Opinion
Let’s not blame India’s early policy settings for our failings in mass education
Summary
- A divergence in the policy approach taken to public schooling might well have led India’s economy to lag China’s, as a new academic study suggests. But this should arguably be attributed more to complex social constraints than to any policy design.
Three-quarters of a century after freedom from British rule, Nehruvian policies continue to animate debates on the extent to which they aided or hobbled the emergence of India’s economy. Even before we made a decisive shift in 1991 to reduce the state’s role, a leftist critique sought to skewer the policy choices of our formative years for investing in elite education at the cost of mass learning.
The economy’s rise and passage of time have not eased that criticism. A recent study by Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang of the Paris School of Economics’ World Inequality Lab compares the approach taken by India and China to public education over a dozen decades—from 1900 to 2020–to examine its economic impact.
That it makes a difference over the long-term wasn’t in doubt. That it might explain divergent growth paths between the two economies is what the work of Bharti and Yang would have us think.
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With China’s per capita income almost five times India’s today, it is easy to forget that half a century ago, the two were more or less at par as economies struggling to emerge from poverty. Beijing had a head-start over New Delhi in easing economic controls and letting private profit act as an incentive for value generation.
Also, it was a rural rebellion against collective farming that led China’s market reforms, while it was a lack of dollars to pay for oil imports that triggered ours by exposing a gaping hole in our statist model of autarky. The remedies differed accordingly. However, the Bharti-Yang study suggests that the most consequential top-down versus bottom-up difference lay in public education, not market orientation.
While both countries have reached high levels of school enrolment after starting with less than a tenth of all children attending classes 120 years ago, the People’s Republic of the 1950s focused on primary and secondary schooling for its multitudes, while India laid policy emphasis on institutes of higher education.
As China acquired a wide base of students who could read and write, we got a small but well educated crowd of college graduates and specialists. Also, Chinese school-leavers went in for vocational training in greater proportion and were more inclined to study engineering than us.
This gave China’s labour force an edge for its globalization-era rise as the world’s factory, drawing millions off farms, even as we made rapid progress with desk jobs in service industries for smaller cohorts of people who could forge careers and move up. In recent decades, India has tried the Chinese formula, but with patchy results.
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Plausible as that chain of cause-and-effect is, India’s gaps in basic education are arguably less the result of early policy neglect than social constraints that are taking rather long to ease. Although budget outlays could have been larger, granted, a mission to educate everyone was indeed mounted. It yielded lower dividends than our thrust on higher learning.
Even today, of the millions who fare poorly on scholastic aptitude, most are from groups historically excluded from academic pursuits. The unjust dictates of caste have clearly softened from Ambedkar’s school-days 12 decades ago, when he was forced to be a backbencher by teachers aware of his caste identity.
Yet, not all educators are equally earnest in aiming for equitable learning outcomes. A Nehruvian-era emphasis on higher education is only one part of India’s story. And it’s a story that offers a lasting lesson: A level learning field is a worthy aim, even if its benefits are too far over the horizon to foresee.
Also read: Mint Explainer: Why Indian schools continue to fail rural teens
