What are the implications of India's teachers going off to UK and USA to teacher in schools there?

In an earlier post, I had described a new opportunity for Indian teachers, who are now going abroad to teach and had wondered if teaching not being a financially attractive career in India, could result in a flight of better teachers to other countries and a dearth of good teachers in India over time?

indiatogether.org reports in detail on this very issue, which probably deserves a lot more attention than it is getting.

Though the union ministry of human resource development is typically unconcerned, a tremor of apprehension is beginning to run through the boards and councils of management of India’s 1,286 CISCE (or ICSE) and 6,370 CBSE affiliated schools that a mass migration of the best and brightest teachers from these schools in particular may well be in the offing. With institutions of higher education in the West — particularly in the US and Britain — more than satisfied with the quality and performance of the large number of Indian academics hired by them, school managements and local governments in the English-speaking nations which are experiencing an acute shortage of teachers are all set to replicate the experience of their colleges and universities.

Unsurprisingly, given that the annual remuneration package of a school teacher (with three years experience) in even the most highly rated English medium CISCE and CBSE schools averages a modest Rs.80,000-100,000 against the $35,000 (Rs.16 lakh) offered by American and British local governments (with private schools offering better pay and perks), there’s considerable excitement within India’s long-neglected teachers’ community about this new development which many regard as a heaven-sent opportunity.

Last year in a paper entitled Managing Trade in Educational Services: Issues in India’s response to WTO Negotiations, Satish Y. Deodhar, assistant professor at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, noted that “already about 10,000 secondary school teachers are working outside the country for sometime now, and increasingly there is a growing demand for Indian teachers, especially in mathematics, sciences and English.”

The outward-bound teachers reflect the fundamental transformation of the global labour market. For the first time, ‘grey collar’ overseas job opportunities, for teachers, nurses and chefs, are opening up in their thousands for Indian professionals.

“A paradigm shift has occurred from supply-determined migration to one that is now determined by demand. This means that we have moved from being a job-seeking economy to one that is being driven by demand in developed nations for services and migrant workers from developing countries,” says Binod Khadria, chairman of the Department of Education at the Zakir Hussain Centre for Educational Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and author of The Migration of Knowledge Workers: Second Generation Effects of India’s Brain Drain (Sage, 1999).

Whilst the emphasis is often on the negative impact of Indian teachers migrating abroad, there could also be positives to it.

While most people tend to deplore the ‘teachers drain’ phenomenon, Maya Menon, director of Bangalore-based The Teachers Foundation discerns a silver lining. “It is not necessarily deplorable. In India teaching is perceived as a stagnant profession with slow upward mobility and modest financial rewards. If new opportunities to work abroad with decent pay have arisen it will motivate more young people to enter this increasingly shunned profession,” says Menon.

Quite obviously the projected manpower shortages in developed nations will attenuate the already evident deficit of trained teachers. Therefore it makes sense for public and private sector educationists to tap this projected pool of surplus working-age Indians and train them to become teachers for India and the world beyond national borders.

Deep in the collective subconscious the opportunities offered by the changing demographic profile of the world are already galvanising education entrepreneurs across the country into action. In November the Bangalore University Syndicate approved the establishment of 136 teacher training (B.Ed and B.P.Ed) colleges in the city and 32 for the Kolar district. Though it’s highly unlikely that more than half of the applicants (mostly politicians) who have been licensed to promote these college will actually establish them, even respectable mainstream educationists such Dr. K.P. Gopalakrishna, chairman of the Bangalore-based NPS Group of seven highly rated secondary and higher secondary schools has identified teacher training as the next high growth sub-sector within the education system. “If in the near future licence-permit raj in higher education is removed, I would be interested in providing high quality teacher training education,” Gopalakrishna told EducationWorld last month (see EW November).

indiatogether.org's report is worth reading in full and includes an interview with an Indian teacher from Bangalore who went to the US to teach, returned back to India after an year and preferred to teach in India, rather than go back to the US.