Education is a business, no doubt. But access to affordable education is also fast becoming a fundamental right, as life becomes difficult without affordable education.

The problem is to balance the business of education with quality and at the same time affordability to all sections of population. And the solution is to start from the way we focus on education. We need a national regulatory authority to focus specifically on affordable primary and higher education. I am not talking about authority to define text books, syllabus or content, which exist today.

What we need is an ERA. An 'Educational Regulatory Authority'.

This authority has to continuously and consistently look at educational needs of the country (for all its people) and work for it. An authority to focus on education and its stakeholders (businesses, students and teachers) specifically.

This authority needs to be an enabler and not doer. This authority must enable private and public players to meet the educational demands of our country.

This authority, the way I visualize, is like a Telecom Regulatory Authority. But not in the re-active way TRAI functions today. This educational regulator has to be pro-active. They should not be mere monitors.

They should be active Program Managers, planners, facilitators, task-masters and own up the objectives and goals set up for education. Governments need to use them to implement their policies to achieve the nationally agreed goals.

This authority must plan the educational needs of our nation keeping in mind the various professional needs of subsequent decades.

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This authority should estimate how many farmers, engineers, lawyers, doctors, scientists, technologists, skilled labor, unskilled labor, salesmen, drivers, carpenters, painters and professionals of different kinds are needed for the next 2 decades and plan the growth of educational system accordingly.

This means that this authority will bring in recommendations even at school levels to create exposure, interest and knowledge in students in different professions and grow the appetite of students towards a career.

Currently this knowledge and interest in different careers and professions is lacking with students. Career interest and knowledge, be it as simple as driving, plumbing or carpentry or as complex as a research scientist, needs to be inculcated in students very early. This will enable them to perform to their full and survive in the society in any job they do.

This approach will address the problem of relationship between education and profession or education and business. While education needs to be much larger than profession, it must facilitate a profession or a business.

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This authority should monitor the affordability of education in various geographies and communities of education and keep on introducing new incentives that enable private and public players to fulfill these needs.

This authority must monitor the quality of education continuously by monitoring the qualitative parameters at different levels.

This authority must set the mandatory level of knowledge to be gained at various levels of education and leave the actual syllabus to individual schools and universities. To provide uniform standards of education, this authority must evaluate the standards of education provided under different boards of education and enable them to be on par. This authority should evaluate the testing methodologies and implement a uniform testing methodology and standard across different boards of education.

This approach will address the problem of bringing in quality of education.

There are so many private schools that have sprung up in remote corners of the society trying to serve the bottom of the pyramid. They will pay low and attract not much talent. Here is where a focussed educational regulatory authority can play a role and facilitate improvement of teaching skills in these schools through policies and procedures at micro-level.

Balancing affordability and quality requires various solutions. There is no one solution that fits all. Hence a lot of micro-level, region specific policies need to be done, which a focussed regulator can do.

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This authority must also look into continuing education, re-training and re-deployment in work sectors that will soon become technologically redundant and come out with programs that help these people to survive in a changing economy.

And this program of continuing education is important for all teachers, starting from primary school teachers. Also, this authority must implement programs that brings teachers from various other disciplines into teaching even at school levels.

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Currently, our people and government do not have the 'focus' that we need to have on affordable, high quality primary and higher education. We do not even have the focus that we have to enable the sales of cell phones in this country.

Instead we are fighting for splitting the existing food on the table through reservation. Our government is magnanimous to increase the quantity with some more IIMs and IIT's.

What we need is a revolution like green or white revolution in education sector. A Knowledge Revolution!

-TBT