The Indian government's announcement to launch a mission to Mars is surely not achieveable with its current demographic
As many commentators
tartly observed when the Indian government announced a mission to Mars, the country is home to about half the world's
severely malnourished children. Meanwhile, only 23 per cent of Indians have received
secondary education - much of it of variable quality - while more than twice as many have in China. Where China has the challenge of getting more young people through college, India is still grappling with the problem of ensuring they don't
drop out - of primary school.
The demographic hot air-balloon floated by many Indian businessmen, like the share prices of their companies, has begun to deflate. It turns out that India is not competing with China for manufacturing jobs after all. In the past couple of years, as China's wages along the coast where its export industries are concentrated have been rising at about 20 per cent a year, low-end manufacturers have started moving elsewhere. This would seem an ideal time for India's demographic dividend to be cashed, but the jobs making jeans and shoes are heading instead to China's inland provinces, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Indonesia.
China has done a good job of investing in education, says Arthur Kroeber, head of the economics consultancy Gavekal Dragonomics, which means that its young workers will continue to be productive well into their 60s. India, on the other hand, has not done enough. "So, its economic growth will be slower and it will have an even bigger problem than China when its population starts to age," he says.
Earlier this summer, as I waited to board an aircraft to Delhi, I
bumped into Ranjan Mahtani, the Indian-born chief executive of Hong Kong-based Epic Group, which supplies clothing to Gap and Abercrombie & Fitch and which has 15,000 workers in Bangladesh. I had seen him a week earlier, when he complained that he was struggling to keep up with demand for this season's fruit-coloured jeans.
I thought Mr Mahtani's trip might mean he was
prospecting for a new factory. But Mr Mahtani was going to Delhi for just one night, to meet with the new head of a major US retailer and have dinner. He says he finds it easier to hire for large factories in Bangladesh, in part because of India's
stifling labour laws. But the poor quality of state education is arguably just as
pernicious. A 2011 survey of government schools in India by Pratham, an education-focused non-governmental organisation, found that half the country's Class 5 of 10-year-olds could not read a text suitable for children three years younger. The results were virtually unchanged from a few years earlier.
Rukmini Banerji, head of Pratham in Delhi, told me that a senior government official in India's education ministry had
derided the findings, saying the organisation was obsessed with quantitative measurements of aptitude while ignoring "the native intelligence of the young
ragpicker". It may be hard not to admire the
ingenuity of India's street-smart ragpickers but surely it would be better if they were in school.
India, however, is a country where government ministers in Bangalore
rail against schools that teach in English rather the local language of Kannada, while placing their own children in those English-language schools.
Delhi, meanwhile, seems the most
cosseted capital in the world: the people who decide that India must attempt a mission to Mars live in vast colonial bungalows while the boys in the government school I visited in west Delhi sat on a grimy rug in a
dingy room. The people who run the system really do live in another universe.