The Caste system and skills

India's population was at one point of time divided on the basis of caste. However, today things have changed and the population of india is divided on the the basis of skill. People with skills who have jobs in consulting houses, software companies and call centers and people without skills and people without skills who undertake old drudgelike jobs.

Caste is determined by birth. Skills on the other hand are teachable - it is possible to teach someone how to communicate in english, teach typing skills, google researching skills and basic computer training.

However, the better education is still reserved for the guys who are rich. If you need to get into the IIT and IIM's, it is important to enrol yourself in a specialized course for the purpose and that is expensive. India has eleven million students who are caught up in 18,000 colleges and receive inferior training.

Increase in high school graduation rate

A conversation with an auto-rickshaw driver about how badly his kids are doing in school, sparked off this idea in my head.

Objective:

Increase in high school graduation rate in rural and urban corporation schools.

Teach high school students in rural areas to compulsorily communicate in English. This will increase self-esteem and confidence when they choose to move to bigger cities after graduation.

Problem:

Government run school teachers under qualified. No incentives to increase graduation percentage.

Graduation percentage in urban schools is less than 10 percent. Rural schools percentage much lower.

Rural high school children lack English speaking skills which makes it hard for them to get jobs and reap benefits of globalization.

Solution:

Kiosks – Set up kiosks in sample area. High school final exams are typically standard. There are certain questions for which you need to know the answers to surely pass. Speak to evaluators and understand what they expect. Create a question/ answer guide and train students using the kiosks. Essentially dumb it down with the objective being to just pass the exam. This is crucial for them to move on to the next step and obtain government scholarships. Focus heavily on English language skills. ( When we were in school, I had to pass my biology exam and there were answers that you needed to know to marginally pass the exam...I passed !!!)

The sample area can even be just a small hamlet with thirty students. We just need to start this thing small with the help of a dedicated school teacher who wants to change things and a computer. We prepare the study material, pass it on to the teacher and evaluate progress. Understand discrepancies and see what we can do to correct them. One hour compulsory attendance is required after school hours. I am very positive that we can increase the pass percentage by a significant percent if the project takes off.

Basically, a year of dedication towards the project + minimum capital investment on a computer with speakers, is all we need to start this off. Maybe a projecter to explain diagrams and math problems. Overall cost of capital equipment + services of a teacher = $1500 or less.

US students ripped off by Amazon.com

Yale's Christos Cabolis and colleagues, forthcoming paper called A Textbook Example of International Price Discrimination finds that although books for general audiences are similarly priced internationally, "textbooks are substantially more expensive in the United States" (on amazon.com) than the UK (amazon.co.uk). They argue that "cost factors cannot explain this phenomenon and discuss several demand-side explanations."

I checked out a few books on the two sites and found the following price differentials. Among the books I checked, the highest price differential was in this book called options, futures and other derivatives ($ 70.00) and the lowest was statistics for economists ( $ 21.37). Microeconomic principles by Cowell was cheaper in the UK than the US by 0.97 cents.