Courtesy mckaysavage on flickr

Yahoo India news article titled “Giving young India a foothold into the future”.  The leading companies in India have joined hands with the central government to improve the career prospects of bright young people from rural India. In a public-private partnership effort to be shortly announced, foundations run by Wipro chief Azim Premji, Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Group and others corporate chiefs will fund the coaching of school leaving rural youth to prepare them for engineering, medical and other technical entrance examinations.

Around 4,000 youth will be selected every year from a network of 576 schools across the country set up to promote quality education in the rural areas. The government and the private sector may share the cost equally.

This unique public-private model for education is one of the ways India can translate demographic challenge into demographic dividend.  Still the number of rural youth wanting to get good education is very large and India needs to move aggressively in tackling this issue.

This is a great demonstration that empowering rural girls is an effective way of bringing positive change to rural India. “I ask them to go to school and make their own destiny,” Krishna says in the article. “I try explaining to them that if they don’t go to school the society will suppress them. I tell them to stand for their own rights and make your own career and not to leave everything in the hands of the fate,” she adds.  As for Krishna’s personal inspiration – “that one is easy,” she says, she looks toward women world leaders like US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State for US, currently visiting India joined with Aamir Khan in a conference on Education at St. Xavier’s college at Mumbai.  They found a common ground in challenging bright youths to take care of millions of Indian citizens that falling behind.

Outlook India’s recent article titled “Teaching for India” gives following statistics:

• The average literacy rate hovers around 60% in India (for women, the number is much lower)
• World Bank statistics show that fewer than 40% of adolescents in India attend secondary school.
• According to a recent study, 15 out of every 100 Indian kids will never go to school. And among the 85 kids who do, 50% of them will drop out before the 5th grade.

The Outlook article characterizes this as an educational crisis, where almost 40% of the population is under 15 years of age, these trends are troubling, and can prove disastrous over the long-term if they are left unchecked.  The article notes that this educational crisis is exacerbated by severe gender and caste disparities and can impede India’s ambition of Global power.

As Hillary Clinton challenged, the educated youth can volunteer to help spread the literacy in India. Recently launched Teach for India which is modeled after successful Teach for America program will place outstanding college graduates and young professionals as teachers in India’s low-income schools for two years. The aim is to narrow the educational gap and expand the educational opportunities available to thousands of underprivileged children.  This is exciting because Gen YRI can take a leadership role in solving one of the major stumbling block India is facing in its march towards prosperity.

Here is some of Indian Youth’s wish list from the survey:

1. Tax Reduction: Most important concern was a reduction in taxes. Every youth surveyed is looking for some tax relief by raising the exemption limit of income tax and bringing down the tax rates.
2. Education: the youth feels that higher/professional education in India is still not accessible enough.  Even at the primary level, the youth feels that the government needs to reconsider its policies.
3. Gap between Rich and Poor: The Indian youth feels that the wealth is concentrated with a small group of people and so they want the government to reduce this gap between the rich and the poor.

See the video below to check out other items on wish list of Gen YRI.

Reporter notes that Researchers attribute the ubiquitous presence of Malayali nurses in the health care sector to various factors:

• Women’s education having come early in Kerala;
• Missionary and state efforts in developing service-oriented sectors, such as education and health; a well-established tradition of migration;
• Existence of informal networks that expedite such migration.

Nursing was the preferred vocation because the investment needed for training was modest, they could sustain themselves and their family, pay for their siblings’ education and even earn a dowry for their marriage.  But, for women from the higher classes and castes, nursing was a complete no-no. The profession was looked down upon, as the work was demanding, the hours were long and included night shifts, and it was not seen as advisable for women to attend to strange, unknown people including men.

Today, nursing as a career has become very popular, even among non-Malayalis and men in need of a job. This is because of the opportunities it offers to earn well and go abroad.

http://newsblaze.com/story/20090526074321iwfs.nb/topstory.html