Kiran Bedi bats for community colleges

Lamenting the total disconnect between education and employment generation, former IPS officer Kiran Bedi today said in a country with a high drop-out rate, this gap should be bridged through community colleges.

"I see this as the only hope today," she said referring to the concept of community colleges, which according to her should spring up in rural areas and in urban villages to offer education and vocational training to the not-so well-off students.

The founder of the Navjoyti India Foundation which runs a number of such community colleges in Delhi and NCR said this while delivering a lecture at IGNOU on the subject 'Community Colleges - Answer for the Future and Present'.

She said that besides filling up the gap between education and employment, vocational training provided by the community colleges can also be a crime prevention measure.

Citing the example of the Navjyoti community college, an initiative of her organisation, she said, "The vocational training of Navjoyti began as a crime prevention measure, by wheeling women away from drug peddling to vocational programmes, wheeling children away to pathshalas."

She added that there is also a need to spread awareness among the people about the benefits of community colleges.

Citing examples of the other countries, Bedi said that in most of the developed nations and in many developing nations, 75-85 per cent of youth learn a skill or competence or trade between the age of 14 and 35.

However, the corresponding figures for the same in India were a dismal 3-4 per cent, she pointed out.

Citing the poor state of affairs in education in India and the paucity of educational institutions, she said that a country like India with a youth population of 400 million has a total of 362 universities.

On the other hand, a much smaller nation like Japan has a total of 4000 universities, she said.

"Unless it (community college) is multiplied by lakhs we will be nowhere in the coming years... that is my real anxiety," she said, pointing out that 90-94 per cent of students drop out of schools in India from kindergarten to intermediate-level education.

Strengthening vocational education through community colleges is the only viable option, she said.

Bedi said India would do well to emulate the Malaysian system, which has a network of vocational training programmes for students leaving school.

Earlier, speaking about the community college scheme of IGNOU, which it started recently in collaboration with Navjyoti, pro-chancellor Latha Pillai said through it "we wanted to broaden the base of skill-based education."