When Chalkboards turn into Choke Points

Too late for School Enrollment numbers?

India’s rural and ground-level schooling has never enrolled more children than it does today, and yet it is preparing too many of them too little for the world they will enter. When classrooms don’t deliver baseline competencies that the rest of the world treats as non-negotiable, the result is a quiet but compounding crisis.

Let’s start with the idea of a “global baseline.” Internationally, policymakers and employers increasingly converge on a simple expectation: by the end of primary school, every child should read a short age-appropriate text with comprehension and handle basic arithmetic. The World Bank and UNESCO’s learning-poverty indicator uses precisely that threshold as a litmus test for system health.

In India, the latest country brief (April 2024) estimates that 56% of children at late primary age were not proficient in reading prior to the pandemic. India also has limited comparability with international large-scale assessments, which makes benchmarking to global standards more difficult, but the direction of travel is clear: we have an outcome problem, not merely an access problem. Everyday numeracy tasks also expose fragility: roughly 61% could complete a set of basic financial calculations, but far fewer could correctly compute a loan repayment. The data is sobering not because young people are incapable, but because schooling hasn’t consistently translated enrollment into usable skills for life and work.

Impact on employability

When foundational abilities are shaky, the labor market response is predictable. Educated youth face a paradox: more years of schooling, yet uncertain employability. The India Employment Report 2024 (IHD in partnership with the ILO) documents how youth unemployment rose sharply between 2000 and 2019, then eased post-pandemic but remains structurally higher than adult unemployment.

In 2022, the youth unemployment rate was 12.4% overall, with rates climbing with education level and peaking among graduates—classic symptoms of a skills mismatch and weak school-to-work transitions. The report’s message is blunt: credentials are not capabilities, and employers can tell the difference.

This capability gap feeds the “shortcut” instinct. For many rural families, the quickest path to a paycheck looks like a contract abroad, often in low-skill, physically demanding roles across Gulf economies. Government data on emigration clearances (for ECR-category workers) shows steady outflows with most placements concentrated in sectors like construction, hospitality, logistics and domestic work. These opportunities are legitimate and often life-changing in the short run, but they also lock talent into low-wage trajectories that rarely convert into durable skills or capital back home.

But aren't Remittances good for individuals and the collective economy?

Yes, and India leads the world in remittance inflows. Yet the remittance story is more nuanced than headline totals. Remittances often finance consumption smoothing and basic investments like housing, marriages or emergencies, instead of funding economy boosting instruments. In other words, you get cash for however long you work, not cashflow sustainable enough to build a stable economy. Savings become thin; illnesses, job loss or crop failure wipe them out. Over generations, the pattern shows up as depleted household balance sheets, stalled social mobility, and lower perceived well-being. In simpler terms, people learn to settle for less and the root cause is insufficient deliverables by the mainstream education.

Everyone knows the problem, not the solution.

And it's not like the government is unaware of these issues. India has placed a big bet on fixing the foundation with initiatives like NIPUN BHARAT (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy). It recognizes an “inflection point”: children must learn to read by Grade 3 so they can read to learn thereafter. That is the global baseline, stated in Indian terms and timelines.

But unfortunately, this is not the first time India has tried to chart education centric plans to catch up to or surpass the west and Asian countries. Many such attempts by different governments in the past have failed miserably due to unsuccessful last mile delivery. And this time, the problem is not just the last mile (i.e. the rural schools with collapsed infrastructure and negligible budget), even the middle and upper middle class children face the same problems post pandemic. A cocktail of mother tongue enforcement, Hindi colloquialism in English classrooms and overall disconnect from the technological advancements like Artificial Intelligence has left students of all ages in a precarious caged education regime that neither rewards rote memorization like it used to, nor fosters creativity and critical thinking, despite parents spending almost a quarter of their annual earnings on children's education.

In another article, we will talk about how a new take on modern education powered by AI and personalization can catapult this problem out of the window and finally arrest the infinitely growing downward spiral of social and professional relevance of formal education.

That's it for this one! Read PART 2 here…

Nisarg Vasavada (eLearning entrepreneur having served over 200k students), Co-founder, Unoic.