The need of the hour is to improve the overall situation of government schools across states, said the State Bank of India report. The need of the hour is to improve the overall situation of government schools across states, said the State Bank of India report.

India has perhaps now only a limited window of just 10 years to get into the developed country tag, or stay perpetually in emerging group of economies, a State Bank of India report has warned.

The SBI report has said India has only one decade to change its status into a developed country and will need to focus on education, failing which the much-hailed ‘demographic dividend’ will turn into a disadvantage. If India is not able to get its act together, it will never be able to go into the developed group of nations, the report by the research wing of country’s largest lender SBI warned. “Policymakers, wake up and smell the coffee!” the report said. India has been categorised in the emerging economy group for the last several years.

The report said the government and policymakers will have to focus on the young people to ensure they become good citizens and invest in education in order to achieve the objective and realise the demographic dividend. “India’s strength of demographic dividend could actually turn into India’s disadvantage by 2030,” it warned.

The population growth trend indicates that incremental population growth has been stagnant in the last two decades at approximately 18 crore, and fertility rates are quite diverse across states, it added.

The report said Karnataka, which has seen a decline in birth rate over the last few decades that has led to the share of those over 60 years increasing to 9.5 per cent in 2011, from 6.1 per cent in 1971, is best representative of the need to focus on education. With the affluence that comes as a result of slower population growth, people are preferring to put their children in private schools and not the government ones, on which a large number of population still depends.

The need of the hour is thus to improve the overall situation of government schools across states,” it said, suggesting a slew of changes needed in order to make the state-run schools perform better.

Among them, the SBI economists have suggested to stop granting funds to private schools under right to education and divert the same to upgrade infrastructure in the government schools. There is also a need for better classrooms, more focus on making English as a medium of teaching, qualified teachers with better remuneration who are not forced to do duties like census surveys, the report said.

India’s full FY18 growth estimate was revised upward to 6.7 per cent from 6.6 per cent in the second advance estimate released in February. This is in line with the 6.75 per cent growth forecast by the Economic Survey and down from 7.1 per cent in FY17 with the slowdown being attributed to the lingering effect of demonetisation and the roll-out of the goods and services tax (GST) in July last year.

Goldman Sachs had said in 2010, four out of the top five economies in the world were part of the West. In 2050, according to Goldman Sachs, the United States will be the only Western power to make it into the top five.

Although the United States will be number two in 2050, its economy will be much smaller than China’s. Goldman Sachs projects that China’s GDP should match America’s by 2027, and then steadily pull ahead. The collective GDP of the four leading developing countries (the BRICs — Brazil, Russia, India, and China) is likely to match that of today’s leading Western nations by 2032.

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