Let’s not blame India’s early policy settings for our failings in mass education
Live MintThree-quarters of a century after freedom from British rule, Nehruvian policies continue to animate debates on the extent to which they aided or hobbled the emergence of India’s economy. A recent study by Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang of the Paris School of Economics’ World Inequality Lab compares the approach taken by India and China to public education over a dozen decades—from 1900 to 2020–to examine its economic impact. With China’s per capita income almost five times India’s today, it is easy to forget that half a century ago, the two were more or less at par as economies struggling to emerge from poverty. While both countries have reached high levels of school enrolment after starting with less than a tenth of all children attending classes 120 years ago, the People’s Republic of the 1950s focused on primary and secondary schooling for its multitudes, while India laid policy emphasis on institutes of higher education. Plausible as that chain of cause-and-effect is, India’s gaps in basic education are arguably less the result of early policy neglect than social constraints that are taking rather long to ease.
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