The unemployable literates of India

Prima facie, there is much cause for cheer. Provisional data gleaned from the latest Census show that India’s literacy levels have soared: India’s effective literacy rate jumped by 9.2% to reach 74.04 %.

Significantly, literacy rates improved sharply among females compared to males. Thus, while effective literacy rates for males rose from 75.26% to 82.14% — a rise of 6.9% — literacy rates for females climbed from 53.67% to 65.48%, an 11.8% increase.

That is heartening news indeed. But this data masks a few worrying concerns. First, the data relates to effective literacy, and not literacy. Measuring effective literacy in India means including anyone who can read and write his or her own name.  Thus, if Ram knows how to read and write the three letters of his name, and Sita knows how to read and write the four letters of her name, they get included in the category of effective literates. This is not the way developed countries define literacy.

Not job worthy
Second, literacy becomes relevant if it leads to employability. Both the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Boston Consulting Group estimate that India would face a “talent gap” of more than 5 million by 2012, as existing educational institutions do not impart employable skills. Just 20% of the engineering graduates are unemployable. A McKinsey report finds only 25% engineers, 15% finance graduates and less than 10% of the other graduates to be employable.

It is even more alarming when one takes into account that graduates comprise only 3.5% of India’s population — this includes graduates in all streams such as arts, commerce, science, engineering, and medicine. If 90% of the graduates are unemployable, it means that barely 0.5% of India’s population comprises employable graduates.

A deep rot
It would be easy to blame India’s colleges and universities. But the rot goes deeper than that. In India’s schools, the quality of teaching and the filtering out of inept or backward students has been woefully poor.

This was obvious from the results tabulated by E-convergence Technologies Limited (ETL), a private sector company with which this author is closely associated. During 2002-03, ETL decided to find out more about the quality of education being imparted in Mumbai’s schools. 

In order to normalise the sample base, it focussed only on privately managed schools and English medium schools. The study covered 34 schools who gave ETL permission to conduct a quiz in English and Mathematics (some of the questions were as rudimentary as putting a set of numbers in the right order). A total of 16,500 students appeared for the quiz. It was found that 65% of the students failed in Mathematics, while 75% failed in English. Almost all the students were from Classes V and VI (10-11 year-old children). That this could happen with privately managed, English medium schools in one of India’s prime cities is a good indicator of how low standards have fallen.

Similar surveys carried out in 1977 by Aikara (and published in the India Education Report of the Oxford University Press) indicated that ‘backward’ states like Bihar had fewer students performing poorly than ‘progressive’ states like Maharashtra and Gujarat. It could be that the lack of alternative job opportunities in Bihar kept good teachers in their respective schools, whereas in progressive states, good teachers migrated to better paying and better respected professions.

Today, it is alarming to note that grace marks are given to students at the SSC level to increase the number of students passing out. In many cases, 20 grace marks were given to students at various stages.

Kapil Sibal’s Right to Education (RTE) Act does not help much either. In fact, it could make a bad situation worse. RTE is preventing schools from detaining students till they reach Std VIII. Thus, a student can go through the schooling system without learning anything, and come out claiming that he is a “Std IX fail” student, when he might have learnt nothing beyond Std III. And an academically poor student in a classroom can prevent other children from learning effectively too. The RTE Act could thus promote more mediocrity than ever before.

That is why effective literacy levels are not something to gloat over. They need to be taken with a barrel-full of salt.