In India, most of the students get a bachelors degree without any loan. No one in India becomes homeless in a week if he loses his job. This loan and debt thing is really messed up in the US.
The World Bank, in 2011 based on 2005's PPPs International Comparison Program, estimated 23.6% of Indian population, or about 276 million people, lived below $1.25 per day on purchasing power parity.
What's your point? They are talking specifically about students a.k.a people who are literate and have a degree. How's citing literacy or poverty statistics relevant?
India has real problems. Needing to take out a large loan to get a tertiary education when you have completed secondary education in a country where a quarter of the population are illiterate is not a problem.
The money that is spent on making education free for students at a tertiary level could be spent on improving primary education and it should be. No state in India is as rich as Ireland was in 1970. That's around when Ireland made secondary education free to students. To spend money on what is almost entirely a subsidy for the middle class when it could be used to help the wretchedly poor is an abomination.
> The money that is spent on making education free for students at a tertiary level could be spent on improving primary education and it should be.
Sources on that? Education is not free at a tertiary level. It's just really cheap. Also, your premise is completely opposite to the reality. Primary education in India has seen huge progress. Yes, there's still room for improvement, but the plans are in place. For example, public schools are mostly free and girls below a certain age gets free education. The concern is about low higher education enrollment levels, which stood only at about 24% in 2013 [1]. If tertiary education was free, this should've been much higher.
Coming back to the original comment, people usually don't take huge loans for education in India like in the US. So the chances of you being homeless if you lose your job is lower.
> In India slightly over a quarter of the population are illiterate.
Most of them still aren't homeless. They somehow have a house to live in. Most illiterates still don't go for a loan to educate their kids, they try to educate with hard cash although they do not get very good education but loans are a big no no(mostly)
I recently read an excellent book on the lives of the extremely poor, Poor Economics, Abhijit Bannerjee and Esther Duflo. The authors are development economists at MIT. If you think that poor people don't borrow money you should really read it. Anybody who's secure enough to make it a blanket rule not to borrow money is well above the kind of insecurity that those living on less than a dollar a day deal with.
As far as homelessness goes a homeless shelter in the first world is better than a lot of people's homes in the developing world. There will be clean drinking water, a toilet, almost certainly hot and cold running water, a sufficiency of reasonably nutritious food. One of the facts about the lives of the extremely poor I learned by reading that book is that it's common for migrant labourers in India to sleep on the street or where they're working rather than pay for accommodation. Mostly at work does not mean dorms, it means on a building site or on the floor in a store room.
> it's common for migrant labourers in India to sleep on the street
but not all poor are migrant workers. Most poor people live in villages made by their forefathers.
Poor people borrow money but they do not have to give their house in return and become homeless in case of non payment.
> who's secure enough to make it a blanket rule not to borrow money is well above the kind of insecurity that those living on less than a dollar a day deal with.
But in the US, even people with degrees from good colleges become homeless because of debt. I will be surprised to see many people in India becoming homeless because of education loan.
edit: Just to make my point clear, there is a difference in mindset of people in India and the US. Indians do not risk taking huge loans just to be able to have a job at the end of college or take huge home loans to live a posh life and later become homeless in case of a job lay off.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India
The World Bank, in 2011 based on 2005's PPPs International Comparison Program, estimated 23.6% of Indian population, or about 276 million people, lived below $1.25 per day on purchasing power parity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_India