Abstract:

India, like Europe, is being forced to respond to the growing competition, pluralization, multiculturalism, and international exchange that characterize the current age. Particularly through the exposure to different value systems and lifestyles, traditional social and cultural identities are nowadays called into question worldwide. It is possible to observe breathtaking changes and shifts in India since the early 1990s and thus, there is a feeling of tremendous optimism in India today. Although India has a potential demographic advantage because of its young and growing population, the benefits of this advantage are overshadowed by the country's lack in infrastructure investment, specifically education. Through the widespread failure of India in regard to educating its people, to some extent an inherited flaw from the British period, the country has mainly poorly educated masses who are only sometimes touched by the prosperity that characterizes India’s expanding middle class. While the size and speed of expansion of technology products such as computer software has been quite extraordinary, the underdevelopment of the Indian school system, especially in socially more left behind regions and particularly among disadvantaged groups, has been deeply inefficient and astonishingly unjust.
However, the process of economic advancement cannot be detached from the cultivation and enhancement of social opportunities on a more widespread basis. Basic education and literacy, primary health care and other social systems are essential elements for bringing forth human capabilities and ensuring life quality. These basic essentials can help in generating economic success of a more standard kind, which in turn can contribute to enhancing the quality of human lives in general. Educational inequalities and basic health care receive more public attention today and the effects of that favorable change can be seen in the relative progress made in increased educational opportunities and more broadly available medical care. Nevertheless, the very poor in India can only participate marginally and largely indirectly in the prosperity that information technology and related developments generate. The aim of the paper is to face India’s challenges: India is struggling with a high degree of social change, with educational inequalities, with urbanization, with people leaving rural areas and with an erosion of its natural foundations. Moreover, the Indian economy must be integrated into a global economy based on a productive division of labour, and millions of young people have to be educated and have to be integrated into employment-related processes all over the country. The truth about India’s prospects probably lies somewhere in between the noticeable extremes of India’s development as the economy has broken free and will most likely not sink back into its old sleepiness. Almost certainly though, many problems will in India remain for a very long time. The theoretical framework of this research in the field of social sciences is based on an interdisciplinary approach concerning the fields of intercultural education and on theoretical foundations of globalization and development studies. The analytical investigation is based on an interdisciplinary literature analyses and on qualitative research methods: qualitative expert-interviews, narrative interviews as well as informal debates at different levels of formality in India.

Keywords:

Contemporary India, demographic advantage, education in India, quality of human lives, India's prospects.