Education and Inclusive Development in India
Contents: Introduction/L.N. Dash. 1. Education and the knowledge economy of India/L.N. Dash. 2. Education and economic development in India/N. Jaganathan. 3. Role of education in economic development--an interstate analysis/Alka Samra. 4. Education, growth and wages in India--an inter-relationship/Kuldeep Kaur. 5. Is investment in women\'s education profitable?/Sailabala Debi. 6. Role of human capital investment on children\'s education: a study of rural households in Tamil Nadu/E. Nanda Kumar and A. Sangamithra. 7. Level of education and employment in Punjab/Harvinder Kaur. 8. Growth of engineering and technical education in India: causes and patterns/Pradeep Kumar Choudhury. 9. Higher education and growth of the Indian economy: the emerging scenario in relation to Inter-state disparities/Manish Dev. 10. Equity in higher education/Sanjukta Das. 11. Economics of higher education in Orissa/Kishor C. Samal. 12. WTO and higher education: challenges and opportunities for India/Nighat Ahmad. 13. The implications of GATS Trade in higher education services: The Indian perspective of private participation/D.G. Mannivannan. 14. Is educational financing in India adequate?/L.N. Dash. 15. Public expenditure on higher education in India/Shaikh Saleem and Vidya Gawal. Index.
"In the Post-Liberalisation Period India has experienced expansion of unprecedented dimension. Despite all its success, a number of deficiencies are spotted in various sectors of the economy. The growth has been termed as exclusionary in nature. The rapid economic growth has failed to take along with it various sectors and different sections of people. Inclusive development will become possible only by giving a U-Turn to the emphasis laid on the education sector. India\'s young demographic bulge--with more than half of its population aged 25 or younger--can prove to be a demographic dividend if the human resources are managed effectively. In fact the Tenth and Eleventh Plans have started focusing greater attention on this sector. Notwithstanding all this there are gaps of various kinds in the education sector. Despite the goal of universal primary education in India, 59 million children are not attending school. India already has one of the highest pupil-teacher ratio in Asia. We have achieved all success in the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan; yet only 87 per cent of the habitations have a primary school within a distance of 1 km. About 6.9 per cent of the total children in the relevant age group were out of school in 2005-06. There are also various problems which inhabit the development of secondary education in the country. No doubt, higher education has witnessed many-fold increase in the country since 1950. But the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education in India is only 11 per cent which is lower than the world average of 23 per cent and the developed countries\' average of 55 per cent. Sustainable development warrants that there should be a minimum enrolment of 20 to 25 per cent in higher education. Further, quality is a matter of concern. There are disparities of various kinds--rural-urban, among the SCs, STs, and OBCs, and other social categories, the poor and Non-Poor, so on. Therefore, education has to be made more inclusive in order to attain inclusive development in the country. In order to achieve this goal, more resources need to be allocated. Education spending in India which is as low as 3.57 per cent of the GDP in 2006-07 needs to be augmented." (jacket)
