Address delivered at the 12th anniversary celebration of the Returned Non Resident Indians Association:
'Primary Education – The Backbone of a New India'
Azim Premji, Chairman, Wipro Corporation

3 July, 2004

Honourable Union Ministers Mr. Tytler and Mr. Rajasekharan, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

It is an honour to be with people who have been successful even outside our own country and yet have deep roots in India. You have already been playing an important role in carrying the flag high for our country – wherever you are and I am certain that you are making the country proud.

India, especially during the past 15 years has made significant all round progress and the developed world at large now knows that it can no more be projected as a country of snake charmers and black magic.

I have no doubts in my mind that India would soon attend the status of a “developed nation”.

I would like to share with you my perspective on some of the critical issues that would enable us to be a “developed nation”.

To begin with, I would like to describe to you the kind of opportunities that await us as a country.

First, we have world’s largest talent pool since we account for 1/6th of the world population and 34% of this population consists of people below 15 years. Projections of the demographic profile by many experts indicate that especially among the developed countries, by about 2050, a large proportion – in some cases even as much as 70% of the population will be of 70 years and above age. It is in this context that we have the opportunity of building world’s largest talent pool.

Second, though we have 16% of the world’s population, our contribution to world’s GDP is just about 1.6%. The projection of some experts points that the current wastage of resources including people resources is upto $ 3 trillion. (Source CK Prahalad presentation). Thus the gap is huge and we have the opportunity to enhance the contribution through sustained, high GDP.

Third, our Human Development Index rank is 125 among about 175 countries and hence there is so much opportunity to improve this index.

My hypothesis is that if have to successfully exploit the above opportunities, we have to make paradigm shift in the way we are creating the talent pool in our country. It requires radical changes in our attitude to the way are building knowledge. We have to change our current status of “receiver of knowledge” to “creators of knowledge” – a status that our country used to enjoy a few centuries ago.

For this to happen, we have to approach and re-design education our country differently. It is this area, where we as Wipro Corporation and in Azim Premji Foundation we are keen on making a significant contribution. The Wipro initiative is primarily focussed on education in private institutions in urban areas and the Azim Premji Foundation initiative is focussed on rural Government schools where we work in partnership with the Government.

I think, the way we corporates and private sector look at development or social sector needs to significantly change. I hear in most cases, it is viewed as either “corporate social responsibility” or “social work” or “giving back to society”. There is an excessive effort in brand building and decibel levels higher than the actual impact of the work done. While there is nothing wrong in brand building, it has to be clearly commensurate with the impact created.

In both Wipro and at Azim Premji Foundation, we do not view our work as social work. We look at it as a professional problem solving approach in a particular domain. There is a huge problem in terms of quality of education across the country and we as professionals would like to contribute to resolving that problem in the most inclusive manner.

We look at it as a life and death issue. Unless we as a country make significant transformation in the quality of education a number of other problems such as poverty, health, underutilisation of human resources, productivity, our dream of a kind of caring and sharing society will remain problems for ever.

Within education, we are working on the following specific issues:

Number 1: The definition of education must focus on the end product that we desire for a just, humane and equitable society. Therefore, it must focus on issues beyond memorizing and cognition. Education must focus on the all round development of the child that can develop the child into a thinking, learning, caring, empathizing, healthy and analytical individual. We are currently in the process of working with the examination boards to bring about elements of this focus in the curriculum in more pronounced manner.

Number 2: Assuming we get the kind of definition of education described above, in order to actualizing the same, we will need different teaching learning processes, different culture in the schools and class-room and different training of teachers becomes necessary. This is where the child centric, interactive and less threatening environment is vital.

Number 3: Transformation cannot be achieved unless the school as a unit and the habitation as a population group take responsibility of achieving learning inside the school. Therefore, while the Government financial support is a must, progressively, we will have to move to locally managed schools to enhance the relevance of learning in these schools.

Number 4: The corporates and private sector, as customers of education, need to play a role that is far more active and collaborative. They can play this role at least in three ways. One, they can continuously give a feedback to the education institutions of their requirements to make education far more relevant and focussed. Two, they can provide leadership and managerial help to manage the educational institutions far more efficiently. And three, they can financially contribute where possible – for which the Government can announce incentive programmes.

While working in more than 5000 schools across several states we have realised that the potential of the Government schools to impart quality education is no less than those in private urban schools. Contrary to common belief, availability of resources and funds is not the key issue. The key issue is execution and building accountability through motivation among the key stakeholders.

Under one of our programmes – the Learning Guarantee Programme, we found that once the schools got an individual child wise feedback after the evaluation, they have responded very positively and many of them have committed to become a learning guarantee school where every child has the required competencies. I have personally witnessed the enthusiasm of the head teachers, school committee members and the students when we felicitated the 40 schools that exhibited a status of being learning guarantee schools.

Similarly when I visited the schools where the CD based curricular and co-curricular content developed by Azim Premji Foundation is being used, I saw and felt the enthusiasm of the children and of the entire school while working on the computers. The excitement among the community members to see their children working on computers was also palpable.
We do realize that one off interventions may have limitations in recognising the linkages among various contributing factors to learning. Therefore, we are currently implementing a holistic intervention called “Child Friendly School” in about 1100 rural Government schools in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in partnership with the respective state governments and UNICEF.

We consciously decided to make the scale of intervention large since our objective is to evolve “proof of concept” that has a very high replication and sustenance potential when implemented in the government system. We are careful to ensure that we do not add such components that are not possible in the larger Government system. The idea is not to create “islands of excellence” but create a possibility of influencing and transforming a large system.

Apart from building a network of about 20 top class NGOs in Wipro Applying Thought in School and an organisation of 120 professionals and 1000 paid volunteers in Azim Premji Foundation our current annual financial commitment is about $ 6 Mln. This can of course get enhanced progressively as we increase the scope of our work.

Every time we have discussed the overall issue of education with various political leaders, senior bureaucrats and other organisations, there has been an instant positive response. Everyone recognises the vital role quality of education can play in building a society and a nation.

The real need is for all of to join hands and make a concerted effort to make that real impact on the overall system that will go a long way in making India as a nation of people who are just, human and hold the values that are enshrined in our constitution.

I thank the RNRI association for inviting me here and providing me this opportunity to share my thoughts.

Thank you.