Abstract:

India has the largest education system in the world with 1.5 million schools, 5 million teachers and 265 million students going to school. Then why is it that India also has one of the highest numbers of students out of school in the world, about 150 million? The country also has the world’s largest youth population, with 356 million 10-24 year-olds. While many of the advanced countries are having to deal with an ageing population, India is sitting on a gold mine of human potential with the growing numbers of young human resources. And, yet it also has about 53 million unemployed people as of December 2021. It is a fair assumption to make, that in a country where there are a large number of schools, a large number of young children, and a great amount of effort that has been deployed by the governments to enroll these children in schools, then a large number of children should graduate from schools and become the workforce for the world. But that is not the case for several reasons. Some of the reasons are obvious but many of the reasons are invisible and have not been given enough importance so far. In this paper, the author will deal with the invisible reasons that make India's human potential deficit.

The problem in India has been its large numbers which can become the enemy of quality and impact. But the real problem has been the denial to look at the root of the issues that plague the education system of the country. India has come out with a path-breaking National Education Policy after 36 years of hiatus. This policy looks at the real purpose of education and how to create citizens that are rooted in their country’s heritage and also ready for the global workplace. The policy has addressed the inclusion of poor children in the education system and has called for reducing dropouts. But like most Indian policies it has not looked at how best to implement it at the grass-root level. The only way to make this policy a practice is to understand and get into the shoes of the constituency that the education system addresses. If more than 60% of students in the country go to government schools because it is free, then the policy must address a working plan to make sure that these children complete their schooling, and either go on for higher studies or are employable at some level.

In this paper, the author would like to refer to 23 years of experience with the education of poor children in India and address some of the issues that pose challenges for them. The author would elaborate on what she has termed the Anatomy of the Poor and look at the Biometrics and Psychometrics of Poverty that prevents children from the slums in India to complete their schooling and getting employed in highly valued jobs. The author will elaborate on how these poor children are “pushed out” of education rather than just dropping out. A case study of an alternate model called the Parikrma Way™ will also be presented to highlight how to convert research to reality, complexity to simplicity, exclusivity to inclusivity and policy to implementation. This Parikrma Way™ is a simple replicable model that can be adopted by all developing countries that are faced with a large number of dropouts.

Keywords:

Education for all, dropouts, equal opportunity, education for the poor, trauma-sensitive schools.