Abstract
The world’s population has doubled between 1960 and 2000 and is expected to rise further by more than two billion people by 2050. Asia will not only continue to be home to the largest share of world population, but it will also have the highest ratio of working to non-working population in the world in 2050. In this chapter we focus on one country—India—poised to be the largest individual contributor to the global working-age population of 15–64-year-olds over the coming three decades. The general optimism about the coming surge in working-age population is dampened by the low quality of skills of India's youth which makes it difficult to employ them productively. We analyse the educational attainment of the school-age population of the country—the additions to the future workforce - and highlight the serious concerns about the quality of skills being imparted to students at all levels and the depth of learning occurring in India’s educational institutions.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is conducted by the OECD every 3 years to test 15-year-old school children’s performance on mathematics, science, and reading, since 2000.
- 3.
World Development Indicators for 2011 (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.PRM.NENR).
- 4.
The IHDS also conducted tests of writing skills in both survey rounds. The data, however, are not nuanced (0 = cannot write, 1 = can write with 1 or 2 mistakes, 2 = can write with no mistakes), hence excluded from our analysis. However, we find that the proportion of 8–11-year-olds who cannot write decreased by 5.63 percentage points between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012.
- 5.
0 = cannot read; 1 = can recognise letters; 2 = can read words; 3 = can read a paragraph; 4 = can read a story
- 6.
0 = no skills; 1 = can recognise numbers; 2 = can subtract; 3 = can divide
- 7.
Education policy and expenditures are determined by state governments in India’s federal system.
References
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Registrar General of India. 2011. Census of India.
United Nations Population Division. 2014 http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/development/population-development-database-2014.shtml
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Afridi, F., Barooah, B. (2017). Educational Attainment and Learning in India, 2004–2012. In: Batabyal, A., Nijkamp, P. (eds) Regional Growth and Sustainable Development in Asia. New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27589-5_11
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