“Foreign Universities to Enter India” – This has been very hot topic recently. Our college recently witnessed one debate competition too on this. So, now you can estimate its importance.

Our education ministry is patting its back on this move, which was not so necessary according to me. A country that invests around 2% of GDP on education, is revamping it’s graduation and post-graduation level. Expenditure on education has steadily risen from 0.64% of GDP in 1951-52 to 2.31% in 1970-71 and thereafter reached the peak of 4.26% in 2000-01. However, it declined to 3.49% in 2004-05.

Imagine a skyscraper being built on a loose base, how long it can survive. Same situation goes with our Indian Education Policies. Ministry thinks calling foreign players in education market will help in employments, reduction in brain-drain, new level of education, many opportunities.

Are our students ready for this? First of all the basic requirement to revamp our education system is to uplift the primary education. The base must be strong, because we all at the end know that ‘basics’ are important. Why don’t we start early? Imagine a strong base for a huge building, so efficient right!

Policy makers must understand that, only beautification will not help, we need models that can help us, Indians, not the foreign universities only. If we look at stats, The Economist reports that half of 10-year-old rural children could not read at a basic level, over 60% were unable to do division, and half dropped out by the age 14.

How these foreign universities could be of some help in reducing that?

So, we definitely need good amount of attention towards elementary education, that too in reality not on papers only. Strong base is a must before playing on skyscrapers built by foreign universities.