What is this track about?
Universalising education has been the mainstay of India’s strategy in education. The 86th amendment of the Indian constitution making education a fundamental right led subsequently to schemes and stepped up efforts towards increased enrollment and retention of children in schools. With 61% of India’s billion plus population literate, educating India is not an easy task. There are 13.5 crore students enrolled in primary schools alone. As many as 54% of the Primary schools (4.17lakh) have only one or two teachers. The number of primary schools with three or less teachers is a staggering 71.5% (5.49lakh). At the primary level alone, there is a shortfall of 1.25 lakh schools, according to Sarva Shikhsha Abhiyan estimates.

Drop out rates at the elementary level are as high as 50% suggesting gaps between learning outcomes and employability.

Despite increased spending on education, research shows government schools are plagued by high teacher student ratios, high teacher student ratios and a lack of accountability for performance.

With the services sector clocking double digit growth rates, Education should rise to meet demands felt in the Hospitality, IT Services, Retail, Financial Services and Aviation, to name a few sectors. According to NASSCOM estimates there would be a demand for 2.3mn IT professionals by 2010 and a shortage of 5,00,000 personnel required which are indicative of human resource requirements.

Private schools?
Strong regulatory barriers especially with regard to physical infrastructure requirements impede private players meeting strongly felt requirements for private schools. There are about 50 000 recognised private schools in India and most of them present in urban clusters. Research points out to more unaided unrecognised private schools serving children from low income groups who remain enrolled in recognised schools to be able to take government recognised examinations.

IT, Infrastructure, Innovative curriculum and pedagogy
Surpassing problems with poor student teacher ratios, curriculum that has not been relevant to employability and poor pedagogic methods employed, a number of IT based initiatives have cropped up which functionalises virtual classrooms that are complimentary to main stream education and still more that offer vocational courses that are linked to employability.

Such private unaided schools and IT powered education initiatives survive owing to the buy in even at the bottom of the pyramid.

Summarizing the definitions of problems in Education,

1. Access to quality education.
2. Lack of infrastructure especially in rural India
3. Absence of quality assessments and measurement of learning outcomes
4. Unemployability after education is perhaps the primary reason for high rate of drop outs from schools Enrollment levels are healthy in primary school and drop out rates increase from middle school to high school and higher secondary where drop out rates are highest and enrollment rates are lowest.

Sankalp Awards for Education:
Enterprises that are meeting inter alia the following needs and issues in this sector are invited to submit nominations for the Sankalp Award.

The emerging models in this sector include:

1. Education infrastructure and curriculum: Tier 3 Urban and Rural segment challenges
2. Quality benchmarks, standardized metrics and testing
3. Outsourced Infrastructure
4. Innovative curriculum and delivery franchised out as services
5. Low cost private schools
6. Vocational education