India

Intro: India’s education system has become a major topic and issue since their independence in 1947. Government funding has often been neglectful of primary education, while focusing its majority of resources for secondary and tertiary levels. Because of many of these pitfalls, India still has many deficits, including a large discrepancy between male and female students, and large classroom sizes. According to the 2001 census the total literacy rate in India is 65.38%. 59.4%of rural residents are literate and 80.3% of urban residents are literate.

Primary- enrollment for females has been on the rise, from about 48 million in 1999 to nearly 66 million in 2007. This shows that throughou t the past decade or so, the government has placed a higher level of importance on educating girls. However, male students accounted for about 74 million, which pales in comparison to the low number of female students. The fifth grade survival rate is comparable with females at 65% in 2005 and male survival rate at 66% which means that about 65% of students who enter primary school complete it. The enrollment age is 6 and takes 5 years to complete. The teacher to student ratio was 40.20 in 2004.

Secondary- For secondary education the gap between male and female enrollment becomes larger. Females make up 42,235,247 while males make up 53,814,417. This shows that even though they are making gains in educating women, it is still far below educating young men. Vocational training has declined in enrollment from 2.13% of all students enrolled to just 1.85% of students enrolled. This could be due to the rapid growth of other industries powered by the internet and technology that do not require that kind of training.

Tertiary, or higher education has slightly higher female rates with 54,350,698 females attending and 59,222,202 males. It seems as though some young girls might have a rough start in education, many are finding ways to still push through it and be competitive with young men in colleges and universities. In 1953 the government established the University Grants Commision to regulate the standard and spread of higher education and literacy. There has been marked progress in the expansion of higher education because of this initiative.

Human and Financial Resources- 44% of teachers are females, which is interesting considering there were so few women who had higher education earlier on. The Indian government spent about 11% of its budget on education in 2003. Per pupil about 14% was spent by the government in 2003.