Earlier this week, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh retired from the Rajya Sabha, putting an end to a three-decade-long career in Indian politics. As prime minister between 2004 and 2014, he ensured the historic Indo-US nuclear agreement, transformed the social welfare framework with a bouquet of rights-based legislation and ushered in a slew of reforms including Direct Benefit Transfer and Aadhaar. However, the 91-year-old will be remembered as the architect of economic liberalisation in India in the early 1990s.
In March 1986, Singh wrote an article for the Hindustan Times titled, ‘A Developmental View’. By this time, the keen economist had already served as chief economic advisor in the finance ministry, a member of the Planning Commission and had recently completed a tenure as the Reserve Bank of India governor.
His views on the issues that faced a pre-liberalised India were based on research as an educationist (he taught economics at the Delhi School of Economics after completing a D.Phil from Oxford University) as well as knowledge of the inner workings of the government. In this piece, he writes about the gap between educational qualifications and employment readiness.
“The existing traditional system of education is far too obtusely academic and less vocational in its relevance to the needs of the developing economy," Singh wrote in the article. While a lot has changed in the country since he wrote this piece nearly four decades ago, some of his concerns are borne out by recent data. The India Employment Report 2024, brought out by the International Labour Organisation, pointed out that the unemployment rate among youth was nine times higher for graduates than for persons who could not read or write in 2022.
Gunnar Myrdal [a Swedish economist] once described India as a "Soft State". This softness manifested in myriad images of "social indiscipline" is in many ways a hard reality of the present educational scenario in India. Its chief features could be discerned in a kind of frequent experimentation with the content and form of education, an increasingly decreasing share in real value terms that education gets in the Central and State budgetary allocations and a lack of perspective in terms of the forecast of manpower requirement of the economic system.
This being so, what are we doing to shape our educational system in the context of scarce economic resources and the inexorable needs of socio-economic order? A recent analysis of manpower requirements showed that right at this moment we are short of (...) middle-level managers. (...)
In a recent discussion on the [educational] system, some of the profoundest questions were asked not by educationists but by the concerned parents. These questions related to whether our economic structure possesses the necessary employment potential and absorptive capacity to give jobs or meaningful employment to students who would leave institutions after plus two. Yet another vital question concerned the withdrawal of two classes from the colleges, particularly those that have sprung up recently in rural areas. They persisted in asking whether only mediocrities or third-divisioners would go into the vocational stream, thereby supplying second-rate talent to the proposed technological prime movers of growth in the country.
The role of education in the dynamics of development is of the nature of strategic investment in human capital. In this connection, a vital balance has to be struck between the accumulation of physical and human capital. One of the most widely prevalent explanations of poverty in the Third World is summarized in the cryptic [economist, Ragnor] Nurske remark: “The poor are poor because they are poor.” The fundamental assumption underlying this belief was that the poor could not become rich, because they had not acquired the necessary technical know-how; that they were ignorant; and that they were resistant to change and remained eternally and forever poor.
We have also to reckon that despite very laudable universalization of education, social mobility between classes is still severely restricted. That highlights the fact that incentives for education of the poor are sadly lacking.
Ultimately, it is not the physical resources that are scarce, but that whatever is there has not perhaps been exploited to its optimal possibilities. In this context, Professor Schultz, Nobel Laureate in Economics for 1979, in Reflections on Investment in Man has something pertinent to say: "Suppose that by some miracle India or some other low-income country like India, were to acquire as it were overnight a set of natural resources, equipment and structures including techniques of production comparable per person to ours --- what can they do with them, given existing skills and knowledge of the people? Surely the imbalance between the stock of human and non-human capital would be tremendous.”
The existing traditional system of education is far too obtusely academic and less vocational in its relevance to the needs of the developing economy. We have also to reckon that despite the very laudable universalisation of education, social mobility between classes is still severely restricted. That highlights the fact that incentives for the education of the poor are sadly lacking.
In a sense, the dynamics of educational reforms have always been like the proverbial pendulum. The two extremes are still evident in the role of education as an end in itself and as a catalyst in the development process. Often, attempts to measure "the rate of return" in educational investment are considered utterly repulsive. Economic consideration or judging education as an input and as an investment in the intangible human capital has only recently freed itself from its predominantly aesthetic consideration.
In perhaps the profoundest document on education, Learning To Be [The world of education today and tomorrow, brought out by the UNESCO in 1972], there is a reference to increasing acceptance of the "existence of a contradiction arising between the products of education and the needs of society." It is true that cost and benefit analysis norms or the building up of educational planning models have severe limitations. They are inherent in the very nature of any investment in human capital where the return would be utterly unpredictable and unmeasurable as compared with an investment in a factory or in land. In the very nature of things, the gestation period involved in investment in education is bound to be prolonged. However, some measures of assessment nevertheless have to be applied.
The induction of economic reasoning into education brings us inexorably close to the concept of "Development Education." It should, however, be clarified that development education would not be less of education and more of economics. One can legitimately ask: What is development education? A tentative idea of this concept can be reflected in some of the salient features of development education.
(a) Development education would be a less philosophical and a more pragmatic approach towards education as distinct from speculative and to an extent obtuse questions of learning, scholarship and pedagogy.
(b) it would postulate education as an input and relate it to general developmental activities in terms of distinct relationships with economic development; and
(c) it would be able to project certain planning models of education in terms of cost-and-benefit analysis and manpower requirements in a given socio-economic perspective.
(...) What we need is a conscious and pragmatic approach which takes into consideration two basic aspects of the Indian situation. The first is that we have to reckon with the fast-moving technological world, where data and knowledge become obsolete even before you can communicate them on the telephone. We cannot even translate classics- such as Einstein's theory of relativity before even some of its assumptions are invalidated by subsequent research
We have to be perhaps ruthlessly realistic about our economic and budgetary constraints. There is no point in trying to apply one cubic inch of butter to a square mile of bread. Such an attempt would imply a realignment of priorities in educational investment and discarding part of the bandwagon. Logically, the imparting of technical skills in the context of regional, national and international requirements must take precedence over the diffusion of resources. Not that aesthetic and cultural pursuits, or creativity in poetry are less important to national development. It is difficult in any case to establish a cause-and-effect relationship between investment in creative arts and the quantum of creativity. It is in this context that education could perhaps be predominantly only development education in a country striving to overcome colossal problems of poverty, ignorance and lack of receptivity to technology and innovation.
This article was published in the Hindustan Times on March 22, 1986. It has been edited for brevity and conciseness.
The role of education in development, of economic reasoning in education
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03.04.2024
Earlier this week, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh retired from the Rajya Sabha, putting an end to a three-decade-long career in Indian politics. As prime minister between 2004 and 2014, he ensured the historic Indo-US nuclear agreement, transformed the social welfare framework with a bouquet of rights-based legislation and ushered in a slew of reforms including Direct Benefit Transfer and Aadhaar. However, the 91-year-old will be remembered as the architect of economic liberalisation in India in the early 1990s.
In March 1986, Singh wrote an article for the Hindustan Times titled, ‘A Developmental View’. By this time, the keen economist had already served as chief economic advisor in the finance ministry, a member of the Planning Commission and had recently completed a tenure as the Reserve Bank of India governor.
His views on the issues that faced a pre-liberalised India were based on research as an educationist (he taught economics at the Delhi School of Economics after completing a D.Phil from Oxford University) as well as knowledge of the inner workings of the government. In this piece, he writes about the gap between educational qualifications and employment readiness.
“The existing traditional system of education is far too obtusely academic and less vocational in its relevance to the needs of the developing economy," Singh wrote in the article. While a lot has changed in the country since he wrote this piece nearly four decades ago, some of his concerns are borne out by recent data. The India Employment Report 2024, brought out by the International Labour Organisation, pointed out that the unemployment rate among youth was nine times higher for graduates than for persons who could not read or write in 2022.
Gunnar Myrdal [a Swedish economist] once described India as a "Soft State". This softness manifested in myriad images of "social indiscipline" is in many ways a hard reality of the present educational scenario in India. Its chief features could be discerned in a kind of frequent experimentation with the content and form of education, an increasingly decreasing share in real value terms that education gets in the Central and State budgetary allocations and a lack of perspective in terms of the forecast of manpower........
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