution is simply not of the quality
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that you and I, all of us,
in this audience would like to see.
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And that ties into the fourth E I've added
to this catechism: Employability.
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Talk to employers, talk to CEOs,
what would they tell you?
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That they're simply not satisfied
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with the quality
of the graduates they're getting.
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Even in the T of TED,
the technological area,
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engineering graduates, half a million
engineering graduates a year,
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but if you talk to the Federation of
Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry,
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they did a survey and 64%
of employers are not satisfied
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with the quality of graduates
they're getting.
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Some companies are running,
essentially, re-education places,
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like the gigantic campus in Mysore.
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And it's not on the job training
which big companies tend to do,
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it is, in fact, a full-year's education
for the people they've already hired,
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to make up for the deficiencies
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of what they've learned
or not properly learned in the college.
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Now, that's the scale
of the challenge that we face.
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What are we doing about it?
A great deal needs to be done.
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Of course, we are trying to put in
kids into the system at an early age,
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the RTE, the Right to Education Act,
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if kids were out of school
in the old days,
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it was their parents' fault;
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today, if there are out of school
it's a state's fault.
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The government is committed
to actually getting them an education.
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We've got more and more money
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being pumped in
by the system at all levels.
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For example, many of you
may have gone to prestigious universities;
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lots of people in India don't.
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They go to state universities
which are grossly under-financed.
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We've come up with a scheme to pump
central money into the state universities,
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so they actually have
the resources to do something
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with the students they have there.
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Money isn't the whole answer.
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There is an entire challenge,
in terms of addressing things
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like the gender gap - that's a gap,
but despite what mister...
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or what an earlier speaker said,
we don't want to embrace, right? -
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that we must, must overcome.
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Right now, women's literacy is 66%,
better than the 8.9, but it still means
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that, you know, one out of every
3 Indian women still can't read and write.
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We have to overcome that.
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And we need to catch the ones
who've been left out of the net:
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adult literacy; huge challenge.
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I went off to a village in Tamil Nadu,
not far from Khan Jibran,
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but I've met women,
who in their 50s and 60s,
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were learning to read and write.
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And people think sometimes
what's the point,
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some of their own family members,
their husbands, think what's the point.
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The answer is it changes their lives,
it empowers them in real ways.
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I spoke to a woman called Chitra Mani,
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who proudly wrote her name
in Tamil on a piece of paper.
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I said: "So, what does being able
to read and write mean to you?"
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And she said: "Now I can see
the destination of a bus,
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where it's going;
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I don't need to ask somebody
where that bus is going.
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I know where I can go.
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When I get to the big city
of Gandhi Puram,
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I can read the street signs,
I can find where I need to go,
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I don't feel helpless anymore."
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That kind of empowerment is
what literacy gives people
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in a very fundamental and real way.
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And we're trying to do that of course,
for those who've dropped out early on,
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in the days before we got to that 74%.
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Younger kids, we've got them
into school now.
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We've something called
a gross enrollment ratio,
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the percentage of children
of a certain age,
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of the appropriate one
for a particular level of education.
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But at our primary school now,
our gross enrollment ratio is 116%.
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We've actually enrolled more kids
than we thought existed at that age group,
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because some of the older ones
are coming in too.
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Bad news is, as you go
up the level, it starts dropping,
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So by the 8th grade,
I'm afraid it's down to 69%,
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by the 10th grade, 39%,
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and by college, our gross enrollment
ratio is about 18%,
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against the global average of 29%.
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So, clearly, we still need to do more.
Our expansion hasn't gone enough.
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We haven't managed to get
everyone to stay in the system.
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Some of them actually
need vocational training.
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They're not all going to become
white collar clerks,
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or officials, or IAS officers, right?
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We need to try and catch them,
and get them into vocational training.
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But how do you do that in the culture
where, for 3,000 years,
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if you wanted to become
a cobbler or a carpenter,
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you'd better have an uncle or father
who's a cobbler or a carpenter,
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because nobody else is going to teach you.
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The transmission of knowledge,
of trade craft in our country,
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has always been through the gene pool,
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the reason why the sons of politicians
tend to be politicians also, you know.
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And with the Bollywood movies stars,
same story. (Laughter)
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So we need to get master craftsmen.
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Why is it with a country of 1.2 billion
that we should have a nationwide shortage
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of masons, of plumbers,
of certified electricians?
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We need to get more
vocational training into the system,
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we're doing that, we're now rolling out
the whole concept of community colleges
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so that kids can go in,
have some academic learning,
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lots of vocational training,
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and at the end of 2 years, if they show
tremendous academic promise
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they can go back to a university, if not,
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they leave with a 2-year certificate,
and they go off and do a useful trade
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in a society that is clamoring
for these skills.
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So these are the kinds of changes
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that we're trying to bring about,
and move along.
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But there's a change that
the government alone can't do.
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You know, if you look at the need
for research and innovation,
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- you've heard a lot of that, I'm sure
in the course of the TED talks -
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research is something which...
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The government wants to double
the amount of money
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they are spending on research
for 1% of GDP to 2%;
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we haven't had the money
to pump into it yet,
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but, innovation requires
new ways of thinking.
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I heard you had a talk about
hyper-thinking; I've missed it.
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But new ways of thinking means
learning to think out of the box,
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learning to create, I know we're
famous for ”jugaad”, right?
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If you Google the word
'frugal innovation, '
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and top 20 hits will all relate to
Indian inventions.
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We invented the world's
cheapest electrocardiogram,
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the simplest and cheapest EKG,
the cheapest insulin injection,
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the world's cheapest small car,
the TATA Nano,
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but all these've been things
invented elsewhere
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that we have stripped down,
made more affordable, more replicable,
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more relevant to our conditions.
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We need to do things
that others haven't done before,
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which we used to do in our culture
where Nalanda invented the zero.
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Remember how the Romans used to write
their numerals in long strings of letters,
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till an Indian thought of the idea of zero
emerging from the notion of "śūnyatā"
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in Hindu and Buddhist thinking?
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That came into the zero "śūnya"
which transformed global mathematics.
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We need to think like that again;
we need to come up with ideas.
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With 17% of the world's brains,
why do we only have 2.8%
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of the world's research output
coming out of our country?
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Well, perhaps we need to start
in the classroom.
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Get our kids, not just to
have their heads filled full of facts,
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and textbook materials,
and teachers' lectures.
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Because frankly, that gives you
a well-filled mind,
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but in the era of the Internet,
you don't need a well-filled mind,
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you've got Google, right?
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Find everything you want
with 2 clicks of the mouse.
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What you need is a well-formed mind.
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A mind that reacts
to unfamiliar facts and details
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that can actually synthesize information
that it hasn't studied before.
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A mind, in other words, that can react
to the bigger examination called 'life, '
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which doesn't actually only give you
the things you're prepared for.
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And for that you need a mind
that's shaped by original thinking,
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a mind that doesn't just ask
the teacher, "Why?", but "Why not?"
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I've actually had a little experience
of out of the box thinking myself.
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I wear glasses, I don't need them to read
or to see you folks on the front,
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but if I want to catch
somebody in the back row,
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there I have to look though glasses.
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But because I hardly ever wear them,
I keep losing or breaking them.
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I shove them in the pocket,
bang them against the wall or something,
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they crack, I put them on the lap,
when I get up, they fall down,
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somebody steps on them, they break.
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In the first 3 months of this year,
I lost or broke 6 pairs of glasses.
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So I was telling a friend about this,
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and he said: "A simple solution,
why can't you think of one?"
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I said: "Look, there is no easy solution
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because for 150 years,
glasses have been made in one way, right?
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They join together at the center,
then hang over your ears.
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That's what I've found
an inconvenience, so I take them off."
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And he said, "No, no, no, no, no,
you will find a different way.
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You can re-imagine glasses in a way
they're not going to hang over your ears,
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or join at the middle,"
and this is what he did.
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I'm wearing them right now;
and if I want to see anybody at the back,
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I just pull them together,
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it has two magnets
in the middle that click together,
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and I can see you all at the back.
(Applause)
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Now, it's just a silly example perhaps,
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but it's an example
of how one can think out of the box.
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Things, familiar objects can be thought of
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in ways they haven't been
thought of before.
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And that way, we can move
forward in the world.
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I have no doubt
that the challenges are enormous,
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there is simply no question
that here, in our country,
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we have to become literate.
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But there's one piece of good news.
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95% of our 12 year-olds
across India can read and write.
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So the future looks good.
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And as far as the workforce is concerned,
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if we can get all
these other pieces in place,
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we can say to the rest
of the world, "We are coming."
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
