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India's government expends on boosting education amounted to 5.4% of total GDP in 2014, but the adult literacy rate improved slightly from 63.1% to 63.4% between 2009 and 2014 (Euromonitor International 2015). Poverty, accounted for 21.9% of total population (World Bank 2011), and attitude against female education cause widespread illiteracy, especially in many rural areas (Thomas 2012) and the gender gap in educational levels are problems. The female and male adult literacy rate stood at 60.6% and 81.3% of the population respectively (Central Intelligence Agency 2015). .
Compared to male employment rate (73.3%), India's female employment rate stood at 21.6% respectively. Main reasons are a low female adult literacy rate, social and cultural barriers, such as various forms of discrimination to female employees at the workplace. The level of female participation has been the lowest in Asia Pacific (Sorsa, et al. 2015; Thomas 2012). However, the percentage of woman employees is growing in various industries and the attrition rate is high after age 30 because of marriage and childbirth (Hasegawa & Noronha 2009). .
According to Euromonitor International report (2015), 6.1% of the Indian adult population had attained higher education in 2014, remarkably lower than Asia Pacific's average of 10.4%. The main reasons are poverty, low school-enrolments and high school drop-out rates. In addition, India faces shortages of skilled labour due to poor quality of education, lack of higher educational graduates and lack of professional training. The shortages are most significant in key industries, such as information technology, automobile and construction. Moreover, India also has a problem of "brain drain" since increasingly Indian professionals migrate to developed countries, for searching better opportunities and salary. This makes India ranked 42nd out of 144 economics in the "Country capacity to retain talent" in 2014.