How Education Is Uniting India Inc.

Big Business is moving on from focussing on institution building to ensuring grassroots outcomes.

- Hindol Sengupta

Anurag Behar is angry. “It’s a gigantic scam,” the CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation and vice chancellor of the Azim Premji University tells me when I quiz him on his pet peeve, the quality of teacher training in India. Behar believes that the real problem with Indian education—which has a bleak record in most vital parameters despite a near-100% school enrolment rate—lies not with the students but with the teachers and the teachers of teachers. In his words, “We have by far the worst teacher education system.”

His critique makes sense if you consider the shoddy manner in which teacher training has often been treated in policy circles. For instance, in 2008, the National Council for Teacher Education, which controls the setting up of private teacher training colleges, greenlighted 291 colleges—over just two meetings. Behar helped draft the Justice Verma Commission report on teacher education, which recommended a complete overhaul of the system. Among other things, the report called for stricter regulations to ensure India had enough qualified professionals who could prep the next generation of teachers. “Every university in the U.S., for instance, has a school of education. Every year the U.S. produces nearly 15,000 teacher training specialists for a population of 320-odd million; the number in India for a population of 1.2 billion is barely 800 to 900,” Behar says.

He then asks me a scary question: India has about 8 million teachers, but how many really know what they are doing?