Higher Education: Problems & Perspectives

Before I proceed any further, let me spell out the focus of my presentation. Well, my paper is tentatively titled: Higher Education: Problems & Perspectives. To put it differently, my purpose here is mainly to elaborate on the nature of problems we face in our system of Higher Education today. While delineating some of these problems, I may also dwell upon some of the causative factors that have possibly triggered these problems off. In the process, I hope, I shall also be able to point towards some antidotes we need so desperately today. I’m aware of the fact that these palliatives alone can help sustain our vision or perspective of Higher Education in near or in distant future.       

When I say that I have chosen to focus on the Problems & Perspectives of Higher Education, I’m conscious of the fact that I’m taking the liberty to make departure from the main theme of the seminar outlined for me. Ordinarily, the person who delivers a key-note address is expected to follow the brief and simply elaborate on the theme of the seminar, and here I seem to be digressing from the main theme. A word of explanation is in order. I think the organizers had chosen an extremely provocative theme for this seminar. In fact, they deserve to be complimented for taking the bull straight by the horns. There couldn’t have been a better way of phrasing the problem. So, why have I chosen to digress? Why am I singing a different tune? Let me confess that it doesn’t have so much to do with the theme as my own inability to deal with it. When I started reflecting on Higher Education: Beyond Empty Promises, I found my presentation turning into a nasty blame game. Empty promises immediately put us in mind of the politicians and the mess they have created all around us. Quite simply, I didn’t want this essay to be recriminatory or accusatory in nature. After all, in case of education, as in any other case, the buck always stops with the politicians. And why mustn’t it? 

Hasn’t the ‘politics’ in our country degenerated to abysmal depths, especially because our politicians do nothing but offer ‘empty, hollow promises’ or trot off ‘empty rhetoric’ to tell us why they can’t fulfill these promises? Whether it is price rise or corruption, good governance or electoral reforms, development of infrastructure or education for all, the successive generations of politicians have habitually been long on promises and short on delivery and performance. Politics has bred so much of cynicism in the mind of an ordinary man that he prefers to trust his own limited intelligence or resources than the proverbial fake promises of the politicians. It is precisely this kind of cynicism that I wanted to avoid in my presentation. I simply didn’t want to get into the game of charges and counter-charges. I’m of this view that if at all we have to change our system, we have to consciously move away from this reactionary mode and adopt more positive and proactive approach to things.   

Friends, let us first reflect on some of the positives we need to recognize in our system of Higher Education. Ministry of Human Resources, in its official website, claims (and we have no reason to doubt this claim) that “India has one of largest Higher Education Systems in the world.” It should not come as a surprise to anyone. After all, don’t we have one of the largest populations in the world, too? Jokes apart, this claim of the Ministry is seriously backed up by some statistics, too:      

              (i)    Universities: 224  

              (ii)   Colleges: 12, 885

              (iii) Students: 68. 47 lakhs  

             (iv)  Teachers: 4.57 lakhs  

These figures are, indeed, quite impressive, especially if we compare them with what the state of Higher Education was in India in 1947. At the time of Independence, these figures read somewhat like this:

   (i) Universities: 46 (five times) 

   (ii) Colleges: 4,258 (tripled) 

  (iii) Students: 3. 65 lakhs (23 times)

  (iv) Teachers: 0.70 lakhs (almost 6.5 times)

What do all these facts and figures point out? Clearly, they suggest that since Independence, India has made exponential progress in the field of Higher Education. We have, indeed, come a long way. Earlier our access ratio was as small as 5%, and now it has risen to 14-17%. It is another matter, that it is still pathetically low in comparison with the developed nations, where it is as high as 50%. (It is 72% for US, 56% for UK and France, 45% for Japan).   

Most of the officials in the Ministry of Human Resources or the mandarins of UGC would have us believe that this is perhaps the biggest, if not the only, challenge confronting our country today. No wonder, they are busy devising policies that might help them increase the access ratio, as though increasing it alone would put us in the bracket of the developed nations. Somehow, this is just one of the several false notions that afflict our plans and policies on Higher Education. We are keen on increasing this access ratio to 22-24% without actually ensuring that the drop-out rate decreases in the government schools and both the ‘base’ as well as the ‘quality’ of the secondary education expands and improves exponentially. Please tell me friends, if it is possible for us to think of the Higher Education or its problems in isolation of the state of primary, middle and secondary education in our country. And by doing so, aren’t we simply putting the cart before the horse? I think, we often hide behind this false logic, because either we don’t know what the real problem is or we simply don’t want to take the trouble to understand it.

Now, this has really put us in a bind, a classic Catch-22 situation. Our problem today is not to increase the access ratio or the number/quantity of the university graduates, but to improve the quality of our Higher Education. (I’m sure, the UGC experts would seriously disagree with me on this issue). In 1960s, we went in for massive expansion of colleges and universities, because our ‘socialist aim’ was to provide education to the masses, which was undoubtedly much needed then. Higher Education had to be provided to all and sundry and that too, at ludicrously low rates. It resulted, I dare say, in one of the worst experiments in quantification. All through the 1960s and 1970s, it was ‘quantity’ and not ‘quality’ that was our foremost concern. This was also the phase when the college/university teachers across the country also became highly politicized and unionized. The net result was that the ‘quality,’ quite simply, took a back seat in our scheme of things.

Now to be fair, this was certainly not the case with all the institutions of Higher Learning. If colleges and universities began to reel under the influence of proliferating numbers, other elite institutions like IITs, IIMs and premier research institutes like BARC, IIS Bangalore/.Kolkatta continued to consolidate their reputation as ‘centres of excellence.’ To a large extent, these institutions have been able to justify heavy investment the nation has made into them. On their part, our colleges/universities apparently failed to come anywhere near the standards set up by the IITs and the IIMs. So the first problem is that of numbers, which are becoming inordinately unmanageable. On the one hand, we are desperate to increase our access ratio, on the other we are finding it extremely difficult to manage the numbers we already have in our system.

Despite all the efforts of UGC and NAAC, if we have not been able to improve the ‘quality’ of higher education in our country (I’m not just making a cynical observation here, as none of our colleges/universities have made it to the Times’ list of top 200 universities in the world except, of course IITs and JNU), one of the reasons is this mismatch between the ‘quantity’ and the ‘quality.’ We seem to have forgotten the basic premise that there is an ‘inverse relationship’ between the two, and that ‘quantity’ can only be promoted at the expense of ‘quality’ or vice-versa and that both can not always be managed simultaneously as we have often tried to do, without much success. Today, we may pride ourselves on having created “one of the largest systems in the world,” but it is far from being “the best.” After all, where did we go wrong? Why have we failed to deliver on this front? What ails our system of Higher Education?

Let us not forget that the system of Higher Education, as it operates in our country today, was created largely through the efforts of our ‘colonial masters.’ British were the ones who laid the foundation of this system, first through Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1835) and later by setting up four universities namely Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Panjab, across the length and breadth of the country. The main purpose behind setting up these universities was to promote Western ideals of modernity, progress and scientific thought among the educated elite of India and also prepare an army of babus, clerks and other petty officials for promoting establishment of the Raj. Significantly, this colonial intervention transformed our basic perceptions about the way in which we had either thought about or conceptualized the very objectives of higher education in Indian context. In the pre-colonial days, the teaching of Sanskrit and Arabic classics was often regarded as the hall-mark of Higher Education, while the official business was conducted in the Persian language. At that stage, education was certainly an elitist discourse, confined to a small minority, but there was a definite connect between the ‘self’ and ‘society.’ It was an individual’s responsibility to engage with his tradition; interpret, analyze and understand it, and also become, if possible, a vehicle for its transmission and dissemination. I’m neither eulogizing the pre-colonial framework of education nor proposing that we return to it, as either of these gestures would be both retrogressive and anti-history. But what I would like to impress upon you is that this colonial intervention has definitely affected us adversely, damaging not only our notions of ‘self’ and ‘society,’ but also that of polity and cultural identity.

If you ask me: In what way has Macaulay’s Minute affected us, I would say, it brought about a basic change in the way in which we have thought of ourselves and our society. In the pre-colonial Indian society, an organic relationship existed between ‘self’ and ‘society,’ which Macaulay changed into an artificial, mechanical one. If his emphasis on English education and science, on the one hand, ensured our march towards the ideals of progress and modernization, on the other, it also created a major ‘disconnect’ between ‘us,’ our tradition and our society. It threw us into a state of self-alienation, from which, I dare say, we have still not been able to recover, and shall probably never will. This is how we lulled ourselves into a state of “cultural inferiorization,” which continues to be the defining feature of our society in general, and our ‘intellectuals’ in particular, even today.

If you ask me, what have we gained in the process, I would say, we have neither been able to participate in the project of modernization (because education alone doesn’t help there; the society, too, has to undergo transformation, especially in terms of modes of production, which apparently hasn’t happened in our context) nor garner the benefits of modernization (because ‘self’ and ‘society’ have worked at variance with each other). This also explains why we have ‘crisis of self’ at the individual level, ‘crisis of relevance’ in our educational institutions and ‘crisis of character and credibility’ in our society. Corruption, obsessive pursuit of money and power or both, culture of crass, almost vulgar consumerism are only some of the manifest symptoms of the malaise that afflicts our society today. I have no hesitation in saying that to a large extent, our system of education also suffers from the very same ills that otherwise afflict our society today.

So far, I have restricted myself to a macro-picture of Higher Education in India, which could have been mediated by invoking the past or through an overarching historical perspective. Some of the paradoxes of our situation that have emerged out of our discussion may broadly be summarized as follows: (i) Colonial versus Post-colonial approach to Education (ii) Organic versus Mechanical relationship between Self and Society (iii) Quantity versus Quality.   

Now as we turn to the present state of Higher Education, I would like to map out a micro picture, too, which, I’m afraid, shall be part empirical and experiential and part sociological in nature. After the introduction of the market economy and liberalization in 1991, our focus on education (both school and college/university) has undergone a sudden, paradigm shift. We are now increasingly talking in terms of the knowledge-driven economy, high degree of quality consciousness, appraisals and evaluations, higher returns on human capital, teachers as service providers and the students as conscious and self-aware consumers. One of the major problems with globalization is that it has further accentuated the ‘disconnect’ between the self’ and ‘society,’ especially in the field of education. By offering attractive salaries, our government is proposing to attract some of the ‘best minds’ into the field of teaching, which has, over the years, become one of the last priorities among the educated youngsters.

Some time back, a survey was conducted across the country in which the youngsters were asked to list their priorities in terms of career options; teaching, for your information, dear friends, figured way down, somewhere close to number 7 or 8 in a list of ten options. Doesn’t this reflect a kind of cynicism, nay disillusionment, the youngsters often feel towards the process of Higher Education itself? If our government thinks that merely by offering fat salaries, they can hope to draw the ‘best minds’ into college or university teaching, they are sadly mistaken. Unless we strengthen our procedures and tone up our methods of recruitment, the ‘wrong’ kind of people shall continue to enter into our colleges/universities and continue to damage our institutions from within.

Can we hope to create a situation where the appointments are made strictly on merit and not on the recommendation of one political ‘bigwig’ or another? Can we hope to create a climate in our colleges and universities, where only talent (I mean real talent! If you understand what I mean) is patronized and nurtured, not mediocrity as is the case today? Where have all the committed teachers gone, for whom teaching used to be a way of life, who never sought any gratification outside their vocation and who never counted hours or money when it came to shaping the minds or lives of the youngsters. I’m not saying that such teachers have already become dinosaurs (an extinct species), but most certainly, such teachers are in a hopeless minority. And this trend can certainly not be reversed by simply offering attractive packages or salaries. More money doesn’t mean more commitment. Only those who don’t understand human nature offer such naïve prescriptions!

We all know that one of the major crises of Higher Education in India is the resource crunch. All our institutions are fund-starved. Over the years, though our government has been trying to convince us that it is constantly increasing its outlay on Education, but despite all its tall claims, this amount remains as low as 6-7% of the GDP. Physical expansion of the educational institutions, steep escalation in the salaries of the teachers and the growing need for infrastructure have only contributed to this financial mess. It is ironic, isn’t it, that this crisis has become more pronounced and grave in the times of globalization. Through the process of globalization, I strongly feel, we should have been able to look at the other models of funding available in the developing countries, where the State Funding only constitutes one small proportion of the total corpus, most of which comes either from the local community, the private sector and/or the individual benefactors/philanthropists. In the West, they have a long and established tradition of offering very generous and liberal donations/grants to the institutions of Higher Learning. Rather than do something of this nature, we Indians prefer to set up an institution of our own, thus promoting the cause of commercialization, not of education. Rather than sustain and nurture good colleges and universities, we prefer to create new institutions, thus reducing education to a marketable, profitable and commodified enterprise. Why can’t we borrow some of the healthy practices from the West and transform our ailing institutions into ‘centres of excellence’? Privatization of education is not the answer, but private or community funding of the government institutions certainly is.

In the last ten years or so, we have witnessed unprecedented growth of the private universities in our country. Our experience has, however, proved that these universities are no more than teaching shops, where degrees are bought and sold among those who have the necessary purchasing power to do so. No wonder, the UPA government has been forced to do a re-think on the status of ‘deemed university’ hurriedly granted to several such institutions of dubious variety. The main argument of those who favour privatization of Higher Education is that it would give rise to a state of healthy competition, thus raising the quality as well as the standards, both within and without the private universities. If you allow me, I’d say, this, again, is facetious, a typical case of circular logic. The private universities only stress on the state-of-the-art infrastructure, but are rarely ever ready to hire the best people available in the field. Under such circumstances, how can they ever hope to match the quality and standards of long-established universities and what is the guarantee that the money power will not play a vital role in undermining their standards and/or quality. As it is, the students pay exorbitant fees to get whatever they do get from such institutions in the name of education.

Of late, we have also been hearing of how the education sector shall be thrown open to the foreign universities, too. My understanding is that once they enter the Indian market, the scene would become, not less chaotic and disorderly, but more so. If nothing else, at least, the multiple inequities of our society, whether they are social or economic, class or caste-based, shall become more pronounced. To my mind, that’s a warning signal, not a welcome sign. As it is, we are living through a situation where there are huge gaps and fissures in our education system, in terms of rural, semi-urban, urban and metropolis. Do we want to further exacerbate them by throwing our doors open to the foreign universities? Then there is also this all-important question of what kind of foreign universities shall ultimately enter the Indian market? It is highly doubtful if Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or Stanford would ever like to set up their campuses in India. If we are only going to invite second or third rate foreign universities to our land, aren’t we better off with our universities, regardless of their performance or grade?

If I have to sum up some of the paradoxes that define the micro picture of Higher Education in our country, I’d say these are  

(i) Global versus Local  

(ii) Rural versus Urban versus Foreign

(iii) High Salaries versus Low Performance

(iv) Low Fee Structures and Low Funding versus Growing Expenditure on Higher Education

Well, this was my way of sharing some of the ideas with all of you. Let me confess that in this presentation, I have not attempted to analyze all the problems of Higher Education threadbare, something which is not within my ken really. All I have tried to do here is to give you an outline of some of the problems, on which you may be able to reflect over the next two days. I’m sure you’ll go far beyond the limited range of questions I have managed to draw your attention to. After all, the success of a seminar depends not so much on the way the participants follow the several leads of the key-note speaker, but how and in what different ways they make a departure from the questions he may have raised. If this surcharged atmosphere in this room is anything to go by, I’d say that this seminar shall not only open up new vistas, but also offer new perspectives to our policy planners. With this confidence, I thank the organizers, once again, and wish them all a resounding success.   

_____________________________________

This paper was presented as a Keynote address during a National Seminar held at Government College of Education, Bhiwani on February 17-18, 2010. 

Higher Education: Problems & Perspectives

Before I proceed any further, let me spell out the focus of my presentation. Well, my paper is tentatively titled: Higher Education: Problems & Perspectives. To put it differently, my purpose here is mainly to elaborate on the nature of problems we face in our system of Higher Education today. While delineating some of these problems, I may also dwell upon some of the causative factors that have possibly triggered these problems off. In the process, I hope, I shall also be able to point towards some antidotes we need so desperately today. I’m aware of the fact that these palliatives alone can help sustain our vision or perspective of Higher Education in near or in distant future.       

When I say that I have chosen to focus on the Problems & Perspectives of Higher Education, I’m conscious of the fact that I’m taking the liberty to make departure from the main theme of the seminar outlined for me. Ordinarily, the person who delivers a key-note address is expected to follow the brief and simply elaborate on the theme of the seminar, and here I seem to be digressing from the main theme. A word of explanation is in order. I think the organizers had chosen an extremely provocative theme for this seminar. In fact, they deserve to be complimented for taking the bull straight by the horns. There couldn’t have been a better way of phrasing the problem. So, why have I chosen to digress? Why am I singing a different tune? Let me confess that it doesn’t have so much to do with the theme as my own inability to deal with it. When I started reflecting on Higher Education: Beyond Empty Promises, I found my presentation turning into a nasty blame game. Empty promises immediately put us in mind of the politicians and the mess they have created all around us. Quite simply, I didn’t want this essay to be recriminatory or accusatory in nature. After all, in case of education, as in any other case, the buck always stops with the politicians. And why mustn’t it? 

Hasn’t the ‘politics’ in our country degenerated to abysmal depths, especially because our politicians do nothing but offer ‘empty, hollow promises’ or trot off ‘empty rhetoric’ to tell us why they can’t fulfill these promises? Whether it is price rise or corruption, good governance or electoral reforms, development of infrastructure or education for all, the successive generations of politicians have habitually been long on promises and short on delivery and performance. Politics has bred so much of cynicism in the mind of an ordinary man that he prefers to trust his own limited intelligence or resources than the proverbial fake promises of the politicians. It is precisely this kind of cynicism that I wanted to avoid in my presentation. I simply didn’t want to get into the game of charges and counter-charges. I’m of this view that if at all we have to change our system, we have to consciously move away from this reactionary mode and adopt more positive and proactive approach to things.   

Friends, let us first reflect on some of the positives we need to recognize in our system of Higher Education. Ministry of Human Resources, in its official website, claims (and we have no reason to doubt this claim) that “India has one of largest Higher Education Systems in the world.” It should not come as a surprise to anyone. After all, don’t we have one of the largest populations in the world, too? Jokes apart, this claim of the Ministry is seriously backed up by some statistics, too:      

(i)                  Universities: 224  

(ii)                Colleges: 12, 885

(iii)               Students: 68. 47 lakhs  

(iv)              Teachers: 4.57 lakhs  

These figures are, indeed, quite impressive, especially if we compare them with what the state of Higher Education was in India in 1947. At the time of Independence, these figures read somewhat like this:

(i) Universities: 46 (five times) 

(ii) Colleges: 4,258 (tripled) 

(iii) Students: 3. 65 lakhs (23 times)

(iv) Teachers: 0.70 lakhs (almost 6.5 times)

What do all these facts and figures point out? Clearly, they suggest that since Independence, India has made exponential progress in the field of Higher Education. We have, indeed, come a long way. Earlier our access ratio was as small as 5%, and now it has risen to 14-17%. It is another matter, that it is still pathetically low in comparison with the developed nations, where it is as high as 50%. (It is 72% for US, 56% for UK and France, 45% for Japan).   

Most of the officials in the Ministry of Human Resources or the mandarins of UGC would have us believe that this is perhaps the biggest, if not the only, challenge confronting our country today. No wonder, they are busy devising policies that might help them increase the access ratio, as though increasing it alone would put us in the bracket of the developed nations. Somehow, this is just one of the several false notions that afflict our plans and policies on Higher Education. We are keen on increasing this access ratio to 22-24% without actually ensuring that the drop-out rate decreases in the government schools and both the ‘base’ as well as the ‘quality’ of the secondary education expands and improves exponentially. Please tell me friends, if it is possible for us to think of the Higher Education or its problems in isolation of the state of primary, middle and secondary education in our country. And by doing so, aren’t we simply putting the cart before the horse? I think, we often hide behind this false logic, because either we don’t know what the real problem is or we simply don’t want to take the trouble to understand it.

Now, this has really put us in a bind, a classic Catch-22 situation. Our problem today is not to increase the access ratio or the number/quantity of the university graduates, but to improve the quality of our Higher Education. (I’m sure, the UGC experts would seriously disagree with me on this issue). In 1960s, we went in for massive expansion of colleges and universities, because our ‘socialist aim’ was to provide education to the masses, which was undoubtedly much needed then. Higher Education had to be provided to all and sundry and that too, at ludicrously low rates. It resulted, I dare say, in one of the worst experiments in quantification. All through the 1960s and 1970s, it was ‘quantity’ and not ‘quality’ that was our foremost concern. This was also the phase when the college/university teachers across the country also became highly politicized and unionized. The net result was that the ‘quality,’ quite simply, took a back seat in our scheme of things.

Now to be fair, this was certainly not the case with all the institutions of Higher Learning. If colleges and universities began to reel under the influence of proliferating numbers, other elite institutions like IITs, IIMs and premier research institutes like BARC, IIS Bangalore/.Kolkatta continued to consolidate their reputation as ‘centres of excellence.’ To a large extent, these institutions have been able to justify heavy investment the nation has made into them. On their part, our colleges/universities apparently failed to come anywhere near the standards set up by the IITs and the IIMs. So the first problem is that of numbers, which are becoming inordinately unmanageable. On the one hand, we are desperate to increase our access ratio, on the other we are finding it extremely difficult to manage the numbers we already have in our system.

Despite all the efforts of UGC and NAAC, if we have not been able to improve the ‘quality’ of higher education in our country (I’m not just making a cynical observation here, as none of our colleges/universities have made it to the Times’ list of top 200 universities in the world except, of course IITs and JNU), one of the reasons is this mismatch between the ‘quantity’ and the ‘quality.’ We seem to have forgotten the basic premise that there is an ‘inverse relationship’ between the two, and that ‘quantity’ can only be promoted at the expense of ‘quality’ or vice-versa and that both can not always be managed simultaneously as we have often tried to do, without much success. Today, we may pride ourselves on having created “one of the largest systems in the world,” but it is far from being “the best.” After all, where did we go wrong? Why have we failed to deliver on this front? What ails our system of Higher Education?

Let us not forget that the system of Higher Education, as it operates in our country today, was created largely through the efforts of our ‘colonial masters.’ British were the ones who laid the foundation of this system, first through Macaulay’s Minute on Education (1835) and later by setting up four universities namely Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Panjab, across the length and breadth of the country. The main purpose behind setting up these universities was to promote Western ideals of modernity, progress and scientific thought among the educated elite of India and also prepare an army of babus, clerks and other petty officials for promoting establishment of the Raj. Significantly, this colonial intervention transformed our basic perceptions about the way in which we had either thought about or conceptualized the very objectives of higher education in Indian context. In the pre-colonial days, the teaching of Sanskrit and Arabic classics was often regarded as the hall-mark of Higher Education, while the official business was conducted in the Persian language. At that stage, education was certainly an elitist discourse, confined to a small minority, but there was a definite connect between the ‘self’ and ‘society.’ It was an individual’s responsibility to engage with his tradition; interpret, analyze and understand it, and also become, if possible, a vehicle for its transmission and dissemination. I’m neither eulogizing the pre-colonial framework of education nor proposing that we return to it, as either of these gestures would be both retrogressive and anti-history. But what I would like to impress upon you is that this colonial intervention has definitely affected us adversely, damaging not only our notions of ‘self’ and ‘society,’ but also that of polity and cultural identity.

If you ask me: In what way has Macaulay’s Minute affected us, I would say, it brought about a basic change in the way in which we have thought of ourselves and our society. In the pre-colonial Indian society, an organic relationship existed between ‘self’ and ‘society,’ which Macaulay changed into an artificial, mechanical one. If his emphasis on English education and science, on the one hand, ensured our march towards the ideals of progress and modernization, on the other, it also created a major ‘disconnect’ between ‘us,’ our tradition and our society. It threw us into a state of self-alienation, from which, I dare say, we have still not been able to recover, and shall probably never will. This is how we lulled ourselves into a state of “cultural inferiorization,” which continues to be the defining feature of our society in general, and our ‘intellectuals’ in particular, even today.

If you ask me, what have we gained in the process, I would say, we have neither been able to participate in the project of modernization (because education alone doesn’t help there; the society, too, has to undergo transformation, especially in terms of modes of production, which apparently hasn’t happened in our context) nor garner the benefits of modernization (because ‘self’ and ‘society’ have worked at variance with each other). This also explains why we have ‘crisis of self’ at the individual level, ‘crisis of relevance’ in our educational institutions and ‘crisis of character and credibility’ in our society. Corruption, obsessive pursuit of money and power or both, culture of crass, almost vulgar consumerism are only some of the manifest symptoms of the malaise that afflicts our society today. I have no hesitation in saying that to a large extent, our system of education also suffers from the very same ills that otherwise afflict our society today.

So far, I have restricted myself to a macro-picture of Higher Education in India, which could have been mediated by invoking the past or through an overarching historical perspective. Some of the paradoxes of our situation that have emerged out of our discussion may broadly be summarized as follows: (i) Colonial versus Postcolonial approach to Education (ii) Organic versus Mechanical relationship between Self and Society (iii) Quantity versus Quality.   

Now as we turn to the present state of Higher Education, I would like to map out a micro picture, too, which, I’m afraid, shall be part empirical and experiential and part sociological in nature. After the introduction of the market economy and liberalization in 1991, our focus on education (both school and college/university) has undergone a sudden, paradigm shift. We are now increasingly talking in terms of the knowledge-driven economy, high degree of quality consciousness, appraisals and evaluations, higher returns on human capital, teachers as service providers and the students as conscious and self-aware consumers. One of the major problems with globalization is that it has further accentuated the ‘disconnect’ between the self’ and ‘society,’ especially in the field of education. By offering attractive salaries, our government is proposing to attract some of the ‘best minds’ into the field of teaching, which has, over the years, become one of the last priorities among the educated youngsters.

Some time back, a survey was conducted across the country in which the youngsters were asked to list their priorities in terms of career options; teaching, for your information, dear friends, figured way down, somewhere close to number 7 or 8 in a list of ten options. Doesn’t this reflect a kind of cynicism, nay disillusionment, the youngsters often feel towards the process of Higher Education itself? If our government thinks that merely by offering fat salaries, they can hope to draw the ‘best minds’ into college or university teaching, they are sadly mistaken. Unless we strengthen our procedures and tone up our methods of recruitment, the ‘wrong’ kind of people shall continue to enter into our colleges/universities and continue to damage our institutions from within.

Can we hope to create a situation where the appointments are made strictly on merit and not on the recommendation of one political ‘bigwig’ or another? Can we hope to create a climate in our colleges and universities, where only talent (I mean real talent! If you understand what I mean) is patronized and nurtured, not mediocrity as is the case today? Where have all the committed teachers gone, for whom teaching used to be a way of life, who never sought any gratification outside their vocation and who never counted hours or money when it came to shaping the minds or lives of the youngsters. I’m not saying that such teachers have already become dinosaurs (an extinct species), but most certainly, such teachers are in a hopeless minority. And this trend can certainly not be reversed by simply offering attractive packages or salaries. More money doesn’t mean more commitment. Only those who don’t understand human nature offer such naïve prescriptions!

We all know that one of the major crises of Higher Education in India is the resource crunch. All our institutions are fund-starved. Over the years, though our government has been trying to convince us that it is constantly increasing its outlay on Education, but despite all its tall claims, this amount remains as low as 6-7% of the GDP. Physical expansion of the educational institutions, steep escalation in the salaries of the teachers and the growing need for infrastructure have only contributed to this financial mess. It is ironic, isn’t it, that this crisis has become more pronounced and grave in the times of globalization. Through the process of globalization, I strongly feel, we should have been able to look at the other models of funding available in the developing countries, where the State Funding only constitutes one small proportion of the total corpus, most of which comes either from the local community, the private sector and/or the individual benefactors/philanthropists. In the West, they have a long and established tradition of offering very generous and liberal donations/grants to the institutions of Higher Learning. Rather than do something of this nature, we Indians prefer to set up an institution of our own, thus promoting the cause of commercialization, not of education. Rather than sustain and nurture good colleges and universities, we prefer to create new institutions, thus reducing education to a marketable, profitable and commodified enterprise. Why can’t we borrow some of the healthy practices from the West and transform our ailing institutions into ‘centres of excellence’? Privatization of education is not the answer, but private or community funding of the government institutions certainly is.

In the last ten years or so, we have witnessed unprecedented growth of the private universities in our country. Our experience has, however, proved that these universities are no more than teaching shops, where degrees are bought and sold among those who have the necessary purchasing power to do so. No wonder, the UPA government has been forced to do a re-think on the status of ‘deemed university’ hurriedly granted to several such institutions of dubious variety. The main argument of those who favour privatization of Higher Education is that it would give rise to a state of healthy competition, thus raising the quality as well as the standards, both within and without the private universities. If you allow me, I’d say, this, again, is facetious, a typical case of circular logic. The private universities only stress on the state-of-the-art infrastructure, but are rarely ever ready to hire the best people available in the field. Under such circumstances, how can they ever hope to match the quality and standards of long-established universities and what is the guarantee that the money power will not play a vital role in undermining their standards and/or quality. As it is, the students pay exorbitant fees to get whatever they do get from such institutions in the name of education.

Of late, we have also been hearing of how the education sector shall be thrown open to the foreign universities, too. My understanding is that once they enter the Indian market, the scene would become, not less chaotic and disorderly, but more so. If nothing else, at least, the multiple inequities of our society, whether they are social or economic, class or caste-based, shall become more pronounced. To my mind, that’s a warning signal, not a welcome sign. As it is, we are living through a situation where there are huge gaps and fissures in our education system, in terms of rural, semi-urban, urban and metropolis. Do we want to further exacerbate them by throwing our doors open to the foreign universities? Then there is also this all-important question of what kind of foreign universities shall ultimately enter the Indian market? It is highly doubtful if Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale or Stanford would ever like to set up their campuses in India. If we are only going to invite second or third rate foreign universities to our land, aren’t we better off with our universities, regardless of their performance or grade?

If I have to sum up some of the paradoxes that define the micro picture of Higher Education in our country, I’d say these are  

(i) Global versus Local  

(ii) Rural versus Urban versus Foreign

(iii) High Salaries versus Low Performance

(iv) Low Fee Structures and Low Funding versus Growing Expenditure on Higher Education

Well, this was my way of sharing some of the ideas with all of you. Let me confess that in this presentation, I have not attempted to analyze all the problems of Higher Education threadbare, something which is not within my ken really. All I have tried to do here is to give you an outline of some of the problems, on which you may be able to reflect over the next two days. I’m sure you’ll go far beyond the limited range of questions I have managed to draw your attention to. After all, the success of a seminar depends not so much on the way the participants follow the several leads of the key-note speaker, but how and in what different ways they make a departure from the questions he may have raised. If this surcharged atmosphere in this room is anything to go by, I’d say that this seminar shall not only open up new vistas, but also offer new perspectives to our policy planners. With this confidence, I thank the organizers, once again, and wish them all a resounding success.   

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This paper was presented as a Keynote address during a National Seminar held at Government College of Education, Bhiwani on February 17-18, 2010. 

Post Ayodhya Verdict: Intellectuals v/s the Common Man

In the recent times, no other court verdict has evoked as much expectancy, apprehension and uncertainty, on   a nation-wide scale, as the Ayodhya verdict has. It was as though the entire nation was waiting, with bated breath, for the final pronouncement of the Lucknow bench of Allahabad High Court to come.

It was literally like a game of skittles, all of which could have easily collapsed in a single stroke, with all the secularists and the communalists landing into an indivisible heap. Although the stakes were alarmingly high, the prognostications about its probable consequences were, expectedly, as low as could possibly be.

From the politicians of all hues (with their uncharacteristic tight-lipped statements) to the journalists of whatever variety (with their characteristic ambivalence), from the intellectual hawks (forever ready with their sound-bites) to the socialite doves (with their typical ‘I-told-you-so’ attitude), from the dyed-in-the wool thinkers (who never tire of their equivocations and/or facile prescriptions) to a man-in-the-street (who always, always has to bear the brunt of it all), almost everyone was equally nervous.

No wonder, on the eve of the judgment, several TV channels ran a regular and sustained ‘Save India’ campaign. It was as though everyone was sending up a silent prayer: ‘Oh God! Let this moment of ‘crisis’ blow over, sooner than later. And let the spirit of India triumph, one last time!’         

At 4 pm on September 30, our nation virtually came to a standstill. While some organizations in UP, apprehending trouble, had already declared a holiday, others in UP and elsewhere allowed their employees to proceed home at 3 pm, hoping that a major communal conflagration might flare up in wake of this judgment.

Whether inside their homes, offices or shops, people had sat glued to their TV sets, waiting for our ‘dome’ of communal volatility to do its worst, and finally bring down the crumbling walls of secularism for good. It was as though everyone was waiting for the fault lines of Indian brand of secularism to be redrawn, irretrievably. 

Then slowly the details of the much-awaited judgment began to trickle in. And the judgment, as we all are beginning to realize already, has been a historic one, in so many different ways. It is historic because it has gone far beyond the insistent demands of our collective paranoia or schizophrenia. It is historic because it transcends the self-imposed limitations of our text-book notions of secularism and/or communalism. It is historic because it refuses to walk either into the trap of ‘majoritarianism’ or that of ‘minoritarianism.’

It is historic because it supersedes our all normal (or should I say, abnormal?) expectations and apprehensions, articulated as well as unarticulated. It is historic because it has been delivered by a bench of judges, who apparently raised themselves above the petty considerations of group, communal, religious identity and/or markers, and chose to speak in a language of mutual respect and sharing, reiterating our faith in the spirit of commonality, co-operation and solidarity that defines a certain India; India of common man’s aspirations.

In our history of post-Independence India, if it is anyone who has consistently and systematically been ignored in all our political, executive and legal decisions/discourses, it is the common man. We have presumably created this entire edifice for the benefit of the common man and yet when it comes to the crunch, we invariably take decisions adversarial to his cause and his well-being.

Over the years, this common man has increasingly become a ‘mute spectator’ of the ‘absurd drama’ our politicians, bureaucrats, media-men and legal luminaries often collectively stage for his entertainment. It is this common man who is always the first to die when the communal fires rage or the terrorists go on a rampage, despite his unshakeable faith and belief in the common brotherhood of man. It is this common man who often greets his Muslim neighbors on Id, his Hindu friends on Diwali, his Sikh relatives on Nanak‘s birthday and his Christian brothers on Christmas.

Yes, ask him, and he’ll tell you that for him development is an issue, politics isn’t; employment is an issue, employment schemes floated from time to time aren’t; poverty is an issue, religious identity is not; hunger is an issue, temple or masjid are not. Most of the time, it is this common man who goes about chasing prices, rising inflation rates and unrelenting hunger with his habitual doggedness and undying faith in God or destiny.

Most of the time, he is so befuddled by the political rhetoric of his leaders that he hardly makes any sense of it, only sometimes chuckles over its illogic. Most of the time, he remains no more than an invisible mark on our consciousness, our conscience and/or existence. Only rarely does he stare out of R. K. Laxman’s cartoons or Amir Khan’s Peepli Live, forces us to think about him, temporarily becomes real and then gets lost in the din and noise of life, all over again.     

Unfortunately, this common man has not only always remained a silent victim of all decision-making processes, but has consistently puzzled over the divisive rhetoric of his political leaders, the ambivalence of the media-men, and the deft hair-splitting of our ideologues and intellectuals.        

What makes this judgment truly historic and unique is that it has not only taken cognizance of this common man, but has also, very loudly and categorically, voiced his aspirations and expectations, that too, in the language he best understands; i.e. the language of commonality, mutuality and brotherhood.

No wonder, this judgment has left most of our politicians in a state of numbing shock and atrophy. For the first time perhaps, this ‘class’ finds itself on the back foot, completely outscored by the sagacity of the judgment, unable to trot off its well-rehearsed opinions. For the first time, all of them are at their wit’s end, struggling to find how to make the right noises and yet make capital out of the situation.

The right-thinking journalists are apparently relieved, but the mischievous ones are back to their games of representational politics; first using ‘divisive’ headlines, and then defending their indefensible positions through carefully crafted maneuvers.

Ironically, the main opposition to this judgment has come from the most unexpected quarters, our intellectuals who are forever ready with their rag-tag tool-box to do a quick surgical operation on any problem of national/international interest. These are our own version of ‘armchair intellectuals’ who often thrive on the state patronage, and yet never tire of reminding us of their anti-establishment stance.

They are ones who are often guilty of Orwellian ‘double think’ and ‘double speak’ and yet claim to speak from the high moral ground, they would have us believe, never shifts or alters when it alteration finds. They are the ones who enjoy all the perks and privileges because of their proximity to the ruling establishment, yet posit themselves as the champions of everyone’s freedom of expression, including their own.

Interestingly, they are the ones who often give legitimacy to the illegitimate government policies, schemes and ideology (that often run counter to the interests of the common man) and yet when something as momentous as this judgment comes, without a demur, appoint themselves as our interlocutors, too. 

If there is any single ‘class’ in India that is really disappointed, nay dejected, over the Ayodhya verdict, it is this ‘chattering class’ of the so-called intellectuals. Someone has gone on the record saying, it is not a court verdict, but a ‘panchayat ka faisla.’ Someone else is critical of it because the verdict is based not upon history, but the slippery notions of faith. Some others are of the view that the judges have sacrificed reason for emotion, and the principles of justice in favor of judicial and/or political expediency. Some have even gone to the extent of saying that it is simply an endorsement of the out-of-court settlement Shankaracharya had proposed long ago.  

So on and so forth. There are as many theories on the verdict as are the ideologies our intellectuals often subscribe to. It is as though each one of them is speaking from within his own solitary-cell, his own prison-house of thought, language and ideology. Surprisingly, the differences in the opinions of our opinion-makers are only superficial in nature, as beyond the surface, all of them are speaking in the same ‘divisive language’ we often associate with the politicians (to learn and to gain legitimacy for which our politicians invariably turn to our intellectuals), the language that helps their own cause but is detrimental to the cause of the common man.

Let us not turn to interlocutors (read intellectuals) for the final comment on this much awaited, much controversial judgment. It is significant that Post Ayodhya verdict there have been no communal riots; and that the common man is now stubbornly refusing to be ensnared into the vicious and wily machinations of the political rhetoric. The least our chattering classes could do was to read the triumph of the common man in this judgment, and leave him alone, not always talk down to him and say in characteristic haughty manner, ‘Well, we always knew what was good for you!’   

Our intellectuals, with their divisive rhetoric, have already done much harm to our country. Let the commonsensical perception and wisdom of the common man now hold sway and reign supreme over us. Perhaps, no other time was more auspicious for reiterating this position than the Gandhi Jayanti we have celebrated very recently. 

By Rana Nayar