Education for the Privileged in India

An eye opener article "The Good Life" in Outlook Business threw me a surprise.

I was aware about Doon School and Woodstock School. But was not aware that it was in lush green hills where the elite and the privileged send their children to ensure the following:

“At Woodstock, we ensure that students live a clean, healthy life in an inspirational environment, where they’re cared for and supported,” 

In other words they are cut off from the harsh realities of life and will never know i.e.:

• What poverty is?
• What hardship is?
• What it takes to rise out from the struggles of day to day life?

Yet these institutions, Woodstock School, do the following for the state:

However, a field expert with no compassion is ineffective. To learn the importance of “service to humanity and the planet,” students have to collaborate with local businesses or NGOs and pick real responsibility tasks, such as in animal husbandry with the local community or solving the water shortage problem in Mussoorie with the help of researchers in the field.

Despite the above social contributions to the Mussoorie (Himachal Pradesh)  by the elite Woodstock School , its worth reading excerpts from an article Unemployment Haunts Himachal Youth:

The number of unemployed workforce in the state is a staggering 8, 92,988, as per the data of the Department of Labour and Employment, (Figures as on 31.03.2017, aged 15-45); it constitutes about 13% of the states total population.

The cardinal question, however, is: What, thus, is the way forward? The manufacturing sector in the state is bad shape for obvious reasons: The hilly terrain, harsh weather conditions, geographical location of the state, lack of adequate infrastructure, non-availability of railways, limited availability of land for industrial use, over dependence on roads for transportation, the cartel of transporters and botched up industrial policy. Consequently, only a handful of jobs were created in this sector-that too, mostly, on the shop floor.

Further , the unemployment rate in Uttarakhand (Doon School is situated in Dehradun) has doubled i.e. from 2.1% in 2004-05 to 4.2% in 2017. Also, in Dehradun unemployment stood at 30.2%.

The question is what have these great alumnus of Woodstock and Doon have contributed for these states in creating employment and infrastructure.

It is important to know that the school fees at Woodstock is :

Fees for 2019-2020 Academic Year

Grade 6 15,90,000 INR

Grade 7 15,90,000 INR

Grade 8 15,90,000 INR

Grade 9 16,46,000 INR

Grade 10 16,46,000 INR

Grade 11 17,65,000 INR

Grade 12 17,65,000 INR

For Doon School it is approx. Rs.10 lacs.

The article in outlook business in the end states the truth:

These schools may seem like paradise but they are not open to all. Only about 100 new kids are taken in each of these schools every year. But, it is worth elbowing your way into them since they send out well-rounded individuals, who are sharp and kind in equal measure.

The students who have not seen the hardships, struggle of common men to stand in queue for a bus or a train or for a basic service first hand will never be a well rounded individual.

This is as good as a man saying i understand labour pain of a women delivering a child.