Episode Details

Ramesh Venkateswaran chaired two convocations this summer, at IIT Palakkad and IIIT Sricity, and shared those stages with Dr. Tessy Thomas of DRDO and Suchitra Ella of Bharat Biotech. He drew a conclusion from the pairing that deserves to be taken seriously, and that is more generous than most of what gets said about Indian education. Both women are products of the Indian system. So are most of the Indian-origin chief executives now running Western firms. Something in that system is working, and we would learn more by identifying it and building on it than by listening to those who only decry.

He is right about the method. Diagnosis is cheap and India has never been short of it. Asking what works is the harder question, and almost nobody asks it.

I want to add three things. One is a caution about the evidence. One is an accusation I can only make against myself. The third is a place to look that no convocation photograph will ever contain.

I. The stage cannot tell us whether the system forms

Everyone on those two stages cleared a filter.

This year 1,79,694 candidates sat JEE Advanced. 56,880 qualified. There were 18,160 undergraduate seats across the twenty-three IITs. Behind those figures stand roughly eighteen lakh who sat JEE Main to get that far.

A country that can pull eighteen thousand out of eighteen lakh, and be right about most of them, possesses an extraordinary sorting instrument. India should say so without embarrassment. Very few nations can do it at that scale, and none can do it at that cost.

But sorting is not forming. A filter measures what arrives at it. It says nothing about who built what arrived.

This is the difficulty with reasoning from the stage. Every person standing on it cleared the filter, which makes every person on it evidence about selection. To learn whether the system forms, we would need to know what became of the 1,22,000 who sat the same exam and did not qualify, and the seventeen lakh below them. Those people are not at the convocation. They are the actual test of the proposition, and they are absent from the sample.

A selection system and a formation system can look identical from the winners’ side of the gate. They are not identical, and only one of them can be built on.

II. The suspicion that it may not be the schools

There is a second possibility, and I raise it because it changes what we would build.

Some of what we credit to Indian education may belong to the Indian household. The transmission of effort, deferral, obligation, and the ordinary domestic assumption that study is not optional. If the home deposits that and the school merely filters on it, then reform aimed at schools will not reach the thing that is working. Worse, we would be crediting an institution for an inheritance.

I cannot settle this from Michigan, and neither can a convocation. But it is testable, and to my knowledge nobody has designed the study.

I will say what I carry myself, because it is the only evidence I own. I was formed at De Nobili School in Dhanbad, under Jesuits, and what I carry from that place is not the syllabus. It is what Father McKenna expected of a boy and would not negotiate. I also still sit with a teacher in the Etawah gharana, in a transmission that is older than any university in this country and appears in no statistic the Ministry publishes. That is the most complete formation system I have personally been inside. It has no accreditation, no examination, and no record. It works anyway.

III. The gate nobody photographs

Now the part I would press on hardest, with respect.

The sample stops at the IITs. India has roughly 14,993 Industrial Training Institutes offering on the order of 26 lakh seats. Add the polytechnics and the apprenticeship system and you have the formation architecture for a working population that dwarfs the ent