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My biggest disappointment is with the social indicators—specifically education and health. For me it is disconcerting to know that there are around 40 million children in the age group 6-14 years who are out of school; or that only one out of three children ends up completing 10 years of education. Infant mortality rate of 56 deaths per 1,000 live births is sufficient to make all of us squirm.

I believe that it is the poor who are at the receiving end, and that they will continue to suffer as they cannot make themselves heard. Market economy ignores them as they are not likely to be paying consumers. Therefore the onus is on all of us to work for them.

I also believe that education can be a great lever to start making a difference. Imagine if all our young people were educated, how much easier it would have been for us to address health related issues. An educated population would not have tolerated the current system and would have demanded better governance.

Elementary education system in the country suffers from two problems—one, availability of quality school infrastructure — that is, classrooms, toilets, teachers, teaching-learning material, etc, and two, most of the children are not learning at the deep level and schools are not really helping every child to discover and realise his potential. The latter is true not just for rural government run schools but also for urban schools which are better resourced.

At Wipro and Azim Premji Foundation we have struggled with these problems for the last five years, and we believe that solution lies in working on several fronts. In the New Year, my hope is that we will build opinion across the country to work on each one of them. One, we must get more money flowing into the elementary education sector. Central government has made the commitment to raise the investment in primary education to 6% of GDP. This needs to be pursued vigorously. The Draft Free & Compulsory Education Bill places the responsibility on governments to ensure that every child goes through eight years of quality elementary education, and prescribes norms relating to school infrastructure and teacher-student ratio. This would mean larger financial resources which are hard to find. I believe that the solution lies in saving money where it is going waste. For instance, power sector losses are of the order of Rs 25,000 crore every year. Similar amounts can be saved by targeting fuel, fertiliser and food subsidies better.

Two, while more money would help, it would not make any difference if it is not utilised effectively. Therefore governance in the government system needs to improve dramatically. The planning process in the government must become more outcome oriented — currently the focus seems to be spending the available money within a given time.

The government must create a more motivating environment for the people it employs. At present the system is extremely demotivating and breeds indifference and lethargy.

Three, we have to reform the curriculum in such a way that it encourages deep learning among the children. Currently education is largely rote based which does not let the child think independently.

NCERT has recently brought out the National Curriculum Framework 2005, but I do not see any action at the state level. Every state must bring out its own curriculum framework to help schools and teachers appreciate what is worth teaching, how to teach and how do we know that the child is learning. And this effort should go down further to the district and block levels.

Four, curriculum reform by itself will not give us the full result unless we also help build the capacity of our teachers, school leaders, resource persons at various levels, teacher training institutions, etc. We will have to help trigger a process of self-development among them. Our experience with a few schools suggests that this process requires sustained efforts over a long time. The task is indeed massive - given that we have one million primary school teachers - but needs to be done.

Five, we need to revamp the public examinations and entry level examinations to higher education. Most of these public examinations are merely promoting rote learning. They are seen as make or break races leading to heavy coaching to pass the muster. The solution will not be simple, given that demand and supply equation is heavily skewed.

Lastly, I believe information technology can be very motivating for the parents to send their children to school and for the child to engage in the learning process which can be made more interesting using IT. IT can really help in taking quality teaching-learning material to large numbers without any dilution, it can reach out to physically and mentally challenged and it can help do things which are not possible through pen, paper and blackboard.

My hope is that as a nation we will work on all these fronts. While the government will be required to take the lead, help is available from organisations like Wipro and Azim Premji Foundation.

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