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On the other hand, it is also true that there is no company or institute in the world that has not benefited by graduates, post-graduates
or Ph.D.s from India: be it NASA, IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Bell, Sun, Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Cambridge or Oxford, and not all those
students are products of our IITs, IIMs IISc/TIFR or central universities, which cater to barely one per cent of the Indian student
population. This is not to suggest that we should pat our backs for the achievements of our students abroad, but to point out that Indian
higher educational institutions have not been able to achieve the same status for themselves as their students seem to achieve elsewhere
with their education from here.
While many reasons can be cited for this situation, they all boil down to decades of feudally managed, colonially modelled institutions
run with inadequate funding and excessive political interference. Only about 10 per cent of the total student population enters higher
education in India, as compared to over 15 per cent in China and 50 per cent in the major industrialised countries. Higher education is
largely funded by the state and central governments so far, but the situation is changing fast. Barring a few newly established private
universities, the government funds most of the universities, whereas at the college level, the balance is increasingly being reversed.
The privatisation experience
The experience over the last few decades has clearly shown that unlike school education, privatisation has not led to any major
improvements in the standards of higher education and professional education. Yet, in the run up to the economic reforms in 1991, the
IMF, world bank and the countries that control them have been crying hoarse over the alleged pampering of higher education in India at
the cost of school education. The fact of the matter was that school education was already privatised to the extent that government
schools became an option only to those who cannot afford private schools mushrooming in every street corner, even in small towns and
villages. On the other hand, in higher education and professional courses, relatively better quality teaching and infrastructure has been
available only in government colleges and universities, while private institutions of higher education in India capitalised on
fashionable courses with minimum infrastructure.
Nevertheless, successive governments over the last two decades have only pursued a path of privatisation and deregulation of higher
education, regardless of which political party ran the government. From the Punnaiah committee on reforms in higher education set up by
the Narasimha Rao government to the Birla-Ambani committee set up by the Vajpayee government, the only difference is in their degree of
alignment to the market forces and not in the fundamentals of their recommendations.
With the result, the last decade has witnessed many sweeping changes in higher and professional education: For example, thousands of
private colleges and institutes offering IT courses appeared all across the country by the late 1990s and disappeared in less than a
decade, with devastating consequences for the students and teachers who depended on them for their careers. This situation is now
repeating itself in management, biotechnology, bioinformatics and other emerging areas. No one asked any questions about opening or
closing such institutions, or bothered about whether there were qualified teachers at all, much less worry about teacher-student ratio,
floor area ratio, class rooms, labs, libraries etc. All these regulations that existed at one time (though not always enforced strictly
as long as there were bribes to collect) have now been deregulated or softened under the self-financing scheme of higher and professional
education adopted by the UGC in the 9th five-year plan and enthusiastically followed by the central and state governments.
In the run up to the economic reforms in 1991, the IMF, world bank and the countries that control them have been crying hoarse over the
alleged pampering of higher education in India at the cost of school education. The fact of the matter was that school education was
already privatised to the extent that government schools became an option only to those who cannot afford private schools mushrooming in
every street corner.
It is not that the other well established departments and courses in government funded colleges and universities are doing any better.
Decades of government neglect, poor funding, frequent ban on faculty recruitments and promotions, reduction in library budgets, lack of
investments in modernization leading to obsolescence of equipment and infrastructure, and the tendency to start new universities on
political grounds without consolidating the existing ones today threatens the entire higher education system.
Another corollary of this trend is that an educational institution recognized in a particular state need not limit its operations to that
state. This meant that universities approved by the governments of Chattisgarh or Himachal Pradesh can set up campuses in Delhi or NOIDA,
where they are more likely to get students from well off families who can afford their astronomical fees. What is more, they are not even
accountable to the local governments, since their recognition comes from a far away state. Add to this a new culture of well-branded
private educational institutions allowing franchisees at far away locations to run their courses, without being responsible to the
students or teachers in any other way. This is increasingly becoming a trend with
foreign universities, especially among those who do not want to set up their own shop here, but would like to benefit from the
degree-purchasing power of the growing upwardly mobile economic class of India. Soon we might see private educational institutions
getting themselves listed in the stock market and soliciting investments in the education business on the slogan that its demand will
never see the sunset.
The economics of imparting higher education are such that, barring a few courses in arts and humanities, imparting quality education in
science, technology, engineering, medicine etc. requires huge investments in infrastructure, all of which cannot be recovered through
student fees, without making higher education inaccessible to a large section of students. Unlike many better-known private educational
institutions in Western countries that operate in the charity mode with tuition waivers and fellowships (which is one reason why our
students go there), most private colleges and universities in India are pursuing a profit motive. This is the basic reason for charging
huge tuition fees, apart from forced donations, capitation fees and other charges. Despite huge public discontent, media interventions
and many court cases, the governments have not been able to regulate the fee structure and donations in these institutions. Even the
courts have only played with the terms such as payment seats, management quotas etc., without addressing the basic issue of fee
structure.
It is not only students but also teachers who are at the receiving end of the ongoing transformation in higher education. The nation
today witnesses the declining popularity of teaching as a profession, not only among the students that we produce, but also among
parents, scientists, society and the government. The teaching profession today attracts only those who have missed all other "better"
opportunities in life, and is increasingly mired in bureaucratic controls and anti-education concepts such as "hours" of teaching "load",
"paid-by-the-hour", "contractual" teachers etc. With privatisation reducing education to a commodity, teachers are reduced to tutors and
teaching is reduced to coaching. The consumerist boom and the growing salary differentials between teachers and other professionals and
the value systems of the emerging free market economy have made teaching one of the least attractive professions that demands more work
for less pay. Yet, the society expects teachers not only to be inspired but also to do an inspiring job!
Deemed universities - a national debate needed
Yet another worrisome trend in higher education and research is the emerging government policy of according deemed university status to
national labs and research institutes, so that these institutes can award their own Ph.D. degrees, without having to affiliate themselves
to a university or fulfilling any other role of being a university. National laboratories include those under the Union government's
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Department of Atomic Energy (DAE),
Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Department of Space (DOS) etc. Some DAE institutions have already obtained deemed
university status, and the UGC has already recommended the case of CSIR for the commission's approval. It is not clear whether all the
national laboratories are under consideration for this status, but it is most likely that all of them would eventually like to seek such
a status.
However, the country needs to decide whether it wants to develop glorified technicians and sycophants or make versatile scientists and
conscious citizens. Barring a few exceptions, the monolithic hierarchy of national labs does not provide enough opportunity to young
researchers to relate their research to broader social and national values. The more open intellectual environment of universities, which
include natural and social sciences, is essential for interdisciplinary learning, personality development, national values and better
citizenship. Thus, the issue of deemed universities calls for an open national debate, as it has major implications for our higher
education and research in science and technology.
With the basic issues of equity and access to higher education still unresolved, the country is ill prepared to generate knowledge
creators or knowledge workers of high quality to tap the opportunities of the emerging knowledge economy. There was a time when the
country debated passionately about external brain drain of students going abroad and not returning, and internal brain drain of students
taking up careers in areas quite different from their academic backgrounds, and what a waste of national resource this was. This
situation has only worsened, with unemployment and underemployment in the era of liberalisation and globalisation, but we don't seem to
even talk about it anymore.
Reforms may mean different things to different people, but for those students and teachers who are at the receiving end of their
governments, reforms have come to mean withdrawal of government funding, no matter what happens. For those who believed that reforms in
higher education would reduce bureaucratic controls, attract better talent, provide more operational freedom, improve transparency,
increase accountability, remove corruption, encourage self-financing, reward productivity and punish laxity, to say that they are
disappointed at the state of affairs in our country is an understatement.
N Raghuram
The author is Reader, School of Biotechnology, GGS Indraprastha University, Delhi.
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Vol #5, Issue #1, Combat Law
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Education policy
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Ugly face of the knowledge economy
With the basic issues of quality, equity and access to higher education in India still unresolved, the country is ill
prepared to generate knowledge creators or workers of the highest quality. If the
current trends are any indication, reliance on the market forces is further aggrevating the crisis, writes
N Raghuram.
Combat Law, Vol. 5, Issue 1 -
Higher education in India is gasping for breath, at a time when India is aiming to be an important player in the emerging knowledge
economy. With about 300 universities and deemed universities, over 15,000 colleges and hundreds of national and regional research
institutes, Indian higher education and research sector is the third largest in the world, in terms of the number of students it caters
to. However, not a single Indian university finds even a mention in a recent international ranking of the top 200 universities of the
world, except an IIT ranked at 41, whereas there were three universities each from China, Hong Kong and South Korea and one from Taiwan.
This situation reached its extreme recently in the new state of Chattisgarh, where over 150 private universities and colleges came up
within a couple of years, till the scam got exposed by a public interest litigation and the courts ordered the state government in 2004
to derecognise and close most of these universities or merge them with the remaining recognized ones. A whole generation of students and
teachers are suffering irreparable damage to their careers due to these trends, for no fault of theirs. Even government-funded colleges
and universities in most states started many "self-financing" courses in IT, biotechnology etc., without qualified teachers, labs or
infrastructure and charging huge fees from the students and are liberally giving them marks and degrees to hide their inadequacies.
The national laboratories were specifically established with the aim of making more direct contributions to the technological needs of
the country in chosen areas such as medicine, agriculture, petroleum, metallurgy, energy, defence, space etc. It was expected that these
national (or regional) laboratories would employ selected scientific manpower generated from the colleges/universities and nurture their
talents towards specific applied goals. But this did not happen, as the national labs became more sophisticated versions of university
departments drawing better monetary and infrastructural support and publishing research papers, for which they need research students,
who cannot be retained and tapped unless they are promised research degrees. The present demand for seeking deemed university status
could therefore be an exercise to legitimise the current situation of the national labs, and redefine their original goals.
Combat Law, Volume 5, Issue 1
(published 15 March 2006 in India Together)
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Vol #5, Issue #1, Combat Law
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Education policy
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