The Prime Minister of India launched the ‘Make in India’ Initiative in 2014 with the objective of job creation and skill enhancement in 25 sectors and to transform India into a global design and manufacturing hub. Isn’t it ironical that the sarkari factories or the sarkari schools that churn out tomorrows factory workers and scientists are not liked by any of its own citizens.  The quality education, especially the quality primary education, has indeed become the scarcest commodity in India. Parents lining up and stressing out for months for nursery admission to a few private schools has become a common story.  The media and parents talk about EWS quotas in private schools, rather than our own ‘Make in India’ primary schools.

Interestingly, the education sector is left out of the twenty-five sectors that have been identified under ‘Make in India’ initiative. Can the government create a ‘Make in India’ brand for its very own primary schools? Can the ‘sarkari’ schools become a brand with which everybody wants to associate with rather than something to be sneered at?

Prime Minister coined the slogan “zero defect zero effect” to emphasize on the production mechanism that produces products with no defects with no adverse environmental and ecological affects. However, the “made in India”  primary “sarkari” school factories continue to produce ‘illiterate’ children who cannot even read and write after being processed in the school factory for five years. Many schools with more than 400 children have only 2 to 3 teachers. Why we cannot afford to put teachers in these school factories. We are not here talking about schools in remote rural areas, we are talking about schools in the heart of Delhi.  We indeed have to do some long-term thinking on “Make in India” Initiative.

Running an education industry is a complex job. We need top-class CEOs to manage and run them. India has them, we just need to find them and put them in place and treat the primary education system as one India’s top priority