New Delhi: As the debate over India’s education system intensifies during the ongoing monsoon session of Parliament, global media turns its attention to what the country’s classrooms lack.
In a report for The New York Times, Pragati K.B. and Somini Sengupta write that India’s large youth population should translate into an economic boost. However, most children, while being in school, are ill-prepared for university and jobs, “even as their families pay more than ever for education and harbor big ambitions for their future”.
“We are not learning anything here. Nothing,” Abeer Agarwal, a 19-year-old college student, told NYT about his school years. He added: “Our schools are not up to standard.”
According to the report, researchers warn that India’s demographic dividend has a limited window, with the country’s youth population expected to stop expanding by 2030.
Access to education remains unequal, the report notes. “There’s an exodus from government schools into private institutions. Families spend dearly on private tutors. College admissions are intensely competitive, expensive and out of reach for the poor.”
The quality of education reflects in classrooms. India’s latest government assessment shows that nearly half of Class 9 students cannot summarise the key points of simple texts such as news articles. Their performance in mathematics, science and social science is even poorer, the report says.
India’s Gen Z, as the report points out, came of age in the decades after economic liberalisation and many entered classrooms under the landmark 2009 right to education law guaranteeing free and compulsory elementary education. Expectations have risen alongside aspirations. Government surveys show household spending on private tuition more than doubled between 2017 and 2025, it notes.
Financial Times reports on India allowing foreign money into consumer ecommerce. However, there is a caveat, writes Veena Venugopal.
“Until now, foreign direct investment in Indian ecommerce was restricted to companies operating in the business-to-business segment, or to platforms (such as Amazon) that did not hold their own inventory. After resisting for a long time, last week the Indian government finally cracked open the door to FDI for consumer-facing firms,” says the report.
The revision to the policy permits foreign investment only in businesses that export from India, not those serving the domestic market, it notes.
Venugopal writes that small and medium-sized traders have long opposed any relaxation of the policy, arguing that greater foreign competition would threaten their survival.
She adds that Amazon and Walmart-owned Flipkart have long sought permission to hold inventory, arguing it would give them much greater operational flexibility. “The new provision lets them purchase, store and export Indian products directly from stock they own,” says the report.
“The timing cannot be coincidence. This change comes as India and the US edge towards concluding their long-stalled trade negotiations, and it’s hard not to read the concession as a bargaining chip.”
The Guardian reports on extreme heat claiming the lives of workers in India’s poorest areas. The piece opens with the death of Palli Mahalaxmi, a 50-year-old daily wage labourer in an Andhra Pradesh village who braved temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius because her family’s survival depended on her Rs 180 daily wage.
She would often dig in temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius with no shade. After hours of digging a reservoir under the scorching sun, she returned home exhausted one day and collapsed on her bed.
“Unable to rouse her hours later, her husband, Palli Shyam Sundha Rao, rushed to find a doctor. Examining her lifeless body, the doctor concluded Mahalaxmi had died from heatstroke,” the report notes.
Her family blames the government for her death, saying they have received neither compensation nor official assistance and are now surviving on help from neighbours.
According to the report, experts warn that increasingly frequent heat waves are pushing temperatures close to the limits of human survival. This year, one Indian town recorded 48°C, and on a day in April, 50 of the world’s hottest cities were in India.
BBC looks at ‘Why Wimbledon is serving Indian ice cream and Bollywood beats’.
Kuremal’s strawberries and cream kulfi, served in partnership with Wimbledon, quickly became a viral sensation. And doom scrollers are aware that Wimbledon’s official Instagram account has been posting edits of tennis players on groovy Bollywood tracks for months now. Nikhil Inamdar examines.
“Few things are more sacrosanct in sport than Wimbledon. Its all-white dress code for players, minimalist court-side advertising and association with strawberries and cream all remain fiercely guarded traditions,” he writes.
As Wimbledon sought to expand its reach in cricket-loving India this year, the world’s oldest Grand Slam had to shed some of its trademark reserve to appeal to audiences in a country where tennis remains a niche sport, he says.
“The championships also welcomed celebrity cricketers and Indian influencers to the Royal Box, using their star power to broaden its appeal,” he adds.
Wimbledon also tailored its marketing campaign for India, rolling out digital content in several regional languages. “The effort seems to have paid off,” says the report.
Despite the men’s final between Jannik Sinner and Alexander Zverev being played after midnight in India, it attracted 2.7 million livestream viewers. Overall, the tournament averaged 853,000 viewers in the country this year, an 18 percent increase from last year, according to the report.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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