Literacy is not enough, quality education is a must.

A sob story in a newspaper highlights what is wrong with thinking in India. Apparently large numbers of young people are having to work as laborers, despite being literate. Young people comprise one third of the population of the country and 90% are literate but " staggeringly high numbers " are working as laborers in agriculture and 20% are jobless. Over 90% of adolescents and 86% of youths are literate, so the article concludes with great indignation that they are being forced work out of poverty and are being denied higher education. The conclusion is completely wrong. It is not clear what being literate means. Ability to read and sign one's name would be considered literate but does not qualify a person for any job. Mr Akhilesh Yadav won assembly elections in UP promising laptops for every student but they are being sold off for half the price. Not much point dishing out expensive laptops when there is no electricity and when many have only the rudiments of primary schooling. Why is it wrong to work as labor, as this article seems to imply? One professor laments the refusal of Indians to work in factories, preferring desk jobs instead. Since he is a professor at MIT in the US it is easy for him to talk. Studies in the US show that those with college degrees earn nearly double of those with only high school diploma. In 2012, 4 years after the sub-prime crisis, the highest paid jobs in the US were those of financial managers. Michael Larsen, who manages the wealth of Bill Gates took home over $3 million in cash and stock options in 2012. No shop floor job after vocational training is going to pay anything remotely close to that kind of salary. It is not surprising that students in India would also want to join this elite club and live in comfort. Nothing wrong with that. What is bad is the abject poverty of a majority of farmers and farm laborers compared to the wealth of farmers in western countries, whose earnings are much higher than average wages. The reason is that farms in the west are much larger and are able to use high yielding seeds, proper fertilisers and the latest farm machinery. In India large numbers of children mean that land is divided into ever smaller portions, which are farmed repeatedly, exhausting the nutrition of the soil. High inflation has seen the costs of basic necessities becoming unaffordable so children are sent out to work to supplement family income. The quality of education is so poor that 47% of engineering graduates are found to be unemployable. What hope is there for the barely literate?