Indian History

 This title alone harkens to tomes written about the topic.  I am going to attempt to focus on a slice.  Education in India.

As someone who grew up in this erstwhile British colony; an erstwhile Mughal empire; and many ersts before it I find it fascinating to see the changes that have occurred in the realm of education.

India became independent of foreign rule in 1947. It adopted a socialist, democratic operating model and has been attempting its foray into the industrial world since.

Not quite 80 years into her experiment it also finds itself in an unenviable situation of having to support over a billion hungry people.

Having received my entire formal education in India - what that means in practical terms in another blog - all the way from kindergarten to a master's degree in business; I still struggle to understand whether as a nation she is able to make the most of her educational infrastructure.

Perhaps the question is better framed as - does India have the right education infrastructure for the 21st century?

Certainly if global corporate brand leadership is any metric, India has proven it can produce some of the best operators to take the planet into a new direction for all humanity.  Many of America's Fortune 50 companies are steered with an Indian born and educated CEO at the helm.  That now accounts for growing number of female leaders too.  Good to see.

But what of India herself?

To understand how Indian education is structured would be a start.  It is chaotic.  Today.  Back say five decades ago it was more streamlined. Not necessarily better but more organized.

There were a handful of premier institutes of higher learning as in college level educators and then there was everything else.  As a child you enrolled in any number of private or public schooling systems but the former were more suited to make something of you than the latter.  As in America the public system is woefully underfunded and does not attract good teachers.  You graduated in grade 12 to seek admission to a college offering undergrad programs.

As far as college level programs the top echelon belongs to the Indian Institutes of Technology. Back when I was a lad there were only five of those scattered across the length and breadth of India. Each coast had its one or two and India's north and the south did too.

Locally known as the IIT are the Indian Ivy league equivalents in a manner of speaking. Originally founded with India's first Prime Minister's backing and the vision of some very learned souls before him including a Parsee man the very first of the IIT launched in the mining town of Kharagpur in British controlled Bengal.

Then came IIT Kanpur, IIT Bombay *now Mumbai, IIT Delhi and IIT Madras *now Chennai.

Banaras (now Varanasi) also joined the league with its University being added to the IT fold.

While Kharagpur and Kanpur if I recollect were formed with American Indian cooperation some were funded and resulted in collaboration with Germany, Russia too.

An excerpt from a dinner hosted by State Department in Washington DC in 2010 to mark Kanpur's golden jubilee; the host read the following prepared statement -

I’m so pleased and honored to be here with you this evening for the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur Golden Jubilee Alumni Convention. The Kanpur Indo-American Program is considered by many to be one of the most significant success stories in the rich history of bilateral higher education exchange programs between the United States and India. That is saying a lot, ladies and gentlemen!

I’d like to pay homage to the sheer creativity, ingenuity, and intellectual capacity that is with us in this room tonight. You are truly an extraordinary group of individuals. It reminds me of a story about President John F. Kennedy, (another part of IIT’s storied past) who once held a White House dinner for all the American Nobel laureates -- then living -- in 1962. The story goes that over hors d’oeurves, one of the guests said to him: “Mr. President, there must be more intelligence gathered under this roof tonight than ever before.” “Yes,” replied Kennedy, “except for when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Well, I must say, ladies and gentlemen, that Thomas Jefferson would have met his match here tonight, at the IIT-Kanpur Golden Jubilee!

If you look at the number of alums that went on into places of power, public or private you will see they graduated from one of the IITs. Typically these bright students would go on to get Master's degrees from management schools also founded with American money and partnership.  These are called the IIMs or Indian Institutes of Management.

The famous ones are in Ahmedabad, Calcutta and Bangalore.