Information depends on education.

Information technology sector has been the real growth story for India, partly because it was left alone by politicians and civil servants who never really understood what they did. In the decade up to 2007 dollar earnings of IT companies grew at between 30-45% a year. IT has grown from 1.2% of GDP to 7.5% and its share of exports has grown from 4 to 25%. In 1998 IT industry employed 100,000 people, today it employs 2.8 million. Since 2009, however, growth has been down below 10% and is expected to stay there from now on. Dollar earnings of Infosys were down 1.1% in the last quarter though TCS was up 3.4%. The slowdown maybe explained by increased competition from other countries such as Philippines, recession in western countries resulting in reduced spending by businesses there and difficulties with getting visas. How much is due to the lack of proper education is not discussed. In a contest called Code Jam held by Google, which is like the Olympics of programming, Indians started with the largest number of contestants. At the qualifying stage 17% of contestants were Indians but by round 3 it was down to 0.7%. By the third round there were just 3 Indians left as opposed to 83 Chinese, 77 Russians, 36 Japanese, 25 Americans, 21 Poles, 11 South Koreans and 13 Belarusians. ET, 16 July. If we remember that South Korea has 50 million, Poland 38 million and Belarus a mere 9.5 million population then the shame is multiplied many times. On 9 August, 2011 Prof DK Gupta, Vice Chancellor of Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj University in Lucknow, wrote to the Medical Council of India requesting that MBBS degrees be awarded to students who had been failing repeatedly in their exams. Some had been failing since 1996. He said that reservation candidates should be allowed to pass with 40% marks because that was the requirement for their admission tests as opposed to 50% for merit candidates. Congress spokesman Ravi Kumar Bhargava said that repeated failure of SC/ST students must be probed implying that some sort of vendetta was taking place. The reason that education is so poor is because the Congress sees merit as elitist and something to be discouraged. Since reservation candidates find it very tough to pass their exams in institutes of higher education, leading some to commit suicide, every effort is made to bring down standards so that they pass. This leads to millions of young people roaming around with pieces of paper but no real knowledge. This is used an an excuse by shrill politicians to meddle with qualifying exams and syllabuses to bring down standards even lower. They completely fail to mention that good students from the same institutes are doing well abroad. Information comes through education and the Congress is bent on destroying both.