Why is India still a ‘Third World’

Allan Bloom once said, “Education is a movement from darkness to light”; is it so?

36% of the scientists in NASA are Indians, 34% of the Microsoft employees are Indian, we have 4^th largest army in the world, India has the second largest pool of Scientist and Engineers in the World, we export software to more than 90 countries, 66% of our total population is youth below 35 years of age and in spite of all these and many more we are still considered as the THIRD WORLD.

If I get into the ‘why’ debate, it can be manifold but for me the major reason for us still being a so called developing nation (which in itself is a paradox), is lack of indigenous ideas. In my course of life, I have come across people from almost all spheres and strata of the society. As per my observations and as proved by the above mentioned facts, Indians by no means lack talent and abilities. We have the capability of executing any given plan, materialising any strategy but what we lack in is - formulating them. Name a software or a gadget and we shall develop it faster and better than people of any other country in the world, show us an industry and we will master it, give us a sport and we play it better than you. What we are not able to do is - generate ‘new’ software, create a new gadget, come up with a new industry. Basically we are lacking innovation. Why 34% of the employees in Microsoft are Indian but not one of them could create a similar sector? Why in spite of 36% of the employees in NASA being Indian, we are not the first one to reach Mars or Moon? There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve – the fear of failure.

This is all mainly because we are becoming good followers, great performers but we need a guide, we need someone to tell us what to do. For me this degradation in the Indian mentality can solely be blamed on our education system. From the very start we are taught to learn and spill it in the exam. Our education system hardly ever gives us scope to be innovative. I remember during my school days nobody would dare to come up with a creative idea for the fear of failure or losing out on marks. None of us would try something new, give it a shot, at least make an attempt to think out of the book. Everyone would merely study what was there in black and white and vomit the same in the answer scripts. Creativity has been crushed by this system. This I say because it is not that we do not have the capacity to be indigenous or innovative, but this very ability has been destroyed. In a recent judgement, the Supreme Court of India stated - It is unfortunate that today education, in our humble opinion, appear to have failed to achieve its objective It will have to be stated that we are yet to reach the preliminary level of achievement of standardised literate behavior.

Now when I sit and think, I realise my initial days in the University of Glasgow, where we were divided into groups and were asked to develop a completely new product, design the business ideas and generate plans to materialise them. If my memory doesn’t ditch me, all my Indian friends in the class actively participated in the course work, helped the group in developing the plan but none of us could take the credit of coming up with the idea of the new product. But after a year’s education, when at the end it this same set of students were given yet another course work of similar sort, this time we all could come up with our own innovativeness. Hence a good education system did help us nurture our abilities which were somehow unmoved for so many years.

The competition has become so fierce that we are scared of generating ideas, we fear of losing out in the race. So tough has life become that we don’t dare to experiment. We are happy to lead the life by the formula. The zest to learn something new, to try and perform something different is almost lost. We are simply waiting for others to create things and then we follow or adapt the process. The fear of failure has got on us like a deadly virus. I wish we can change the pattern of education, I wish my countrymen can overcome this fear of failure and have the courage to be innovative. That I guess is the only way we can break out of this ‘third world’ tag.