Education: A Learning Curve

This upsets the Indian left, which wants to shut down these "mushrooming private schools." Bureaucrats take advantage of this prejudice and extract bribes in exchange for licenses, which average 5 percent of a school's running cost. Yet even the children of government-school teachers go to private schools.

As with so much about India's success story, Indians are thus finding solutions to their problems without waiting for the state. If China's success is due to its amazing (and state-funded) infrastructure, India's is largely the result of individual initiative. If this initiative can successfully broaden access to and raise the quality of education, India could be even better positioned for the knowledge economy than its behemoth neighbor.

Gurcharan Das is the author of "India Unbound" and a former CEO of Procter & Gamble India.

© 2006