Sebastian Mallaby, writing in the Washington Post, points to the rise and rise of private schooling in India – and highlights the vast numbers of engineers that they are educating.

Vellore is a small town in southern India, poor enough for some of its buildings to have thatched roofs rather than the rain-proof metal sort. Until a few years ago Vellore was notable only for its large Christian medical center, erected with the help of foreign money. But now it has sprouted a 9,000-student technical college, complete with a sports stadium, an incubator for start-up high-tech businesses and a bio-separation lab.

Everywhere you look, fresh buildings are under construction: over here a new laboratory complex, over there a gleaming student hostel with its own swimming pool. The college started out in 1984 with just 180 students, and its extraordinary growth is a symbol of the modern India as much as forts and palaces symbolize the India of old. Its success is part of the explosion of technical schools all across this country, which in turn is part of India’s technology-fueled economic miracle.

In 2005 India produced 200,000 engineering graduates, about three times as many as the United States and twice as many as all of Europe. But the really astonishing statistic is this: in 2005 India enrolled fully 450,000 students in four-year engineering courses, meaning that its output of engineers will more than double by 2009.

Equally striking is the way that India is managing this transformation. What has made this engineering takeoff possible is not an increase in the supply of universities financed by taxpayers or foreign donors; it’s an increase in demand for education from fee-paying students — a demand to which entrepreneurs naturally respond. More than four out of five Indian engineering students attend private colleges, whose potential growth seems limitless. In 2003 the Vellore Institute of Technology received 7,000 applications. In 2005 it received 44,000.

Link: washingtonpost.com.