[redbluegreen]

That's true, but then for that to happen you need a working government and society, you can't do that if inefficiencies abound. China, Japan and South Korea all had powerful governments who made hard choices, India's on the other hand is weak and ineffective.

[barry-cotter]

It’s actually worse than weak and ineffective. If it was weak and ineffective then effective organisations would be able to make an end run around it, whether by corruption or by using politics to institute policy changes. India has a powerful government that’s captured by domestic constituencies that love the current sclerotic system. The Licence Raj lasted 50 years because powerful people wanted it. Moving from the current system to something better will require taking on some of these groups.

[kamaal]

You need to put human resources development as the number one priority. As of now these are not even political issues in India. Nobody thinks these are important things to do.

India started off well during its Independence, the first education minister(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abul_Kalam_Azad) and the first prime minister(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru). The idea was to build a highly trained workforce and an industrial base, and then they bootstrap each other. But India has kind of lost its way.

This what is said of first education minister:

Jawaharlal Nehru referred to him as Mir-i- Karawan (the caravan leader), "a very brave and gallant gentleman, a finished product of the culture that, in these days, pertains to few".[16] Mahatma Gandhi remarked about Azad by counting him as "a person of the calibre of Plato, Aristotle and Pythagorus".[27]

India hasn't had good quality leadership in human resources for a while now.

The current priorities of HR development ministers in India go on the line of rewriting history to propel their political propaganda, pushing things like homeopathy, astrology. Hating universities and academia, calling them elites who need to be eliminated for their political ideas to be taken forward.

You don't do much in Human resources building with these kind of systems in place.

[barry-cotter]

Education has remarkably little to do with economic growth. Richer countries are more educated but changes in education do not predict changes in productivity. Education appears to be a superior good that people just purchase more of when they’re richer.

Ghana is more educated now than France was in 1960 going by average years of education and it’s poorer. China’s years of explosive economic growth after Deng opened it up in the 1980s happened with a population that had on average finished primary school.

India’s plan to build a highly educated workforce and industrial base in tandem was a thorough and costly failure. Lots and lots of people tried to get a good education so they could go for civil service jobs. It did nothing industrially because running a successful industrial policy is a lot harder than either leaving businessmen to their own devices, taxes and regulation aside, to make their own business decisions, or running a captured, cronyistic industrial that wastes money and is swept aside as soon as the policy is abolished. Ireland, India, Pakistan, Argentina; there are many countries that wasted enormous sums on infant industry tariffs to no benefit.

[rizwank]

Do you have a resource to recommend that suggests reasons and provides data for this seemingly paradoxical observation?

[barry-cotter]

Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education

From the Section “The Education Premium: Personal versus National”

> “When we move to the national level, these clean results vanish.65 Some prominent economists find that boosting national education slightly impoverishes countries rather than enriching them.66 Others report small positive effects; one typical estimate is that an extra year of national education boosts national income by 1.3%–1.7%.67 Remaining papers find moderate positive effects; the effect of national education on national income roughly equals the effect of personal education on personal income.68 No matter what they find, researchers usually confess their answers are highly uncertain.69”

> “65. For overviews, see Pritchett 2006, Bosworth and Collins 2003, and A. Krueger and Lindahl 2001. 66. See, e.g., Pritchett 2001, pp. 367–91, Islam 1995, and Benhabib and Spiegel 1994. 67. A. Krueger and Lindahl 2001, p. 1125, columns (2), (3), and (5). 68. For a survey, see Lange and Topel 2006, pp. 462–70. 69. One major exception: D. Cohen and Soto 2007 emphasizes the high quality of their data and the low uncertainty of their results. But even their findings dramatically hinge on their sample. When they look at 59 countries over 1960–90, a year of education raises national income by 4.9%. When they look at 81 countries over 1970–90, a year of education raises national income by 9.0% (D. Cohen and Soto 2007, p. 68, columns 5 and 10).”