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The Economist July 1st 2023 27 Asia Education in India Missing the mark C LOSING THE factory in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was not a deci- sion he took lightly, says the boss of a manufacturer based in Mumbai, India’s business capital. Yet the local workforce’s lack of skills and discipline meant it made sense to produce in the south and west. “We offer training at all our production sites, but bringing people to the required level simply wasn’t worth our time.” The tale illustrates one of India’s big- gest problems. Its education system is fail- ing it. At some 1.4bn, it has more people than China, and its economy is growing fast. It needs to make hundreds of millions of its young people employable, particular- ly in the poorer, more populous northern states. Otherwise it could waste much of its growth potential and court instability as undereducated, underemployed young- sters lose hope. Graduates of its leading universities are high­flyers at the world’s best firms. But many of the 265m pupils enrolled in its schools will leave them barely able to read or do basic maths. aser, an annual survey of children in rural India (three­quarters of the total), found that in 2022 just a quarter in Year 5 (when they are ten) could do basic division and a mere 43% managed to read a Year 2­level text. Of those in Year 8, when compulsory education ends, barely 45% could do basic division and less than 70% could read a Year 2­level text. Even more alarming is the lack of pro- gress. Though school infrastructure and enrolment have improved in recent years, with more children attending schools that have toilets, running water and sometimes even computers, learning has not kept pace. By 2022, maths skills had barely budged in a decade; reading skills had de- clined, partly owing to learning lost during the covid­19 pandemic. These numbers hide regional variations; learning levels tend to be higher in richer southern states and lower in the poorer north. One reason is a long­standing focus on elite education inherited from British rul- ers, keen to train administrators to run the empire. Post­independence governments relied on a small, brainy elite to build the new nation. “It’s a sorting mechanism, a system for the first two rows of the class,” says Yamini Aiyar, who heads the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in Delhi. The system’s narrow emphasis on fin- ishing a rigid syllabus assumes skills few children have when they start school—and never get a chance to acquire. It does little for the vast majority of pupils at non­elite government or low­cost private schools. Yet they are the ones India’s economy needs to broaden from its focus on services and increase its heft in manufacturing, which it hopes will account for 25% of GDP in 2025, up from 17%. Even a factory job re- quires skills many school leavers lack. Some signs of change can be seen. On a recent afternoon in Bajraha village in Bodhgaya in the eastern state of Bihar, a dozen children in their early teens sat in a circle in the village hall as Baijanti Kumari, a local volunteer, drew letters on a black- board. In their summer holiday the chil- dren were learning how to read a simple story and do basic maths, things they had BODHGAYA AND PUNE India’s failing schools put at risk its hopes of becoming an economic superpower → Also in this section 28 Vietnam’s best­in­class schools 29 Ethnic violence in India 30 Banyan: Australia and its aborigines 012