Atanu Dey on India’s Development

My contribution to the August issue of Pragati. I am reproducing the piece here below the fold, for the record. Regulars to this blog pretty much know my position on what needs to be done on education. Still you may find something of use.

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Markets Work, Incentives Matter
The two broadest generalizations one arrives at from a study of economics are that markets work and that incentives matter. People respond to incentives because that is at the core of what it means to be rational. To the extent that humans are rational, their behavior is predictably in the direction that […]

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India is a country that’s renowned for its diversity – the country is a potpourri of different languages, religions, castes and cultures. While this variety makes the nation more interesting and intriguing, it’s kicking up a storm in the sphere of education. The country’s government-aided institutions all allow a certain quota of seats to be […]

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Webometric.info analyzes about 15,000 universities world wide and ranks 5,000 of them on their “web performance” which is a weighted combination of

Their objective:
We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according […]

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This is a follow up to the previous post, “Begging for a World Class University.” In this I will address two responses to the post: one, the comment left by Aditya, and two, a post by Pramode titled “A Question (or two) for Atanu“.

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Consider this scenario. Someone you know imprisons his grown up children and does not allow them to go out and do jobs that they are fully capable of doing. He also locks up his productive assets and prevents his children from using them. Then he goes around begging his neighbors for help with feeding his […]

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Ramesh Menon’s article “India’s Talent Crunch” in DNA makes shocking reading but is news only if one has not been in touch with the reality of the desperate situation that employers face in India in their search for employable people.

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Previous posts: Part 1, Part 2
Reservations in educational institutions for specific groups are essentially a flawed response to a problem. It is flawed for a number of reasons. The first and foremost is that it does not even begin to address or even recognize the actual problem, namely, that there is a mismatch between supply […]

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Previous post: Part 1.
I find it hard to comprehend very large numbers. For instance, when I consider that India has 1.12 million schools (primary and secondary), I am dumbstruck. I have to translate it down to relative numbers because the absolute numbers are beyond me. So, I would roughly estimate that out of population of […]

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Yesterday morning I got to the Pune railway station early because I had yet to buy a ticket for Mumbai. A notice at the ticket counter informed me that the train – Deccan Queen – was full. Disappointed, I walked to the nearby intercity bus stop.
As one can expect, the place is a sort […]

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This is a follow up to the post on Indian spending on education abroad.
The actual spending may not be $13 billion annually but the argument does not change even if the figure was much lower. What matters is that it is indicative of a problem and we should be concerned about it. It should […]

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That’s what a report in the Hindustan Times claims: US $13 billion each year. Figures such as these are unbelievable but I suppose someone must have done the numbers. In any case, I had estimated that number to be around $10 billion a few years ago.
Let’s pause for a moment and figure. $13 billion […]

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The headline in the NY Times article simply says, “INDIA’S GREAT PROBLEM: Nobody Knows How to Educate Her 300,000,000 People.” It begins
For many years past, those who have known India best have recognized that one of her greatest, if not her greatest, problem was that of education.

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This post summarizes some of my thoughts on why the Indian educational sector must be liberalized.

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Humans are the ultimate general purpose machines. What we are potentially capable of is virtually unlimited. Who we become and what we become capable of doing depends on the environment we grow up in and the programming that we are subjected to. To some degree at least, our educational system programs us. In some cases, […]

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Information, Not Plastics
The world has come a long way since the 1960s when the future was defined by one word – “plastics” – as Mr McGuire advised the young graduate Ben. Now the future is defined by another word and the word is “information.” Plastics was a wonder product of the world of industrial technology […]

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Pardon me for the alliteration and the weak attempt at punning in the title of this post. I could not resist the temptation. But anyhow, the Finnish educational system’s successes underlines my convictions about what features define a good system. Here’s a report in today’s Wall Street Journal, “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart?“. (Hat […]

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The future of education is going to be one of the most exciting things going on in the world. I see a revolutionary change occurring because of two specific reasons. First, the increasingly complex nature of our world. Change is accelerating and therefore to prepare people for that dynamic world, people need skills that were […]

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Perhaps you have read it before on this blog. Now “The Age of Profound Ignorance” is available to a wider readership on LiveMint.com. (If the previous link does not work, please use this one.)

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Education in India is generally in dire straits even though some people mistakenly believe that it is excellent from the successes of some ex-IIT non-resident Indians in the US who made piles of money. It is not hard to figure out what is the root cause of the distress of the educational system in India: […]

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