Episode 1: From Schooling to Skilling

In an ideal scenario, a child’s educational journey begins in a classroom and culminates in an office. In school, the child acquires a solid foundational education, which equips her years later for a good job. That is the popular picture of success. 

In an ideal world, this journey should be a pipeline delivering workforce-ready students. However in reality, the collective journey suffers pitfalls such as drop-offs in middle-school, poor foundational education that leaves students ill equipped for the workforce. How is this gap between education and employability to be bridged?

At the foundational level, the course of this journey can be corrected by introducing socio-emotional learning, which imparts skills that are handy in real-life situations and in one's career such as relationship building and decision-making. At the career stage, ed-tech organisations offer specific skills that equip people to adapt to the evolving demands of the workplace. This is particularly empowering for women keen to join the workforce remotely as Harappa demonstrates and for graduates from low-economic backgrounds as shown by HCL's TechBee programme. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:03

And the third thing is that for the first time is very clear goal by third grade, children should have the basic foundational literacy and numeracy. And then it goes on to say that if this is not achieved, then the rest of the policy is irrelevant. That's a very strong statement.

SPEAKER_04 0:24

Welcome to Reorient. I'm Anakshi Sophi.

SPEAKER_06 0:27

And I'm Gaur Gupta.

SPEAKER_04 0:29

You know, in a region that constitutes virtually 25% of the world's population, it isn't surprising that we decided to start with education. Here's what I'd like to understand better, Gaurav. I know we've been successful in enrolling kids into school, but keeping kids in school is a challenge. For example, almost 50% of girls in rural India drop out of middle school. In a country of India's population of 1.4 billion, that's a huge number. Boys also tend to drop out in secondary school across the country. I think the dropout rate for boys between classes 9 and 12 is around 15%. Then there's the problem with the quality of education. We get caught up in numbers and quantity when we need to be paying attention to quality. Every student today aspires to get a good job at the end of their education. But does our schooling equip students for jobs of today? According to a recent skills index that I saw, more than 42% of Indian graduates are not employable. That is a huge issue, a life-changing issue for so many people. How do we solve this? I do hope that this episode covers at least some of these challenges.

SPEAKER_06 1:48

I think you're asking all the important questions. I think the way we're going to try and address them, in actually, is let's actually start this with the journey of the child itself, right? Like actually taking them through, getting them into school, you know, and we've got a great person who's going to talk about that, uh, Safina Hussein, who, you know, her organization has put over one and a half million girls back into school. There's an astonishing number. She uh just won the Ramon Marx S.A. Award for that great achievement. So no better person to help us think about those challenges, even of getting kids back into school, which yes, India has solved in many cases, but there are still these pockets where, because of patriarch and other reasons, we have those challenges. But once you're in school, how are we making sure you're actually learning? And we've got, you know, I can't think of anyone better, but Rukwini Banderjee of Pratham, who themselves do so much great work in education, but Rukhwini really releases that ASA report, which is the barometer for measuring foundational and math literacy skills. And we'll hear from her about what's going on there. Now, what does it take to keep kids in school? That's the next bit, right? You've got some foundational learning. It's crucial that we pay attention to the quality of education, like you said, and not just traditional skills, but things like socio-emotional and arts-based learning. These have never been focus areas for our mainstream education. And we have Jigasa LeBrux, who runs this fantastic nonprofit called Slam Out Loud, that is working towards improving the quality of foundational education using the arts. And I think it's great to hear her voice next to someone like Rookmanning and Safina that's saying actually we need to also bring other aspects into education. And it's of course impossible to talk about education without talking about tech, especially going forward. And I'm excited that we have Shriasi Singh, who's one of the co-founders of the ed tech platform Harapa, about how the workplace is evolving and how tech is helping bridge the gap between education and employability. That's obviously one of the big pay-offs that people say. Well, that's the reason I'm in education. And finally, we will also hear from Sundar Mahalingam, who's both the president of strategy at HCL, but also runs the Shiv Nada Foundation. Now, his perspective is really important because as one of these aspirational employers that's really helped us create, you know, a rising middle class. He will talk about his experience of hiring graduates and what's missing, what's needed, and also the work he's done through the foundation to help support these things. So I think we'll have this wonderful tapestry from start to finish on what is that journey? Where is it broken? What's working, what's not working, and I'm really excited.

SPEAKER_04 4:24

So through this episode of Reorient, we want to address each of the broken parts of this journey. That sounds interesting, and I'm keen to see how we do this.

SPEAKER_06 4:34

On that note, let's get started with our guests. Who are these girls? When you say educating girls, who are the girls that you work with? Give us a little bit of a picture of them.

SPEAKER_02 5:03

Thank you, Gorav, and thank you for inviting me on your podcast. Very excited for this conversation. Who are the girls that we work for? We work actually, educate girls focuses on the out-of-school girl, right? A girl who has either dropped out of school or who is never enrolled. You know, a lot of girls sometimes never make it to school, right? So we're looking at a girl who is outside of the formal education system. Majority of these girls that we work with, they are rural, remote tribal. So you're looking at a girl in a village, you know, and her school could be a walk, let's say, a kilometer away, or if she's a middle school, she could be walking three to four kilometers to get to middle school. This is a girl who probably wakes up at like 5 a.m. or 6 a.m., starts her day with doing all the household chores and cooking and cleaning and then getting ready and going, you know, if she's not going to school, this is then she's grazing the goats and she's fetching the water and one of the last ones to sleep at night, having done even more household work and looking after the siblings. So a girl who has a lot of vulnerabilities, very limited exposure, probably a lot of them have never been outside of their village, incredibly hardworking, but with a very, very, very limited future. Girls who, if they're not in school, they're more likely to be married early. If they marry early, they will have children early. If they have children early, their children are more likely to be malnourished or stunted. You know, they may not be able to immunize their children fully and stuck in a cycle of illiteracy and poverty. You're talking about intergenerational poverty and illiteracy for rural and tribal girls without an education. So those are the girls that we are focused on working with work.

SPEAKER_06 6:46

And this may sound very like on the fringes, but this is a very large population. It runs into the millions. Like give us a sense of the scale of this.

SPEAKER_02 6:53

I have to say a lot of progress has happened, right? So it's not all doom and gloom since independence. I mean, we now have, you know, especially with the Right to Education Act, we had that, and because of that, we have almost universal elementary education in terms of gross enrollment ratios, et cetera. So majority of the girls between the grades of one to eight are in school. I would say less than 5% are out of school and probably in pockets and hotspots. However, if you look at the situation beyond the eighth grade, that's where the big cliff is happening and the girls are dropping out. So it's almost like 50% of the girls will never complete secondary school in India, right? 90% of them are not skilled or formally skilled. And just about barely 30, 35 odd percent are in the labor force. So that's what we're kind of talking about. So they're almost 91 million girls today.

SPEAKER_06 7:43

What's the reason that even, you know, uh 70 years after independence, that we are at a place where 91 million of our population is in such a vulnerable position. What do you see as the main drivers of this?

SPEAKER_02 7:57

I think the main drivers are really two buckets, right? One is societal, which is mindset, how we value women and girls per se. It's patriarchy, it's, you know, my uh goat is an asset, my girl is a liability. In Hindi we say parayathan, which means, you know, it's somebody else's. It's like how people say educating a girl is like watering your neighbor's garden. So one of that is just this feeling that, you know, what can I get? And if I'm not getting anything, then why should I be investing in this? So there's a mindset issue, there's a patriarchal issue. So those are the societal sort of barriers. And the second aspect are systemic barriers, right? So if we're talking about the largest number of girls out of school up beyond the eighth grade, we have to look at the access, right? Secondary schools. How close are secondary schools for rural girls? So for every hundred primary schools, we have 60 middle schools, and then we have just about 26 secondary schools. So that whole neck itself is a narrowing. So when you combine that systemic access issue with the societal problem, that's what gives us, you know, things like early marriage, that gives us all of those pieces that keep girls from education.

SPEAKER_06 9:08

Tell us about your work with these girls who drop out in middle school.

SPEAKER_02 9:12

For these girls, because they cannot go back into formal schools, we're actually running second chance programs at a village level. So these are, you know, we'll run learning camps for about 15 to 20 girls per village. We'll gather them and then in a public sort of location, run an 18th month camp where girls are enrolled into the open school and they're getting, you know, sort of a revision, a bridge course on foundational literacy memory. Because sometimes we have girls who've been out of school for eight years, seven years. So they've also lost the practice of reading and writing. So we do that, and then we introduce them to the 10th grade curriculum, plus a whole package of life skills. Things that you would get in a school. But because these girls are not in secondary schools, they don't get career awareness, they don't get digital skills, they don't get life skills, they don't get there's so much other stuff that they don't get exposure to. So packaging all of that in to help them take their 10th grade exam. And post that they gain the credential, but they also we make sure they get their bank account and this entire thing so that they can actually move ahead in life to their next opportunity.

SPEAKER_06 10:13

And I know you don't do anything at small scale. And I know this is the start of a journey, but I'd love to know a little bit about where what scale you're operating at today, and what's the scale you want to be operating at tomorrow.

SPEAKER_02 10:26

Yeah, so uh we just started this program recently. So we started with about 300 girls, but just in a few cohorts, I think three plus cohorts, we are now at 18,000 girls across multiple states. And our aim is really to look at 10 million girls over the next 10 years.

SPEAKER_06 10:47

So, what you've heard is how we've made great strides in enrollment, but there remains this still sizable, vulnerable population of kids not going to school. Government data continues to show that more than 47 million kids in India between the ages of six and seventeen are out of school. So that's a challenge which you know we know how to address. We need to continue getting that number down to zero. But there is then the next challenge, which is something that will continue to take even more work, which is imparting quality education with kids in school. Rukamini Banaji of Pratham and I had a conversation about this. One of Pratham's key projects is to conduct the annual status of education report, or USER, a measure of foundational learning levels in the country. Let's start with what exactly is USER? Why did you start it? And then we can talk a bit about what it's been revealing to us over the last decade.

SPEAKER_03 11:42

So the USER survey formally was the first year we did it was 2004. But the histories, there was quite a lot of history before that. And the, you know, depending on who you talk to in Pratham, they will tell you a different history. That's how histories are, because you see it from your own eyes. But I would say that, you know, around 2002 or so, you know, we had been largely Bombay and then we had been largely urban. Much of our early work was in cities. And as we were beginning to develop or understand what is it about children learning and what is it that they are not being able to do, what are solutions, and so on, we began to actually move also into rural areas. And as we moved into rural areas, because the original team was very urban, we felt it was very important to understand the terrain in which you are, so that it could be that rural areas are completely different from urban and there'll be very different issues. So we used to do this, what we called a village report card, which is that before you start working in a community, you take a look at on these two basic things. Are children in school and are they able to read and do basic math? You need to get a sense of that before you can really start any action. And the way we would do it, the tool was actually exactly the same: very simple letters, words, simple paragraph, very, very short second grade level story. In math, it was number recognition and a few operations, all done orally and one-on-one. And the orally and one-on-one has been a feature of all our assessment work because we feel at this very basic level, if kids can't read, you can't give them a pen and paper test, right? And when kids read, you get the outcome data, the level, but you get a lot of other information because you're doing it one-on-one with a kid. So you get the kid's persistence level, you get whether the kid is very shy, you get to see whether the kid really wants to try. You know, you all kinds of other data.

SPEAKER_06 13:32

Have we met expectations, or have we, you know, is this been a bit of a humbling experience of actually things have not at all moved as fast as you had expected them to?

SPEAKER_03 13:42

So I think, see, the ASER tool was the beginning point for Pratham to start to figure out a solution. And so from 2002 onwards, the solution was also baking, right? So the teaching at the right level methodology was also evolving. So I think for us as Pratham and for anybody who was connected closely to us, we were not discouraged at all because as soon as you understood the problem, you could see that people wanted a solution. And then the solution, we had a solution, but you could have other solutions. Okay, ours is not the only solution. So I think that the teaching at the right level was actually after us at 2005-2006, it was a very good time to talk about the results and then say, what shall we do, even at a state level? And there were many states that actually did something. Sometimes they did it, you know, with teaching at the right level, sometimes they did activity-based learning, sometimes, you know, whatever. But there was action. I think the interesting thing is that for us, as we were developing all of this, the methodology for the solution really needs kids to be slightly older. So we've always done teaching at the right level for kids who are eight and older, so third, fourth, and above. And that, if you see the results, whether done by us or but done by state governments, the results were fairly good. They've been evaluated, and you know, people have won Nobel Prizes on those evaluations and so on. But the real issue was that every third grade started at that low level. And then you got them somewhere with the basics by the time you, you know, you, you know, one year or six months or whatever. I think what has happened recently, which is I'm very excited about, is that the new education policy says build the foundation. Because it's really so if you think about what we were doing as catch up, and if you think about where India is today, I would call it leap forward. I mean this leap forward effort, this building of the foundational literacy and numeracy, starting not just at first grade, but starting in at least in principle or in policy in early children, it gives you a you know, five-year runway to be able to achieve something by third grade. All our work in the last 15 years was cleaning out at third grade and trying to solve the problem. But if the direction is right, and I think that we should not underestimate the power of an umbrella policy, because before this there were efforts that different state governments were doing. But the new education policy does a couple of things which are I think very important. One is it brings this age group three to six into the into the full structure and adds it to the one and two. It's not like you're some early childhood and there is one and two. This foundational stage, age three to eight, this is actually a developmental stage where teaching, learning, social structures, social all of this happens differently at that age than at later. So that's number one. Number two, they've laid out this importance of foundational literacy, numeracy, but which I would broadly construe as build foundations well. And the third thing is it's on page, I forget which page, page eight, I think, in a 50 or 56 page policy that for the first time is very clear goal by third grade, children should be have the basic foundational literacy and numeracy. And then it goes on to say, I'm quoting from memory, so it's not exactly correct, but that if this is not achieved, then the rest of the policy is irrelevant. That's a very strong statement.

SPEAKER_06 17:06

So we've just heard that the national education policy is already having a quite positive effect on foundational learning. Yet it's a fact that less than half of Indian kids in primary school are able to read at levels that correspond to their age. That is still a staggering problem. And the future of these kids is deeply affected by their ability to get these foundational skills. They're gonna have to take an enormous leap forward to get desirable jobs. I wanted to go back to Safina on this. How does she think about the challenge that despite more kids going to school, learning levels are in fact flatlining? Why is this the case?

SPEAKER_02 17:46

Earlier, we didn't have this crisis because majority of the kids were out of school. And then when they came in, right, you solved for the inclusion challenge. But these were all first generation learners. They had no support at home. They had no um, you know, their parents uh didn't read and write. There was nobody to help them. Their attendance was very irregular. So all of those pieces, I think it was natural, we should have anticipated it that we were going to see a complete drop in learning levels, right? Because we had a whole new uh set of learners that were moving into the system. What we didn't do is we and also we don't have an early childhood education. So they're not coming through a preschool mechanism either. So by first grade, we're expecting a lot from them. If you look at the first grade textbook from a kid who's never done anything and who has no support at home. And I think it's it's the success of the in solving for the inclusion challenge that has actually led to the learning crisis in some ways. And I think it could have been mitigated if we had taken this whole foundational literacy and numeracy piece early on, if we'd done very intense foundation course almost, like, you know, before starting school, et cetera. So the kids were all at one level. So there's a lot of stuff that we could have anticipated and done. But I think that's pretty much the root cause of the learning crisis, in at least in my view.

SPEAKER_06 19:08

Hearing Safina about this challenge of a plateauing set of learning levels, while at the same time recognizing, as Rukumini was also saying, that, you know, we have more kids in school, we now have a more progressive approach to think about what to do with kids at school. I wondered what it would take to get beyond just simply flatlining on these learning outcomes. And I wonder if it is also because we need to update our view on what actually is foundational learning. It is so much right now associated with language and math skills, but not at all associated with uh other sort of socio-emotional learning such as arts. And so I turned to social entrepreneur Jigyasa LeBrux, who's been trying to fill that gap in the education system by taking arts to junior school, often to schools that have no curriculum around it or very limited access. Jigyasa, tell us about Slam Out Loud.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

At Slam Out Loud, we believe that our children, no matter where they come from, should get safe spaces to express themselves, to build skills like imagination, curiosity, skills that will allow them to thrive in their own lives. And when we look at our education systems today, uh we see that academics are prioritized our the outcomes that we want, especially for children who come from low-income backgrounds, are limited to either academic achievement or at best getting a job. But we don't create any spaces where our children feel belonging and connection and build the skills that they need to live thriving social lives. Slam Outloud brings all of these skills into the classroom using the arts. So we use poetry, theater, storytelling, visual art to build in children imagination, analytical thinking, emotional regulation, awareness, uh, so that they can be adults who are more humane and also in touch with themselves, who find their own voice and know what they want in their lives.

SPEAKER_06 20:57

Now, I imagine, and this may be completely incorrect, that these kind of skills that you talk about, people are more amenable to that after a certain level of achievement already, right? That it feels like a people might define as post-material. Okay, you've got the basics right, or you're in a well-to-do structure, and now you can think about what feel like almost luxuries. I'm imagining many parents don't define these as fundamentals, and our schooling system doesn't define them as fundamentals. Is this correct? Or are you seeing that actually this is an outdated view? There is an enormous amount of groundswell around learning these kind of skills.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yes, great question, Gaurav. A lot of people think about how children could first develop academic skills or foundational numeracy and literacy, and then sort of, you know, social emotional learning skills could come along on the way. But there's so much data in the world, there is so much research in the world that points to how social emotional skills are really fundamental to how children learn. And how children learn really starts from a sense of Belonging, a sense of feeling that their classroom is a safe space. And children interact with or use social emotional learning in their day way more than they use academic skills. So, for example, when you get up in the morning, when a child gets up in the morning, you've you're making sense of it's a new day. When you're working with other peers in the classroom, you have interpersonal relationships to manage. When you're working with a teacher, a connection is an important thing in how you learn. So almost think of it as like a plate on which you can serve like foundational literacy and numeracy skills. For example, you know, being able to read, write, all of these are skills on a plate which has these skills, like, you know, being able to imagine. Even a lot of conversation around social emotional learning skills does not include the cognitive skills that SEL fosters. For example, memory. Again, a really, really important component of how children learn, being able to make decisions. Again, a social emotional learning skills. If you don't have the ability to make decisions, you won't be able to like engage academically with the subject. So children develop social emotional learning skills even naturally outside of schools. But if we don't create any spaces for them to really develop these well, the foundational numeracy and literacy will also not stay. So it's almost like your plate has holes, and then you keep putting foundational literacy and numeracy on that, and it'll keep falling through if the base of socio-emotional learning skills does not exist.

SPEAKER_06 23:28

But make this a little bit more real. I mean, you used a really interesting term like memory, which I can imagine, at least to my own parents many, many years ago, would be like, oh well, I need my child to have great memory because I can connect that to outcomes in exams, right? And I'm I'm really hoping, you know, decades later, parents are thinking differently as well. So make this practical. Like, what is it something that you might be doing or encouraging in classrooms, or what Slam At Loud delivers that you can point to that says, and therefore many kids will improve their memory as a result of this. I'm just using memory as one example.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

I think one of the most interesting examples with memory is stories and stories from our own life, right? It's always easier to remember stories instead of formulae. We will remember the Pythagoras theorem, or we will remember buoyancy more as the story of Archimedes like jumping out of a butt tub, right? So storytelling is one way that you know children are able to make connections, or even adults are able to make connections and build on top of that. Your formula almost almost comes after the story in your head. So when Slam Out Loud brings a lot of storytelling in the classroom, and one of you know the activities which which I really, really love that we do in classrooms is called My Precious, where children, you know, go to their parents and talk about an object that is precious to the parent and what is a memory associated with that object and why is that important. And when the child comes in, you know, relates the same story in the classroom, the child is not only building like a connection with the parent and engaging emotionally, but also building memory in terms of a story that will allow them to remember why this object is precious. And stories stay with us way longer and much more than any data or anything that we learn academically in the classroom does.

SPEAKER_06 25:11

A lot of the whole schooling system and what is valued is ultimately driven by people having a view on what success looks like. And then once you say, well, this is what success looks like, what's the examination that gets you to that success? And so invariably what gets prioritized is what gets measured, because exams are all a measurement technique in many ways. And I think I imagine this is where your whole field has an uphill battle because it is not traditionally the field where, at least for me, I don't, I'm like, how do you measure this stuff? Can you show progress? And are you able to see that this is actually leading to something? Now, I had a conversation with you, and you seem to convince me that no, you can put science into the arts, right, around this stuff. Uh, and I'd just like you to talk a bit about that. Like, is there a solution here or is this an incorrect way of thinking anyway? Like, let's fight against this because not everything needs to be measured and so forth. But to me, it seems like a practical way to at least get people more engaged with this type of education.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Yes. I'll start with what I believe in. I believe that, you know, even social emotional learning skills need to be measured because that show us if what we're doing actually works and if it actually has impact and that allows us to go back to our programs and make them better and make them better in service of our children. Coming to the measurement of social emotional learning skills, so even the new education policy 2020 talks a lot about how the arts allow children to become more humane, how they allow them to become people with agency, but it never operationalizes it. It doesn't show what needs to be measured. And because it does not show what could be measured and how that measurement could look like, there is no money that's really put into arts education. There's no money that's put into measuring where our children are at when it comes to social emotional learning skills, like I said, curiosity or imagination. You know, when the first ASER report came out, we suddenly had a benchmark where we got to know that your fifth grade child cannot read a second grade text. However, we have no such thing around imagination, or we have no such thing around emotional awareness or agency that tells us where our children really are with respect to, you know, you know, growing in these skills, or or where where do we need to get as a nation for our children to thrive enough for children to become adults with agency.

SPEAKER_06 27:30

Do you see a future and where there's an usar for creativity and socio-emotional learning?

SPEAKER_01 27:35

That's a vision I have for our work, which is to have an assessment that tells us nationally where our children are at on the skills that they need to thrive in their life. Where are they on agency? How are they doing in imagination? How curious are our children.

SPEAKER_06 27:53

This idea of an ASA star report on creativity sounds so needed. And I suspect Rookmani would be a big proponent of it too. And I want to take the conversation back to her and talk a little bit more about the ASA report. Rookmani, were there any surprises from this year's ASA report?

SPEAKER_03 28:11

So I would say that we've had a lot of very good surprises in the report. If I go to the meat of the report, which is really our kids in primary school or middle school, mainly primary school, able to read basic text, do simple arithmetic, the trend lines, you know, over the past few years had been, you know, very incrementally rising. And then after two years of COVID, obviously there was a drop. But there's been from 22 to 24, because we last big USR we did was 22. There's actually a big increase. And especially for kids in grade three, uh big, much when it's off the line. You know, we had a very steady incremental line for about six, seven years, then a drop. And now you see that the surge takes it well beyond for the grades three kids at least. In math, it takes it well beyond the 2018 level. And in reading, it's not as dramatic, but it's pretty high. So we haven't just bounced back. What you're saying is we bounced beyond. We've bounced beyond. And if you look at it state by state, you see this increase in more or less across almost all states, which means that this is a very significant. And the way, you know, of course, Assad doesn't give you explanations. It's just a temperature check. But the way we've been looking at how this has happened, one is I think that these kids, the kids who are born in grade three in 2024, started their education after COVID. There was no disruption because of COVID. The second thing is I think they've gotten the full advantage of the new education policy. Because the new education policy, in very clear terms, lays out this national goal that by grade three, all kids must learn how to, you know, acquire, I mean, all kids must acquire basic foundational skills. And a lot has happened within the school systems to kind of do teacher training, lots of new material. I think the policy has begun to translate into practice. So the increase you see, I think is definitely a function of both of these. And I think there is a third element. Again, we are these are conjectures because the ASER data doesn't actually tell you all this. But I think that during COVID, everybody across the world had families who also got engaged with children's learning. So I think that we haven't lost that, probably the family part. You've gained a lot in the school part, and that these kids did not have a disruption. And all of this is much more clear in government schools than in private schools.

SPEAKER_06 30:41

Part of what happened in COVID is obviously people turned back towards government schools because of economic pressures as well. But that is bounced back too, right? There has been That's bounce back, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:51

We've gone back in terms of the enrollment. We've gone back to sort of the trend line up to 2018. And so that's bounced back. But the government schools have done better in ASER, right? Yes, but the government schools across the board, the the percentage gains in learning are much higher in the government schools than in the private schools. And that's partly because this whole translation of the policy through this operational plan, which is called Nippundhal, has happened in quite a big way across all states and government schools. So this is a very, I think, heartening, very inspiring moment.

SPEAKER_06 31:27

So Rukmani has given us some great news. At the same time, we should recognize that the bar is still pretty low. You know, we are still talking about some very foundational things. And the whole education system, in some ways, is a relative question. Your education relative to others, relative to others in other countries. And we therefore need to recognize that there's a lot of innovation happening. And is India keeping pace? So I think about how do you move beyond foundational learning minimums to what is the innovation that's really going to help us succeed in the future? And clearly, tech is going to play a big role. At the same time, EdTech up till now hasn't really delivered on the promise. Although I think with some of the latest AI technologies, the LLM technologies, there is again renewed excitement. Firstly, for just more of a ground level perspective on this, I turned back to Safina to just see how tech is playing a role in delivering on learning outcomes that she is aiming towards. Safina, with AI, we're finally in a stage where some of the things that we thought would happen in the last decade with technology, you know, where ed tech was really taking off, actually can happen now. You know, we we wanted to see personalized learning happen, but it was stuck because it didn't really have a human interface. It didn't know how to contextualize. At best, what you could do is say, okay, here's a maths problem. Oh, you're getting it wrong. Well, here's an easier maths problem. But with LLMs, that level of personalization has really skyrocketed. And it's amazing what some of the early evidence is showing. You know, I was speaking to some someone at the World Bank around a new study that they are about to publish where they said that, and I think this was in Nigeria, you know, they simply took one of the LLMs and did a very simple prompt, which is behave like an English tutor and create a lesson plan and support a set of students with learning English. And then those kids went through engaging with the LLM, learning actual English. And it was remarkable that just from a single prompt like that, the results showed that they were way better than even top quartile performing English teachers just from a single single prompt. But that also says, you know, if you have that incredible impact, then access is really critical because access becomes an issue, right? The World Bank was engaged, so these opportunities existed for these kids to try out these prompts. But education is to some extent a relative space. It's not just an absolute space. So just as this technology can help you leapfrog, if you have even better technology, is everyone else just running a much faster race? And so I think there is this sort of opportunity and challenge. What is very clear is that this is not an asset-light model. This is a model in which if you have access to certain types of technologies and compute powers and so forth, you're going to be able to do just an exponential amount more. And so one of the things I'm sort of still trying to figure out is is this the great leapfrog that you know India keeps talking about, or are we going to get left behind? And I know you've had this sort of really interesting, I guess, relationship with technology where you've you've exercised a good deal of mistrust to ensure that there really is this sort of human ground game, you know, starting with the idea of knocking on every door to make sure you find that girl. So if I was to ask you to think about what you could imagine technology doing for you in the places you have described, are you hopeful or are you, do you remain suspicious? How are you looking at this?

SPEAKER_02 35:05

So I think, and again, you're absolutely right to describe me as cautious with technology. So I'm not one of those who get just get really overexcited, like, oh my God, all the problems for education can be solved with that. Because I think so, technology is an enabler. And I think all the things that you described about Leap Frag, I'll give you an example. So we were running our second chance program in one state, and uh the girls, the state hadn't released the textbooks. So imagine the exams were like in a couple of months, but there were no textbooks for the girls. And you can't get them in the open market, right? So uh we used a chat bot. And so it helped the girls. So we had very high engagement because the girls are actually using the chatbot to be able to, you know, download chapters, read them, quiz them, like all of that kind of stuff. So you were able to leapfrog all these delays that sometimes the education system comes with, right? In in terms of textbooks and materials, et cetera, by using technology and still making sure that the girls had all the resources that they needed to be able to prepare for the exam. So, yes, uh, we also use technology, you know, as you mentioned, for finding the out-of-school girls, right? We go door to door, but we also, because we have such good data, are able to predict where the hotspots are for out-of-school girls by using machine learning and our algorithms. And that is incredible because it showed us that, you know, 5% of villages in India had 40% of out-of-school girls. I can predict the number of out-of-school girls in each of those villages, right? So that helps me to accelerate the inclusion, the solving of the inclusion problem. And that's tremendous. We use technology a lot in terms of the LMS, right? Like, where are kids getting stuck, doing the error analysis, what sort of lesson plans do we need? And you can have a 24-hour turnaround in the classroom, saying, I did the subtraction with carryover today, I could do the error analysis, I can figure out that wherever there's a zero at the end, the kids are getting it wrong. Therefore, here's a lesson plan on how we can teach this better, et cetera. Like the massive enabler. I don't think you can think of tomorrow's education system without having a technology strategy. Now, on to the cautious bit. I work in gender. There is a huge uh, you know, the gender digital divide, and it is real. So I think also being cautious and we cannot assume that just because you built a technology solution, that it will get to that hardest curve. You cannot make that result. And so, for example, a lot of our second chance program, we do the, you know, you can have the chatbot and things, but we will make sure that the textbooks are in the camps because we know that a lot of the girls will not have access to a phone.

SPEAKER_06 37:39

What we're hearing from Safina is really the incredible power of AI. And we're really just, I think, skimming the surface. There's so much we could dedicate to this one topic. Although, let me just try and summarize what I have heard from many of the folks we have spoken to about AI. One of its most principal opportunities within the education sector is personalized learning. AI can teach at your level. We heard from Rukmini how important teaching at level can be, and there's enormous data around once you have that personalized learning in a school, how it can be transformative for each student. The second way it can really dramatically change learning is that it can be more visceral, right? You can use VR, you can use 3D enabled with AI to look inside what a heart looks like, get access to architecture, to knowledge that you can only really visualize and see because of technology, which today you cannot in static books. Thanks to LLM and other sort of AI technology, you could be speaking to Einstein rather than simply reading about. So there's a real visceral opportunity to learn in new ways beyond that personalized learning that AI can support with. And then of course, there is the whole opportunity with how do teachers spend their time? The more that the teacher can really be thinking about each individual student, because a lot of what's on their plate, there's a lot of administration and being a teacher. Again, there are AI tools that are solving for that. And similarly, at a school level, how do you manage schools? Again, we have limited resources, and how can AI transform more of schools' budgets going towards directly the students rather than the administration? These are all the many different ways in which we're already seeing AI transform education. But a lot of that is also being now applied to how you think about moving from education to employment. How do you think about skilling and personalized skilling? How do you make skilling relevant? How do you make job matching uh relevant? AI can prepare students for the jobs that they want. And that's really critical because around 55% of Indian graduates reportedly don't have the skills needed for the jobs they want. So I'm now going to turn to Shri, who founded Harapa, an ed tech organization that helps people stay relevant in a work environment that's you know changing so rapidly, to tell us about the gaps that Harapa plugs.

SPEAKER_05 40:12

Harapa education was set up in March 2018. And really, sort of, you know, the problem statement that we were very excited with was there is a set of skills that we eventually started to call thrive skills. But really, there are cognitive social and behavioral skills that we think are really the skills which are most critical for career growth, right? And workplace success. Like, you know, whether you're a computer scientist or a public policy specialist or a community organizer or a lawyer, the fact is that you need these skills, which we sort of categorize them into saying the way to solve things, the way to think about things, the way to work with others, the way to collaborate, and the way to lead. Both lead yourself, lead others, and lead change, right? Really, these five sort of categories of habits of think, solve, communicate, collaborate, and lead, where we felt with skills that were becoming more and more important as you grow through your career, yet were not really being addressed by formal higher education systems, you know, with the intensity and focus that we had to. And we said these skills are actually needed by everyone. So we said, okay, we will address the skill gap on these very critical skills, which they call, you know, the future of work skills, you know, all of the industry 4.0 skills, through a platform and an online enabled platform so that would be accessible and affordable and relevant to everyone. So that in the in a nutshell was really the Harappa promise or the Harappa hypothesis.

SPEAKER_06 41:42

Now I'm I'm curious because, you know, in the space of, let's say, ed tech, right, there is a lot of big numbers that are quoted, but it is actually in reality been a really humbling experience, right? I mean, how much did the ability to actually learn versus yes, there's content and yes, there's people signing up? Like, how much did you see that actually happen? And what was the secret to that success? Because engagement online has actually been a real challenge, right? Like it is a human's, you know, humans want to learn with other humans around, otherwise they don't kind of show up. Did you find that? And were you able to overcome it?

SPEAKER_05 42:16

So, you know, Gorrow, I think we paint all of egg tech with one picture, but the fact is there are just so many. I think most of us are going to live till 8085. And the fact is that our learning needs change a lot, right? And our learning formats change a lot through this 80, 85 year period. So I think the value and the proposition of online learning was oversold for school children, you know, where there is so many distractions. But I feel actually for professionals and adults, given all the variety of other things that we all have to do, raise families, be responsible for other people, have full jobs, you know, manage homes, online learning sometimes becomes almost the only viable, sustainable medium of learning, right? And to a certain adulthood, you there's much more choice and sort of self-directedness that you bring into it, which is very different from say school children or even undergrads, right? So I think that persona difference, and that, you know, as an adult, you make a much more deliberate choice, makes a big difference in the outcomes of, you know, technology-enabled or ed tech products, as you're calling.

SPEAKER_06 43:24

Well, one of the things you started out with, right? You said that her upper, you know, in its more original format was very much about what people have called 21st century skills, life skills, you know, personal leadership skills, they're all these different terms. How much, when you experienced these classes and the people that were going through it, how much did you feel like you're making up for something that an education system actually failed to deliver? And how much had you wished that really these are things that our schooling system should have been delivering?

SPEAKER_05 43:54

I think companies like ours exist in some way, especially on the foundational skills or the life skills that we're talking about. Really, as a failure of the formal education system to not address these critical skills at all. I think I'm shocked actually that more and more as one was running her up and you know, we were kind of mapping curricula of higher educational institutions as well as school education to see what we would come up with. It's shocking that, you know, you'd you never have courses on listening, you never have a course on group dynamics, that you know, there is sort of, you know, there's so much research to say what happens when seven people come together to work as a team, that there is a norming period, there is a storming period. I think, you know, if you are taught some of these skills and an orientation to some of these, you know, sort of very basic things that happen, I think you can deliver projects in time, you can build better businesses. There's just so much, you can actually also have a healthier, happier life as an adult. Because if you see all the workplace stress and strife and the disillusionment, people don't know themselves. I keep saying that the greatest sort of task of adulthood is even knowing yourself.

SPEAKER_06 45:01

So far, we've heard from people who've spoken about the challenge of the education and skilling funnel, getting kids to school, stopping them from dropping out, and the quality of education and so on. For most, that journey only matters if at the end of it there's an aspirational job. What we're seeing is that at the end of the funnel, there is a lack of job readiness. We've heard a lot of CEOs complain about a lack of talent at a time when we're experiencing, or we're meant to be experiencing, a demographic dividend. So I want to bring in Sundar in at this point to weigh in from an employer's perspective. Sumda, thanks for joining. Um, I think you have a very unique view on this because for 30 years you've been watching this from the tech side, from the employment side. I mean, and you know, I think close to 20 years with HCL now. And to me, HCL is one of the biggest employers in what is perhaps the very aspirational opportunity for creating the next middle class and upper middle class in the in the country, right? HCL has been a big part of that. And so you see, you've seen for the last 20 years, what are we outputting as talent through both high school and tertiary and skilling programs? And where is the mismatch? Is that growing? So I want to know about that. And I also, on the other side, aside from leading some of those things at HCL, you you have a leadership position within the foundation, the Shivnada Foundation, which is one of the country's biggest investors in the education space from the photropic side, uh, education and scale. So that's why I'm really excited about this conversation. And let me start by the going to the first piece, which is as someone who has witnessed this journey from an employer's perspective, how would you describe the quality of human capital that the system has been putting out for a company like XER? How is it and has it changed over time? Is there really a misalignment?

SPEAKER_00 46:53

What do you see? Okay, Gara, thanks so much. It's real uh good to be here and talking to you. So, yeah, this is very interesting, right? So um HCL technology, and you know, I we talk about India in general last 20 years, starting maybe late 90s onwards, right? IT and technology has been the sort of what I call a growth engine. I would say, right? It's almost, I think, the most important growth engine for the country as a whole and for employment and for foreign capital as well, right? Now, so therefore, we can't say there's a lack of interest among young people to come to the sector. I remember as a student when the technology companies came in or wanted to do things for, let's say, I mean, recruit for as as for computer programmers, they did not really care whether you knew computer programming or not. All they wanted was somebody bright and smart, and that could be any engineering student. And so there's no broad issue with the, and still doesn't, there's not a broad issue with the quality of people coming in. And as this became more interesting, more and more students got into engineering, number of engineering colleges burgeoned in the country. I think at one time there were some, I don't know, a thousand engineering colleges in Tamil Art alone, right? And churning out huge numbers of students. So you had a lot of students, a lot of interest. So that was not the first worry, right? The issue, however, and having said that, what you we had to do, and say we, I mean the entire industry, you had to bring the students in and then train them on what you wanted. The students were not ready for a job yet. They were basically raw material, right? Who needed to be trained and different people at different approaches. Like some people would say six months to train them, some people would take a year, et cetera, et cetera. And um I remember at one time we thought about it and we said you have engineer and training and all that. And then Shiv that, and this was, I think, roughly 2014-15, said that why do we need engineers for these roles? Why not somebody who's graduated from grade 12? What is this additional four years of engineering adding to what you want from your uh what I call employees? And to that, to be honest, we discovered not very much. We opened a program called the HCL Tech B program. It still runs actually, you know, and as we speak, so the tech B program was for students of grade 12. We would select students after grade 12, and they broadly came in from because the more affluent children went in for higher education. So, this I'm talking about children who didn't have any opportunities, and this is a great opportunity to come and get a job, right? Starting after grade 12. And we also offered the ability for them to sort of on the side get themselves a degree. But they came in and they performed exceedingly well. But we had to do a training program for them. So they came in, they spent six months in a classroom program with us learning technology, learning various types of you know, uh coding and you know, basic things like learning communication classes, et cetera, et cetera. And then spent about three, four months uh shadowing uh a live project and things, right? So after about a year, they were well trained and they were put in the system. Our uh failure rates were very low there. As we speak, about uh, I think about 20,000 of HCL's 2.5 lakh employee base are tech bees.

SPEAKER_06 49:55

Well, let's actually drill down on one of the big outcomes. I mean, I think people do education for broader things. It creates great citizens, if you get it right. But one of the big ones, and one of the, I guess, the big personalized returns, is a job. Even though we've made progress, we've made progress both in kids who are in school, we've made some progress on the gender divide, and especially at higher levels. We've seen more in university. Actually, our uh female labor force participation rate has is actually starting to decline again, right? And what's happening here? Why is it that we are not translating even some of our modest gains in the education space, especially for women, into a labor force participation rate that actually makes any sense? Well, we've just heard from Sundar about how companies are trying to fill the skilling gaps for our lower skill graduates. But we have other gaps in inclusion, especially a gender gap, a gap that's in fact growing as far as the workplace is concerned. Why is that? And what's the role that tech can play? Shrecy has a lot to say on this.

SPEAKER_05 50:53

I mean, this to me is the greatest tragedy, right? You know, all of us, and there's so many amazing change makers, amazing institutions who have worked so hard uh to improve access to education, right? And that, you know, I think people are always surprised when I tell them that in India the gross enrollment ratio for women is actually greater than men. And it has been for the last five to seven years. Even for STEM graduates, which would one would think was an easier pathway, you know, to sustainable livelihoods, is greater for women than is men. Very few countries have those sort of advances, right? Yet the justiposition of that happening with workforce participation falling is truly sort of the issue that you know we really need to pay much more attention to. And I think it's societal, isn't it? I think our societal infrastructure, I think the lack of safety in our urban commutes, the challenges of you know, navigating commute, I think some of those are just so critical. And unfortunately, what has happened, and you'll see that that even rural workforce participation is increasing, but actually middle class and upper middle class, urban workforce participation for women is actually coming down. And that's when, you know, almost that women's jobs and careers are often seen as secondary and only when you absolutely need it, really poor people have to work and the really well-be can afford the infrastructure to be able to work. But I think really in the urban middle class is where we see that women are just not able to sort of, you know, use the advances in education to have long-standing, sticky, sustainable careers or livelihoods, right? And I think most of that is because we've not worked on. I mean, there's such so much work to be done on how we are structured as a society. What are obviously expectations from women in terms of caregiving and other responsibilities for the family? It is really those classic things which are holding us back.

SPEAKER_06 52:54

I guess one idea that has been floated is that just as you described how technology is at least helping to solve a lot of access issues or potential access issues, there is now a conversation around how that same technology is also allowing access to actual workforce participation because there is now a large percentage of jobs, which maybe you can do from home. And that that actually helps alleviate a lot of the stigma and other types of challenges that women face. Do you see a little bit of that? Did you start to see some of that happening as part of the cohorts of women that went through the courses at Harappa?

SPEAKER_05 53:28

Absolutely. I think for many people, it can be a great enabler and is able to help them manage obviously what they need to do at home, plus have a career. One, there's just many more options, right? So, for example, you did a bachelor's in economics, right? Or you did a bachelor's in zoology or botany. And really there just aren't enough jobs. And data science is really where the action is at in terms of you being able to get a job which could pay you well, pay in in maybe currencies from outside of India, right? Give you much greater flexibility. And you, if you could do a six-month bridge course that gives you that credential and you're able to access some of these jobs, I think that's a great way to use technology for working women is being able to access short courses for in-demand skills and be able to pivot to careers that make much more sense. And one is seeing that. You know, one of my favorite examples is speaking to the founder and CEO of a tech, you know, they they had courses on tech skilling from coding to data science to whatever is during COVID and right after COVID, so many RV spouses who are obviously stationed all across the country, you know, sometimes three, four, five, six hours from the nearest airport. No way they can come into one of our big cities to do a course. Taking courses online on coding, on Java or data science, right? And being able to get jobs. And I think that's a great story. The second thing that I've seen that happened with working professionals is, and we did a lot of these in terms of enterprise cohort, you know, the shared sisterhood that could come, especially even in women-only cohorts, right? And I feel like, you know, everybody should be a part of a woman-only cohort once or twice in their lives as a learning experience because it just there's a lit, there's a different dimension that gets added in a women's only space when you're learning together. You know, the shared stories and understanding that somebody in a smaller town has such similar experiences, especially of how the homes function and you know what people are going through as somebody living in a in a big city or a metro in India, gives people so much power, right? Role models, right? People mentors and role models that they could connect with if you're in a place where, I mean, especially with niche skills that you might not find in a in a small town, somebody working on cutting a JI, if that's what you're interested in, or even in a very specific, I don't know, embroidery that you might be working on, or any anything that's you know, sort of part of your business, you can access the best in the world through that. At Horakma, we certainly saw uh working women and our learners be really be open to take advantage of some of these changes. And I really encourage short courses online, affordable, accessible, right, and a great sort of thing to add to your C rule.

SPEAKER_06 56:29

Let me then link that to what I'm sure is a top-of-mind issue, even for HCL today, right? And and Indian tech companies. Like as you think about how AI will change the nature of jobs. I mean, sure, there's a pessimistic version which is, well, a lot of jobs are just going to get lost that might have existed in sort of the space of Indian technology firms, BPO firms, and so forth. The sort of positive version of that is, well, actually, individuals with AI can actually do more and that the nature of what we do will be different. But it requires the individual to not do the grunt work, but to do the creative work. And this brings me back to this like learning to learn growth mindset that in a way, the follow instructions and follow the process is not what's going to get rewarded. What's going to get rewarded, or at least the belief is creativity and your ability to take what is an infinite tool, but then use it in new ways.

SPEAKER_00 57:23

I asked Sundar if this concerns him. The search is a challenge, Garu. I mean, the current system from your schooling to the jobs, particularly in this, I don't know so much about, let's say, a manufacturing or other. I'm just broadly can only come to you from the lens of technology, right? Currently, you've been rewarded for following process. You may be creative and you may want to do things of that sort, but I mean, you don't get disproportionately rewarded for that. So there's been no impetus to for people to do that in that sense, right? Now, as you say, you have a tool here which does at least part of your uh what I call work for you. That's being a lot of people are enjoying it, using it, accepting it, and all that. And so they are reducing their own drunt work to some extent, right? But are they then going to be able to then transcend, let's say, that part and be able to use this for newer and creative things? That is certainly a challenge. And that I don't think, at least I don't know if we have figured that out yet. But I'll leave you with one interesting thought here, which I thought I was thinking about this. So, what is all this doing? We talk about betterment automation, we talk about AI or whatever, right? To human society. And let's not worry about this whole dark uh dystopian things in terms of where, you know, we get taken over and we get enslaved and all that. Let's keep that out of it for the time being, right? What it is doing to my mind is freeing up a lot of time for us, whatever it is. The basic thing you're getting is, for example, if I'm getting able to do my task 20% less in less time, time gets feed up. If a farm guy gets a machine which helps him, how does one say, do things better? His time is freed up, et cetera, et cetera. You can extend that analogy right through. So now human beings suddenly have an excess of time. So, what should entrepreneurs be thinking about? What should we guys be thinking about? How do we fill in that time? How do we engage people with that time?

SPEAKER_06 59:03

That feels like an appropriate question on which to end our conversation, which is really talked about the journey from getting kids into school all the way to getting a meaningful job. And maybe, as Sunda says, all the way to maybe even having some spare time.

SPEAKER_04 59:21

That was a great discussion, Gorus. The piece on socio-emotional skills was really useful and a big takeaway for me, equally the piece that Safina raises on sustaining learning levels among first-time enrolled students. And finally, I think it would be useful to see how whether across scale and size tech can offer a meaningful solution. I know the goalposts of the job scene keep changing. So the question of what skills are most important beyond reading and maths, to things like emotion, memory, spatial awareness are critical for many countries in Asia.

SPEAKER_06 59:56

I think those are great takeaways. And I think this is a topic we need to continue exploring, and hopefully we'll have another episode on education. So our next episode is on air pollution, which may feel like a very different subject to this grand subject of education, but actually they're very linked. I think education is all about helping young minds grow. The idea of teaching new things, injecting them with new thoughts, fundamentally shows up physically in brain growth and gray matter growth. And good education systems actually improve IQ over time. Interestingly, young minds exposed to air pollution are then deeply affected and are not able to achieve the same level of cognitive growth. This is something that's been seen again and again. And so while we're going to talk about lots of things with air pollution, I did want to make that link that even this subject we've talked about just now and how we can help our young people with new skills, a growth mindset, perform better, our next subject, air pollution, actually has a deep impact on that. We're of course going to talk about many other things. This is a subject everyone rants about at this time of year, especially. Ideally, they should be ranting about it all through the year. And we have a great bunch of people to talk about it too. We have Anumita Roy Chodri of the Center for Science and Environment, Shishya Sinha of the Clean Air Fund, Abedoma, the founder of the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative. I loved what he had to say. We had the same experience as the experience of people in India going through exactly the same thing and the same challenges, so much to learn from each other. And Roli Agarwal and Amit Moria from Google, who have an exciting new tech product that can actually help us understand our experience with air pollution.