ABSTRACT
India has made impressive strides in expanding access to primary and lower secondary education during recent years. Between 2005 and 2009, for example, the number of out-of-school children in the age group 6-14 years declined from about 13.4 million to 8 million – an impressive achievement in a relatively short period of time.1 Another area of progress in India during the past decade or two has been the expansion of female schooling. The share of girls in primary and secondary education increased quite dramatically, thanks in large part to many states offering stipends and free tuition for girls of secondary-school age. This is not to suggest that all problems of access have been resolved in India. Indeed, the
country continues to face major challenges in the delivery of education and training services. India and the South Asia region lag behind other world regions in achieving Education for All (EFA) goals. Access to educational opportunities continues to be a major obstacle, especially for disadvantaged children from poor families and rural areas. In 2006, an estimated 18 million were still out of school, almost 60 per cent of whom were girls. Even though India has seen impressive increases in female secondary schooling, the absolute levels of secondary school and tertiary participation among girls remain low, especially in comparison with countries in East and Southeast Asia. But the most important problem facing India is that achievements in access have not
been accompanied by adequate improvements in quality. Indeed, the expansion of schooling has often occurred at the expense of quality. In basic education, a significant proportion of school leavers do not achieve minimum mastery levels, as defined by the national government. The situation gets progressively worse at higher levels of education. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that education and training systems in India are not sufficiently responsive to the skill requirements of their economies, especially in the changing context of a globalized economy. By some accounts, a quarter or more of the 650,000 engineering graduates produced annually in India are unemployable because of their poor training and lack of engineering skills.2
