OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM IS KILLING CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

The purpose of education in a person’s life is to empower him, enable him and make him somebody who can contribute to the society. An education system which focuses on just facts and figures and ignores the creative instinct of the people would result in a world that is static in terms of progress and which lacks the resources the ever increasing population will need. In a country like India where providing even the basic primary education to all children is a challenge, the RTE (Right to education) act has come as a ray of hope. But given the size and scale of our country and the numbers of kids to be educated, the real challenge would be to establish an education system which not only provides literacy and knowledge, but also fosters creative and critical thinking among the students.

Even after growing at close to 9% for so many years, India has still not been able to create a system in which it is possible to provide free and compulsory education to all children. By World Bank figures United States of America spent 5.4% of its GDP on primary education in 2009 while India spent 3.4%. Given this huge difference in spending on education, it is not surprising that India lags behind in terms of innovation and technology. If the students are not given the basic primary education in the first place, they can never dream of becoming innovators. Not only is the primary education a problem, but the education that is given is also too focussed on facts and figures. Students are trained to pass exams, not to become innovators. The blame goes to the parents too. From an early age there is an enormous amount of pressure put on a child to score good marks and to outscore his peers. This puts an enormous pressure on the child to study for passing the exam and for scoring well. Even the laboratory infrastructure in most government schools is so dismal that the students hardly attend laboratory sessions. If India has to become a technological powerhouse, the change has to occur at the level of government schools. 70 % of the schooling in India happens in government schools, while the number is as high as 84% for rural areas. The RTE mandates all private schools to enter 25% students from families making less than Rs. 100,000 an year. But the real change has to happen at public schools which are plagued by teacher absences, poor infrastructure and lack of facilities.

Given the first condition of a good primary education is fulfilled, a student would need a good higher education. There is no dearth of engineering colleges in India. A lot of private engineering colleges are being opened with the intention of making profits, but a lot of them lack in terms of infrastructure and laboratory facilities. Even for those students who are interested in research and do pursue research, 40% have to go abroad for the dearth of facilities and research environment in our country.  Along with that, India does not enable its scientists to make revenue through intellectual property rights. Another indicator which shows our dismal record is the number of scientists in our country. While India has 7.8 scientists / 1000 of the population, the number is 180.66 for Canada, 53.13 for South Korea and 21.15 for the US. This shows that there is an urgent need for fostering a thriving research and development climate in our country.

The bulk of the spending for research and development has to come from the government. While R&D spending as a % of GDP is a dismal 1.25% for India, the figure is 3.1% for the United States. And the United States is a 16 trillion dollar economy in comparison to a 1.5 trillion Indian economy. So the amount of deficit that R&D in India faces is a big handicap and it is only natural that the bright minds would have to move to places where their efforts would bear more fruit. A Thomas Reuters study has shown that only 3.5 % of the global research output in 2010 came from India. According to the study, India ranks abysmally low in key sectors such as mathematics, engineering, computer sciences and agriculture. This is despite the fact that India has been an argi-based economy for too long, and now when it is supposed to be a service based economy, it is supposed to score better on computer sciences.

So the million dollar question is: Has the time come for our government to invest heavily in our innovators? Given the facts the answer can hardly be in the negative. Given the demographic dividend of our country, it is imperative to spend in education , R&D and vocational training very heavily. It is high time the government stopped doling out unproductive subsidies to people who do not need, and redirect that money for creating real assets in our country.

Our country needs a robust educational system at the school and university level, and to complement that it needs a strong research infrastructure to retain the minds within the country. Industry too has a big role to play. It can be involved at various level with the universities: in setting the curriculum, providing scholarships, investing in research infrastructure in top universities to name a few. Special zones can be created where Industry and relevant research facilities can be created along with incentives from the government in terms of tax exemptions and subsidies. Thus our industry expertise in areas like agriculture, computer science and technology can be successfully harnessed.

To sum up, a developing country can become a developed country only if it enables and empowers its citizens to learn, innovate and create, uses that innovation for real progress. Although we may lag behind some other countries right now in those areas, but with will and resolve we can overcome all hurdles and become a truly great nation of truly creative and innovative people.