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Friday, March 29, 2024

India Reels Under Low-Quality Education

A large section of youngsters in India, looking desperately at career advancement prospects, is paying for 2-3 degrees in the hope they will one day find their dream job. They are drawn irresistibly to colleges that are mushrooming inside tiny apartment complexes or inside stores in public places. Billboards promoting organisations promising job placement border both sides of highways. It is an odd paradox!

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A large section of youngsters in India, looking desperately at career advancement prospects, is paying for 2-3 degrees in the hope they will one day find their dream job. They are drawn irresistibly to colleges that are mushrooming inside tiny apartment complexes or inside stores in public places. Billboards promoting organisations promising job placement border both sides of highways. It is an odd paradox! Top technology and management schools in India have produced such leaders in international business as Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc. (Parent Company of Google) and Satya Nadella of Microsoft Corp. However, thousands of small private colleges lacking instructors with proper training, the wherewithal to hold proper classes, and using outdated curriculums that hold no promise of internships or job placements have mushroomed into a burgeoning business, says Bloomberg. Such cities as Bhopal—a thriving central India habitat of over 2.6 million people—highlight the complexities of the nation’s education growth. Private institutions put up large sign boards that announce their claim to fame and tempt the young generation with the lure of jobs through degrees—which are often found to be fraudulent assertions. One such ad reads: ‘Regular classes & better placements: Need we say more?’

And who can forget the huge examination-admission-recruitment scam in 2013 that involved the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board (MPPEB), popularly known by its Hindi acronym, ‘Vyapam’ (Vyavsayik Pariksha Mandal)? The massive scale of the scam surfaced on the night of July 6 that year when the Indore police arrested from various city hotels 20 people – 17 of them from UP – who had come to impersonate local candidates in the PMT exam scheduled on July 7, 2013. The scam was operational in the 1990s and involved politicians, senior and junior officials, and businessmen systematically employing imposters to write papers, manipulate examination hall seating arrangements, and supply forged answer sheets by bribing officials.

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In Bhopal, private schools offering management, engineering, and Civil Services training are running thriving – often sham – businesses. After ordinary degrees failed to land them professions of their choice, students claimed they enrolled in these courses to improve their skill sets and increase their prospects of better career options. Partha Chatterjee, West Bengal’s minister and general secretary of the West Bengal unit of the Trinamool Congress, was held by the Enforcement Directorate on July 23 last year in connection with the West Bengal School Service Commission teachers’ recruitment scam. As recently as February 10 of this year, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of Calcutta High Court—hearing a clutch of petitions regarding the school recruitment scam since September 2021—had ordered the cancellation of 1,911 jobs in Group D positions in state-run and state-aided schools after finding manipulation in their Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets. Calcutta High Court directed the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE) to notify the termination of 842 school teachers by March 11 this year. In the case of illegal appointments, the high court order on March 10 this year took the total tally of jobs terminated to 3,623. Out of these, 252 were teachers in primary schools who were appointed illegally, 618 were teachers of Classes IX and X, 842 were Group C teachers and 1,911 were Group D employees.

 

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The Hills Times
The Hills Timeshttps://www.thehillstimes.in/
The Hills Times, a largely circulated English daily published from Diphu and printed in Guwahati, having vast readership in hills districts of Assam, and neighbouring Nagaland, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur.
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