“Our focus is to be efficiency-oriented rather than expansion-oriented”- Kapil Sibal (HRD Minister, UPA )

For almost a decade now, the Congress led UPA has been entailed with a toughest assignment on earth – contrive policies for shaping up the Gen-Next India by bulldozing it’s way through all the social stigma, detracting opposition parties, presumptuous media and the constant threat of terrorism. While some policies were snapped with both hands by the public, others were subjected to rave criticism. From the most controversial and globally significant Indo-U.S Nuclear Deal to the elemental Common Minimum Program aimed at empowering the nation from the grass root level, all have left the people with a sweet-and-sour taste in the mouth.

Our Despicable Education System:

When the UPA came into power, spate of issues were hanging by a thread, one of which was the country’s obsolete education system. The major, well understood defect of our education system is that it focuses on the child’s ability to reproduce information to the exclusion of the ability to apply concepts and information on unfamiliar, new problems or simply to think. Both the teachers and the parents constantly reinforce the fear of examination and the need to prepare for it by memorizing a whole lot of information from the textbook and guide books. It’s the case of knowledge vs. information in our curriculum and tipping the scales are the loads of information being crammed in, only to increase the load of the school bag. What else can you expect when experts commissioned to write textbooks for school students are isolated from classroom realities and have no idea about the effectiveness of their materials. Majority of our children view learning at school as a boring, even unpleasant and bitter experience. The student centric, participative, experiential and team based methods of teaching are hardly a factor in our institutes. With no agility in it’s syllabus, our education system deviously programs students like artificial intelligence systems simply to answer questions.

UPA’s Reforms:

In it’s strive to break these strongholds, the UPA decided to focus more on efficiency rather than expansion. It mooted several educational reforms; it’s mantra being neo-liberlization of our education system. A quick look at a few significant policies will take us closer to the bigger picture of what these reforms really meant to be.

Firstly lets review the 100 days’ agenda announced by Mr. Kapil Sibal in June 2009 proposing an autonomous overarching authority (National Commission for Higher Education and Research, NCHER) for higher education and research.

NCHER was based on the recommendations of the Yasphal committee report. The intention was to free University Grants Commission (UGC), Medical Council of India (MCI) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) from bureaucracy, making it autonomous and as powerful as the Election Commission.

Pros:

a) The commission will work towards making the youth competent enough to match up to the global standards.

b) It is going to pave way for ‘block grants’. This principal of block grants instead of financing the institutes of higher education on the basis of their respective requirements will decrease the corruption, plus it will bring all the institutions under the watchful eyes of a vigilant organization.

c) There would be less scope for different syllabi in different states as per their local conditions, which will prepare students for the competitive global market.

d) It will look after all types of higher education without falling prey to the tension between separate departments. Therefore, it can work upon long term agendas too.

e) The NCHER will formulate laws and regulations for public and private universities and will keep a constant check on their deemed status.

Cons:

1. Decentralization of the education system might reduce the burden of the states but it can also overlook their interests.

2. Many universities are financed by the states only but they will not have any final say in the appointment of Vcs.

3. There is a possibility that the ruling party may try to enforce their particular agenda through NCHER.

The Foreign Varsities Bill was tabled in the parliament on May 2010 and was vehemently supported by the leader of the Congress’ youth wing, Rahul Gandhi. The bill seeks to permit foreign players into India’s higher education system along with independent audits to ensure that they don’t run merely for profit.

Pros:

1. The bill will create a new category of educational institutions not shackled by the uptight Indian education regulators or system.

2. Statistics reveal that $2.247 billion worth of foreign exchange went out of the country as remittance towards tuition fees and other expenses by Indian students in 2008-09 alone. Thereby, the bill is intended to stem the number of students going abroad in search of quality education.

3. Building effective international academic collaborations is made easy for policymakers and institutions interested in partnering with these foreign universities.

Cons:

1. Distant/online education – the new process of learning of this fast-paced generation, is not a provision under this bill as only a conventional mode of education is being allowed.

2. When the intention is to create standards of quality and competitiveness in the system against controlling the demand, limiting the institutional autonomy by implying criteria such as regulation in the number of seats, reservations for backward classes etc. renders the bill as a damp squib.

3. It is unlikely that we will have full-fledged universities with campuses set up by quality institutions. The economics militates against this possibility.

The government proposed several reforms for every domain in the educational field. It made a very bold move to scrap class X board exam and make it optional with the intention to appease the hardships of high school students. At the grass root level, the government tweaked the ‘Right to Education Act’ to ‘The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act’ by subsuming strict guidelines for parents and schools to invariably educate children in the age of 6-14, irrespective of their background or abilities.

Student Unions’ view of UPA’s reforms - ‘The rich takes advantage, poor takes the fall’

UPA’s educational reforms made a lot of sense to the broad-minded but whirled up the blinkered.

On 18 January of this year, when the Union Ministry for Human Resource Development filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court to strip of the deemed status of 44 universities because of their abysmal infrastructural facilities, students panicked and violence erupted in some of these deemed universities near Chennai. The incident black marked the role of NHCER which was only striving for ‘quality’ in the educational institutions across the country.

The All India Students’ Association has expressed it’s contempt over NHCER and its block of grants saying that the poor and the needy will be severely affected.

When it comes to the Foreign Universities Regulation Bill, the situation is even worse that the Congress’ own youth wing has preempted it for vetting pointing out that only elites can enter the corridors of these universities and the poor will remain as peepers. The National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) also petitioned the bill, demanding a cap on fees charged by foreign universities wanting to camp in India.

Critics’ view – A mission impossible to mission in-freaking-sanity

Dr. Vijender Sharma (Formerly President, Delhi University Teachers’ Association) wrote off the government’s educational policies, warning students that it is as just a ‘glittering gold on the outside’ in a paper that was presented in the All India Convention on Education (February 20-21, 2010, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi). He criticized the formation of the apex autonomous body- NHCER as a mere privatization and centralization of the education system that will benefit the private or self-financing higher educational institutions the most . He also stated that the new laws of NHCER will simply loot the students and exploit teaching and non-teaching employees to the core.

Most of the critics view the Foreign Universities Regulation Bill as commercialization of our educational system where the Heads of universities assume the role of traveling salesmen to promote their programmes while students, now called consumers, are manufactured through an education system that is created exclusively to suit the corporate interests and bust cultural ethos & thoughts, significance of the local language, and traditional educational themes.

The Hindu in one of it’s editorials has criticized the Foreign Varsities Bill stating that 8,00,000 students graduate every year from the existing 7,000-plus engineering colleges in the country and there’s absolutely no need for foreign universities to save the face of India’s education system. They rather want the government to focus on the plight of the local institutions and arbitrate ways to develop them.

The Defenders- NHCER is foolproof.

Professor N.R. Madhava Menon(member of the Yasphal committee) retorts, “Though the delivery of educational services is a centralized activity at the institutional level, the NCHER plays only a facilitatory and not a authoritarian role as decisions are made purely by educationists which is later reviewed and authorized by the president or the governor”. He went on to add that,” The NCHER Bill provides a framework for securing autonomy of academic institutions and an environment for competitive excellence in higher education”.

Dr. Gnanadurai Michael, Retd. Consultant for Asia, CBM International in a press release said, “Higher education system had been ruined due to interference from multiple regulatory bodies and NCHER has made them hopeful for restoration of autonomy to universities”. The move is also being welcomed by several eminent educationists who believe that it will infuse vibrancy in our education system.

Role of the Media:

In recent times, the media seems to have garnered enormous power and attention of the public as confessed by our P.M Dr.Manmohan Singh in his ambiguous statement that media is accuser, prosecutor and judge. But unfortunately, our media is also tangled with the attention seeking disorder that it adorns the cloak of modernization but eschews practical ideas and often steps over the line distorting facts in order to make it’s news wince more faces, raise more eye brows and shoot up the TRP in it’s favor. The media has failed as a watch dog of our democracy as now it prowls around like a hungry beast devouring everything that comes through. The onus is really on the media to broadcast responsibly, downplay conservative views irrespective of it’s TRP value and start promoting tough and decisive policies that will stimulate the development process of the country though it may not go well with their sponsors.

The power of the media to change the society can be well understood by the impact of the movie, 3 idiots which bombarded the box office simply because the youth of the country were able to emotively identify themselves with it’s central theme.

“Do what you do best and not what others want you to do “

This happens to be the real voice of the youth today! Inspired by the movie, many came out audaciously asking for a radical change of our obsolete education system and several others were enlightened about the skeletons hiding inside the jaded closet . If the critics can sit and analyze over why the movie appealed to young India, most of their apprehensions will turn on it’s head.

It’s our generation and detractors can go:

It is quite blatant that all the reforms proposed by the UPA, no matter what they conjure it to be, are devised by the cast of three spells – Liberalization, Privatization, and Globalization which is exactly what the corporate world thrives on.

While you are hysterical about the implications of modern technology in your daily chores and yearn for your sons and daughters to squeeze maximum benefits out of the corporate set up, how can you try and water down its effects on education which is the basis for every development? Our forefathers would have sneaked through the jaw of the dinosaurs, survived the crust fracturing meteorites and a few might have even clung onto the Noah’s ark for us to get here. So anybody who mindlessly opposes these reforms can regress back to the stone age and start all over again from fire, where L.P.G can wait for another million generation. All the talks about India becoming a developed country will continue to hopelessly resonate within the boundaries of our social stigma, until L.P.G finds it’s way into all the terrains, especially education. Centralization of the education sector, implementing grade system, strict rules for quality check, modernization of our classrooms, invasion of foreign universities, creating a single curriculum meeting global standards, all leaves a bitter taste on several taste buds, but can be gulped keeping in mind the after-effects.

“There exists no solution to problems within the conditions that created them in the first place” -Albert Einstein.

Therefore, the idea of tweaking the existing education system as proposed by the conservatives is overtly baloney as radical changes are the need of the hour. The government need not yield to the pressures from sections of our uptight society which is quite insusceptible to ‘change’. Instead it can wriggle off accusations and strengthen it’s stance on these reforms, in fact moot more policies in line with globalization whose pros are more credible and cons are quasi-negligible.