Nilanjana Gupta
Jun 2 2015
No Indian university features in global rankings of institutes. This often makes headlines but what is conveniently left unmentioned is how the Indian government invests far less than countries which have the best institutes
Market ability of youth
While it is much too soon to begin to evaluate RUSA, the Central Government has in the meantime announced that it will formulate a New Education Policy within a year and has created a website for inputs from citizens.
The site itself is too nebulous to say much right now, but the indicators are that this Government is more interested in ensuring the marketability of the nation's youth rather than the more philosophical goals of our earlier educational policies.
As with the Knowledge Commission set up by Manmohan Singh, this seems to be focussed on skill building rather than education in the wider sense.
The right balance between various demands and goals of higher education is very difficult to find, but it is important that we, the citizens, get involved in this discussion and this search for answers to difficult questions.
In India, higher eductaion is supposed to fulfil multiple roles. Perhaps that is why more than 80 per cent students graduating from higher education institutions are unemployable. Photo: PTI
ONE of the issues that is least talked about in any discussion of the achievements of the year old Modi Government is higher education. Rightly so, as the Modi Government has shown no particular interest in this area. As in earlier regimes, in this year's Budget, the Central Government has promised to set up a number of new institutions with the brand names IIT, IIM, AIMS in politically sensitive states. The money earmarked for these constitutes a large proportion of the money allocated for higher education in the 2015 Budget. As always, the total allocation is well below the amount spent on higher education by first world nations. While the fact that no Indian university features in global rankings of institutes often makes headlines in the Indian media, the fact that the Indian government invests far less than the countries which have the best institutions is conveniently left unmentioned. On the one hand, Prime Minister Narendra Modi clearly dreams of India emerging as an economic superpower. This aspirational dream accounts, in large part, for his appeal to the youth of the nation. On the other, his government is clearly reluctant to invest in the nation's youth. Instead, we find in India that education is seen by many business analysts as the sector which promises the biggest business opportunity for canny investors. As one book suggests, time is ripe for Saraswati to become Lakshmi.
Campus placements
At this time of year, lakhs and lakhs of students all over the country are in the process of desperately applying for admission to college and universities. Every year it seems that more and more students are vying for places in the few top institutions while simultaneously seats remain empty in colleges across the country. At the other end of the process, we see a similar pattern—top corporations will visit the top institutions and placements from campus interviews have become quite common on some campuses across the country, while other institutions struggle to attract even smaller companies to hold job interviews for their students. Repeatedly the feedback from the employers is that most — in some reports as high as 85 per cent — of the students graduating from the higher education system in India are unemployable. They lack even basic skills necessary for low-end jobs. This is even more true for students of private engineering and management colleges where in states like Tamil Nadu, more than 50,000 seats in engineering colleges were vacant last year.
Mushrooming colleges
For a period from 2006, there was an average of 10 new colleges opening everyday in India, most of them private engineering colleges. Around 300 colleges have since officially closed down and many more are no longer admitting students due to lack of demand.
It is worth looking at some of the profit-making private ventures, especially since the first wave of such private initiatives — the establishment of technical colleges and management colleges — has now slowed down across the country. Today the biggest profit turners are the Coaching Centres, especially those that claim to prepare students for entry into the IITs and other “elite” institutions. The other fast-growing ventures are the training courses offered in the on-line mode. Educomp, one of the most successful on-line education providers in India offers tutorials for preparation for entrance examinations, civil services exams, spoken English as well as a wide range of other so-called “leisure” courses such as playing the guitar. Educomp also teams up with people or groups with specialised expertise and offers training modules; for example ProfitShastra offers training for “budding financial professionals” to make them “market-ready.” Another big player in this emerging market is Pearson, the transnational publishing house.
Radhakrishnan Commission Report
In India, higher education has always been expected to fulfil multiple roles. The very first Commission Report in post-Independence India, popularly known as the Radhakrishnan Commission Report of 1948-9 defined these expectations in grandiose terms: “The most important and urgent reform needed in education is to transform it, to endeavour to relate it to the life, needs, and aspirations of the people and thereby make it the powerful instrument of social, economic and cultural transformation necessary for the realisation of the national goals.” Higher education was and still is expected to serve these diverse requirements simultaneously. This, of course, is easier said than done.
Another problem is that the huge majority of students enrol in institutes under the state governments, while the Central Government only funds and administers the so-called “elite” institutes like the IITs, the IIMs and Jawaharlal Nehru University. state governments typically lack the economic resources necessary to fund infrastructural development in the education sector. They find it difficult to even provide for salaries to the teaching and support staff which inevitably leads to large numbers of vacancies in teaching posts. Rather, due to political exigencies, there is constant pressure to increase student intake which only further increases the unviable student-teacher ratios. Two initiatives regarding higher education begun by the Central Government have so far not attracted the kind of public discussion and debate that is desirable in a democratic framework. The first is Rashtriya Uchchatar Shikshya Abhiyan (RUSA) that was adopted in 2013. The main thrust of this Abhiyan or Mission is the improvement in the quality of education imparted by the majority of colleges and universities that are funded by the state governments. This is has the potential of a huge impact as 94 per cent of all students enrolled in higher education are in institutions either directly under the state governments or in private institutes that are administered and affiliated to state universities. Colleges and universities under the state governments are typically starved of funds, especially for improvement of infrastructure, as most states do not have the money or the political will to provide enough support for upgrading such institutions. Data from the budget of states shows that in most states, 95-98 per cent of the state's expenditure on higher education is earmarked for salary payments. With a few exceptions, spending on capital investment accounts for less than 10 per cent of the total allocation. Plan expenditure of the state governments is meagre all over the country practically all across the country. Under the RUSA, more than 300 universities and 8,500 colleges will be eligible to receive funds from the Central Government, largely for improving the infrastructure. According to the RUSA guidelines, funds will be monitored and time-bound to ensure proper utilisation. Interestingly, this funding may also be funnelled into private institutions. This initiative has, like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, on which it modelled, can make a meaningful intervention into the fund-starved state system.
Over-centralisation
In addition, the RUSA also speaks of non-monetary reforms which are required to ensure enhanced quality of education deliverables. Of these reforms, the one most difficult to achieve will be the autonomy of the institutions. The RUSA Guidelines quite correctly identifies over-centralisation and over-bureaucratisation as hampering the robust growth of colleges and universities. Self-governance, academic autonomy and non-interference from the state governments are required, according to the RUSA Guidelines, in addition to more funding to ensure dynamic and quality-conscious institutes. To ensure this, the RUSA funding is to be channelised through the state higher education councils rather than the states. plan, monitor and advise the institutions.
The functions and composition of the state higher education councils are also given in detail in the RUSA guidelines according to which the members and chairman/vice-chairman should all be eminent senior academicians. However, given the sensitive nature of higher education, already some states such as Gujarat and West Bengal have violated this point by appointing the ministers of education/higher education as the Chairman of the state higher education council. A World Bank Report has concluded recently that none of the state higher education councils meet the RUSA criterion of “an arms-length relationship with state political leadership and state government.” Already, problems range from Maharashtra's State Higher Council, which has not met even once since its constitution — to West Bengal’s State Higher Education Council which is suggesting a common syllabus, entrance examination and examination system across the 23 universities in the state.
One other important caveat is that RUSA will provide 65 per cent of the funding required, while a matching grant of 35 per cent must be provided by the state government. Given the limited resources of most states, this will be a negative incentive for many. For most states, the only income from higher education is in the form of “affiliation fees” which private colleges must pay for their degrees to be recognised. This has often led to further over-burdening of the affiliating universities who administer the examinations and oversee the administration. No extra staff is appointed for these purposes so this practice usually leads to undesirable outcomes such as inordinate delays in publishing results. Because access to education is a politically sensitive issue, no state government can raise the student fees for college or university education though students pay lakhs of rupees to dubious private institutions for often dubious degrees. Like many governmental policies, RUSA too has many good ideas and intentions.
The guidelines to RUSA correctly identified many of the problems faced by state colleges and universities in the country. It has also come up with a mechanism to address many of these issues. However, as with many governmental initiatives, there is a high possibility that the particular priorities and ideologies of the political parties in power in the various states will subvert and modify the original objectives in pursuit of their own narrow agenda.
While the RUSA talks about the autonomy and agency of the institution, it actually effectively removes it. By bypassing the UGC, an autonomous body, and giving all power to the state government, RUSA makes the institution completely dependent on the state government, its policies and its controlling mechanisms.
Lack of legal framework
While basic schooling has received much attention and funding from the state and the Right to Education Act has created a legal framework within which school education must function, higher education is yet to receive the same attention from law-makers, activists, policy-makers, or potential employers. Interestingly, business analysts have identified some of the requirements of the higher educational sector and are providing solutions by setting up a wide range of educational products which are rapidly expanding.
The writer is Dean & Professor, Department of English, Jadavpur University
No comments:
Post a Comment