NYT has a depressing article about Indian Education system. (Thanks Arjun for sending me this.) It correctly points out that
India has long had a legacy of weak schooling for its young, even as it has promoted high-quality government-financed universities. But if in the past a largely poor and agrarian nation could afford to leave millions of its people illiterate, that is no longer the case. Not only has the roaring economy run into a shortage of skilled labor, but also the nation’s many new roads, phones and television sets have fueled new ambitions for economic advancement among its people — and new expectations for schools to help them achieve it.
What is even more depressing to me is that even in major cities the situation for well to do people is bad. Most students consider going to school/collegs a waste of time and pay lot of money to go to tuition classes. In regular school/college classes teaching is abysmal. As a result most student spend all their time going to tuition classes and to schools — they don’e have much time to do thinking or do anything else.