What are the trends underlying India’s growth over the last two decades? The contribution of our manufacturing sector to GDP has remained more or less stagnant at less than 30%. Agriculture has shrunk. However, the share of service sector contribution has increased from 44.5% to 56.6%. Clearly, growth of the service sector is crucial for India’s future. This will depend to some extent on the supply of workers with the right skills entering the labour force. The National Skill Development Corporation of India estimates that one million young people are joining the workforce each month and will be doing so for the next 15 years.

Against the backdrop of these facts, the industry is concerned about the fact that enough people with adequate skills at the starting level cannot be found. In early April 2011, a hard hitting article titled Indian graduates millions but few are fit to hire appeared in the Wall Street Journal. Using information from the National Association of Software and Services Companies, the article points out that “although there has been a quantum leap in graduates (engineering colleges in India now have seats for 1.5 million students, nearly four times the 3,90,000 available in 2000), 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates are unemployable by India’s high-growth global industries, including information technology and call centres”.

What, then, will help to change how we train and educate our young people? How can this be done on a massive scale? It is clear that the current education structure and institutions are not delivering, neither at the level nor at the pace that is needed.

The enthusiasm around Aakash, tablets and other technology being introduced in the education sector is a response to some of the fundamental flaws in the education system. The hope is that the new and affordable technology can directly connect learners to content and knowledge. And, by enabling access, we will liberate our young, those in high school and in college, from the clutches of outmoded and dysfunctional institutions and modes of delivery. The assumption is that learners are ready to learn and the content and knowledge is out there, ready to be absorbed.

All that is needed is the bridge to connect them directly.

What do we know about the learners? The available information is stark and scary. Seven years of large scale data from the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2005 to 2011) clearly shows that our children are weak on the basics of reading and arithmetic. Based on a sample of over 6,00,000 children we see that after five years in school, about half of all children in Std 5 cannot read simple text at Std 2 level. About a third cannot do a simple subtraction problem with two digits and borrowing. Such figures have been reported year after year from 2005. It is very likely that lakhs of children who did not learn to read well or could not do arithmetic have left the school system by now.

The PISA 2009+ results from Himachal and Tamil Nadu have shocked the nation. These tests are given to in-school children who are 15 years and older. India is next to last in performance. Looking at the kinds of questions actually asked is even more revealing.

Here is a question from the PISA test:

[Mei-Ling found out that the exchange rate between Singapore dollars and South African rand was: 1 SGD = 4.2 ZAR. Mei-Ling changed 3000 Singapore dollars into South African rand at this exchange rate. How much money in South African rand did

Mei-Ling get?]

About 60% 15+ in-school children from India are estimated to be below this level of math.

The world is changing?faster for some than for others. Opportunities are becoming available that we could not have imagined even a few years ago. Technology and innovation will change the landscape of how we learn. But we must get ready to enable our children to enter the new world.

The framework of our education system needs fundamental reworking from Std 1 onwards. The weaknesses begin early. Weak foundations sabotage the entire learning process from school to college. The causes are many?they span the whole spectrum?from teachers who are not able to teach effectively, to families who cannot adequately support children’s learning to a school system that focuses on completing the curriculum rather than on teaching children and a society that values certification rather than learning. At the core of today’s condition is the fact that the school system?private or government?has not yet squarely accepted that there is a very big crisis. With our focus on inputs and access, we are still obsessed with the priorities of the last century. We need to move decisively to articulate what kind of learning we will guarantee to our children and when. If we as a country do not act decisively and fast, the only akaash that many children will ever see is the cloudy, grey sky above them.

Rukmini Banerji works with Pratham and ASER