Why Indian Education is Losing Value Says Former Goldman Sachs Strategist
Abby Joseph Cohen
June 14, 2023
There are major doubts about India’s ability to play a key role in replacing China in the global economic supply chain, said Abby Joseph Cohen, former Chief United States Investment Strategist at Goldman Sachs. How can India educate the engineers and skilled workforce that is necessary if the theory of evolution and the periodic table are erased from textbooks, Cohen stated. Goldman, a New York based investment bank, has a market value of $105 billion.
A professor at Columbia Business School, New York, Cohen was speaking today at a forum “Is Globalization Real?” organized by the school’s Chazen institute.
Starting this academic year, several chapters were removed from textbooks in India for grade-10 students, who are typically 15-16 years old: the theory of evolution; the periodic table of elements; the industrial revolution; sources of energy; and the sustainable management of natural resources.
The periodic table explains how life’s building blocks combine to generate substances with vastly different properties and “is one of the great intellectual achievements of chemists,” Jonathan Osborne, a science-education researcher at Stanford University in California told the journal Nature.
In 2018, Satyapal Singh, who was then India’s Minister of State for Human Resource Development (now known as the Education Ministry), said that “Nobody, including our ancestors, in writing or orally, have said they saw an ape turning into a man. Darwin’s theory (of evolution of humans) is scientifically wrong. It needs to change in school and college curricula." Singh, who was a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet, repeatedly sought the change.
In 2021, Baba Ramdev, a yoga guru and swami in India, was selling a potion that he claimed will get rid of COVID-19 infections. With no medical or other college education, he also offers cures for cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and several other ailments, which have not been approved by any credible authority in India.
Yet, following a recommendation of the government of Uttar Pradesh, colleges and universities in the state included one of Baba Ramdev’s books on Yoga in their undergraduate curriculum. The government in India’s largest state is run by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Some economists and media pundits view India as a beneficiary of western companies seeking to reduce their dependency on China for their supply chain, including for semiconductors and automotive parts.
However, Western companies and investors have shown little interest in investing in India, except in consumer, media, and social media businesses. Annual net foreign direct investment in India stayed flat at around $45 billion from 2016 to 2022. Despite talk of moving suplly chain out of China, the country attracted $189 billion in gross foreign direct investment in 2022, which was more than double that of India.
India’s challenges in attracting foreign investors include political unpredictability, weak infrastructure and logistics and numerous administrative barriers, according to the Asia Society Policy Institute.
The removal of scientific facts from Indian textbooks has been extensively covered by the western media, from the Financial Times to the Irish Times to the Greek Reporter. This adds to India’s challenges, since, like Abby Joseph Cohen, more western investors will question the quality and value of a rapidly growing, educated workforce, which, in the past, was seen as a key economic strength.
Cohen has been an advisor to the endowment investment committees of several not-for-profit institutions, including Cornell University, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Opera.
Earlier, while at Goldman Sachs, she was president of the Global Markets Institute which provides research on economics, public policy, and financial markets. Cohen joined Goldman Sachs in 1990, was named partner in 1998, and retired in 2021. She began her career as an economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C.
Cohen is a presidential councillor at Cornell University, chairs the steering committee for the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute for Innovation and is a life overseer of Weill Cornell Medicine – all in New York state.
In addition to scientific facts, chapters and sections in Indian social science textbooks have also been deleted or modified: democracy and diversity, political parties; challenges to democracy; the Mughals, who ruled parts of Northern India from the 16th to the 18th Centuries; Mahatma Gandhi, who led India’s struggle for freedom from British rule; Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse; reference to Hindu extremists; and the 2002 riots in Gujarat, in which more than a thousand Muslims were killed, when Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of the state.
Also, references to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad were removed from the political science textbook for Class 11. A Muslim, and one of the leaders of India’s freedom struggle, Azad was India’s first education minister.
Since Modi first came to power in 2014, groups affiliated with his party are growing their imprint on the campus of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), according to The Print. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet, and Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, are among the top technology executives at major global companies who are graduates of the world renowned IITs.
In an open letter, more than 2,400 scientists, science teachers and others in India noted that students in India “will remain seriously handicapped in their thought processes if deprived” of studying evolutionary biology, a fundamental discovery of science.
Stanford’s Osborne told Nature, “Anybody who’s trying to teach biology without dealing with evolution is not teaching biology as we currently understand it.”
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