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To be fair, the Indian education system was crafted to create 'Brown Sahibs' to manage the Colonial Govt., and unlike say SE Asia and E. Asia, the system remain
by thwerw4234 7y ago
To be fair, the Indian education system was crafted to create 'Brown Sahibs' to manage the Colonial Govt., and unlike say SE Asia and E. Asia, the system remains in essentially the same state that the British left it in. Indeed, most 'Indian Americans' are united in their hatred for their home countries IMO.
On the other hand, it's very unsurprising that India's greatest export remains Human Labour. For those who don't realize this, India's balance of payments is actually positive inspite of the imports being about ~$150 billion more than exports (that is about 5% of nominal GDP). This comes about because of the amount of money that is being repatriated by Indians.
Perhaps it is for this reason that India maintains a linguistic apartheid, whereby only the English speakers have access to education, and higher wrungs of the state like the judiciary, civil services etc. It's also a testament to the nation's collective stupidity that it thinks exporting cheap labour over building skills within the country, is a justifiable strategy.
This is echoed, unsurprisingly, by 'body traders' like Infosys (c.f Nandan Nilekani), but is a common state doctrine after 'independence'. Unlike China, which emphasized mass education access, and local technological ability, India's schools specialize basically in serving Anglo-Saxon nations - most IITians etc. leave the country on graduation (esp. in CS).
Within a country like India, where each of the major languages have a speaking population of an average 6+ million (similar to S. Korea, Germany etc.), and where Hindi has a speaking population of 400+ million, you'd be hard pressed to find a single university of repute that can educate people in any of the native languages. Even the bombastic Tamils in the south or the Hindi pushers in the north have little to show after 70+ years of bitter politicking.
How a mob of uneducated rabble, neither interested in agriculture nor equipped for industry, will be beneficial for India is a puzzle that only Indians appear to be able to "bend" around.
For these reasons, those who compare India with China, have neither an awareness of India's history, its present British colony run by "Brown Sahibs", or even about its historic role as the "pivot for Asia", whereby it was used to colonize the whole of Asia. This is not surprising, since its own 'eminent' academics are often at a loss in doing anything that doesn't involve mimicking their long gone masters.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoThat's both a little harsh and doesn't stand up to scrunity. As a counterexample, consider Singapore, which also has inherited and retained the British education & legal systems, as well as standardized on English as the lingua franca despite it being nobody's mother tongue. Yet Singapore has still become one of the world's richest countries, while Malaysia next door, starting from almost the same position (they were part of the same colony/country!), has not. My equally unpopular opinion is that Gandhi's ruinous Swaraj/socialist economies theories that basically involved blocking off imports and central planning of everything were the primary cause India stagnated for so many decades, and has now fallen so far behind China in everything except exporting brainy IT engineers to work in the US.
- ashleshbiradar 7y agoGandhi? which one?
- kamaal 7y agoNonsense. Russian(Ex-USSR), China are more extreme in central planning and inward focus than India will ever be. The real problem is insatiable desire among Indians for Managerial/Administrative jobs. Or Govt bribe income potential jobs(Again in Administration). Most people want to be in abstract boss level administrative/managerial jobs because they think they can just give orders and make 10x more money than people who do 10x work to make things happen and make 0.1x money. Indians do well in administration/management because it's the most aspirational job here. Lastly India is a country of shopkeepers and resellers. We are NOT an engineering or industrialization intensive country. There is a fundamental cultural problem and that is unlikely to be solved soon given the misaligned incentives.
- terminaljunkid 7y ago> Indians do well in administration/management because it's the most aspirational job here. If your definition of doing well is doing some droid - like managing of stuff, yes. Innovation? Not much..
- terminaljunkid 7y agoI am actually happy English is the language. India has several languages each with small population of speakers. Having access to education in English is big plus. If it was Hindi, all south and east Indians will be in serious disadvantage.