By Dr. Jaijit Bhattacharya
Our former President, Dr. Abdul Kalam, wrote his vision of India in his book Ignited Minds: Unleashing the Power within India. Education is the fuel that will propel our country to greater prosperity. Unfortunately, we are still far away from universal education, without which, igniting minds is a distant dream, thereby dampening our national journey towards greater prosperity.
Clearly, to provide quality education to the roughly 200 million students that India has, which, by the way, is roughly the same population as that of Pakistan, we need to have a large army of very good teachers. Unfortunately, we do not have good teachers. But we do need good teachers urgently as otherwise, students will not receive a good quality education, making them less productive and hence less employable. And if we cannot provide good education in the next 20 years, India would have lost a demographic advantage, and instead will be saddled with an enormous, ill-trained and poorly educated manpower that will not fare well in the global skills marketplace.
Unfortunately, one cannot manufacture teachers in a factory. It takes an enormous amount of time and training to produce the teachers that we need. So are we doomed? What is the way out of this precarious situation? The answer, as most of us know, is technology, or more specifically, education technology, which is referred to as Edtech. Edtech allows us to scale up and deliver quality education at a population scale, riding on top of the layers of networks such as BharatNet, that strive to reach out to every single student.
In fact, it would be very supportive of the industry if government schools and colleges procure Edtech to support the teachers in government educational institutions and improve the quality of education. It would lead to the integration of Edtech with regular classroom teaching in K-12 education. This is in fact already happening in college education, propelled by the Wuhan Covid pandemic. Such an initiative would improve human resources in the country while providing revenue for the Edtech sector that would help them grow and innovate, creating pedagogy that is digital first and relevant for the Indian ecosystem.
India needs to be on the cutting edge of Edtech. We need to use Web 3.0 technologies such as AR/ VR/ IoT etc to make education more efficient and fun. Perhaps we should look at creating life-like robots that can become teachers in a classroom and support human teachers. Perhaps we need something else. It is critical that we quickly innovate in Edtech to provide and consume education at a population scale.
This article first appeared in India Today, https://www.indiatoday.in/opinion-columns/story/igniting-minds-edtech-way-india-2002368-2022-09-20