QUALITY EDUCATION
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Focus on professional education. India’s top priority when it comes to higher education is to educate enough of engineers, doctors and managers. This isbecause we need enough nation builders given our state of the economy. At this stage of development (with a per-capita income hovering around $1200/person/year) it is wise to put your money on educating professionals than research (can be a super-expensive game in many fields that needs a bigger chunk of our meager budget). Indian educated students are a core part of the research elsewhere and they could be the conduits of tech transfer in the future.
Poor school education. I have taught/graded undergrads as a TA for 4 semesters in my gradschool. Given a better schooling system, the undergrads in good US universities come better prepared and get better resources through TAs. Indian institutions often get unprepared students from our poorer schools and it takes a lot of effort for our professors to make many of our undergrads realize the importance of computing.
Poor payment to faculty. In India, being a professor is not that attractive a job. A good software engineer could earn 4X of what a faculty at IIT earns. Given the poor payment and horrible politics, people tend to assume that you had no other option before you joined as a faculty. This self-fulfilling vicious cycle provides us poor faculty (both in payments and quality) although I know of plenty of really committed faculty who are stand out.
- By Krishna Sharma