July 6, 1998

Check the brain drain. Set up quality private universities

Tavleen Singh

Perhaps the saddest comment on the current state of higher education in India is that any child who can afford it prefers going to a foreign university. Ironically, the first to flee the land were the children of bureaucrats. Courtesy a small survey I have been conducting in my spare time, I have discovered there is almost no bureaucrat I know whose children have not studied in some foreign university.

The most honest of the species, the ones who win awards of the "Honest Indian of the Year" variety, somehow find the funds to send their children abroad. This, even though it costs more than Rs 12 lakh a year to put a child through university in America. The irony lies in the fact that it is our bureaucrats -- with their cussed, myopic ways -- who have destroyed higher education in India.

This has been achieved by refusing to allow universities to charge anything that could even remotely be considered a decent fee, by refusing to permit private investment in higher education and, at the same time, depriving it of government funds. When it became clear to our clever little mandarins that Indian university education had virtually collapsed, they quietly started sending their children abroad. But they still refused to change policy.

What of the ministers, you will say, are they not more to blame? They are indeed to blame. But since democracy has a way, in our illiterate country, of throwing up people's representatives who are largely illiterate, we have to blame politicians less than our highly-educated bureaucrats.

In any case, the end result is that a country which had universities almost before anyone else -- Taxila and Nalanda, for instance -- today provides higher education of abysmal quality. It is so poor that none of our universities can be considered even halfway world class.

These thoughts have come to my mind in these past couple of weeks since I have been on a sort of unofficial tour of American universities. I have seen the Ivy League, the non-Ivy League, big colleges and small ones. Each and every one was better than our best. The once mighty universities of Bombay, Delhi and Madras, to which students used to flock from distant lands, cannot compare with even American state universities. The main reason for this is they have been slowly starved to death in the supposedly "socialist" interest of making university education affordable to even the poorest Indian child. The result: in cities like Mumbai and Delhi your child will probably spend more on transport or eating out than on annual college fees.

Another result is most of our universities have buildings that cannot be repaired, teachers who cannot be paid proper salaries or provided decent housing, libraries that cannot afford to buy new books or look after old ones, science laboratories that have remained unchanged since the 1950s. Compare this with the fact that Yale University alone has more than 10 million books in its libraries and its science laboratories are responsible for some of the latest medical research in the world. You begin to realise why our children are fleeing to foreign lands.

The saddest thing is it does not have to be this way. All that the government needs to do is permit private investment in higher education and we will instantly see institutions of excellence emerge. Fees will have to go up, of course. But the problem of poor students can be solved, as it is elsewhere, through scholarships.

In most American universities, more than half the students receive aid of some kind in proportion to their individual need. The money comes from the university and not from the government. So there is no interminable tangle of red tape, no network of officials to be bribed. Since most American universities are funded by private money, there is no ministry of education sitting on their backs, interfering endlessly in everything.

On my visit to Yale, I discovered it had just raised over a billion dollars through alumni efforts. In India, when we talk about private investment in higher education we may not be talking about such staggering amounts becoming instantly available. But I have met any number of industrialists, Indian and NRI, who are keen to invest because investment in higher education helps them directly.

Industry needs computer scientists, management graduates and all manner of skilled technicians, almost more than the government does. But the investment will only come if the Department of Education keeps its greasy fingers out of the pie. From the government's viewpoint, privatisation of higher education could come as a boon. It could then spend all its money on school education. So why has all this not happened? Bureaucratic indifference, political neglect and a general reluctance to rock the boat.

But this is a good time to begin anew. Since we ostensibly have a "Hindu nationalist government", it could be done in the cause of Hindu revivalism. Our first two completely privatised universities could be called Taxila and Nalanda. With regular subjects, they could have a special emphasis on "Hindu subjects" like Sanskrit, studies of the Ramayan and Mahabharat and perhaps even political and economic courses based on the Arthashastra.

What do you think, Mr Murli Manohar Joshi? As a former university professor and a Hindu nationalist, should this not be a matter close to your heart?

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