Cover Story: Education; Setting no Standards

In the mad rush for statistics India has lost sight of the importance of quality education.

If India were to be tested for educating its multitudes, it would score dismally. At the start of the millennium, there is mostly bad news from the education front. Dilapidated schools, demotivated teachers, irresponsible management and powerless parents. A vicious cycle where hopelessness breeds further hopelessness.

FACTOIDS

ť Of the Rs 4,700 crore allotted in the Central budget, Rs 3,000 crore went to elementary education.

ť In 1998-99, 71 lakh students were enrolled in colleges and universities.

ť By the end of the Ninth Plan there will be 85 lakh students in 10,000 colleges.

There is an increase in literacy rates -- but it is so slow that the absolute numbers of illiterates keeps rising every year. By international standards India's performance is dismal. Even Sri Lanka has done a better job of educating its people. As for female literacy, sub-Saharan Africa fares better.

If the numbers are distressing, even worse is an all-round deterioration in the quality of education. Anil Bordia, former education secretary and one of the authors of the New Education Policy (1986), points out that "along with quantity and spread of education, quality has not kept pace. On the contrary there has been a shocking decline in standards."

IDEAS

ť Hike fees and cut subsidies in higher education.

ť Encourage autonomy, insulate institutions from political meddling.

ť Scrap bodies like UGC which have failed to maintain and monitor standards.

ť Centres of excellence can be created by emulating the IIT model.

Even as the number of colleges has proliferated, their standards are dubious. Institutions set up to maintain standards have failed to do their job. The UGC, for instance, has not lived up to its mandate. A similar institution, the All India Council of Technical Education, was set up by an act of Parliament to promote technical education. But what it has done since 1988 is scandalous. All sorts of dubious technical institutions have come up under its auspices. As Bordia says: "A watchdog for the maintenance of standards has itself become the instrument of deterioration of standards." An illustration of the farce our education system is often reduced to.

As far as the government is concerned it is statistics about the spread of literacy that count. But if education is a means to learn skills and transform lives then a substandard education is of little use. The bottom line -- if the level of literacy learning is very low then very little use can made of that literacy.

That is why good schools are now considered the best incentive for spreading education. "A poor family will not send its children to school to give a bureaucrat the satisfaction of adding them to a literacy statistic. They will do so only if there are some benefits in that education," says Amarjeet Sinha, a director in the Department of Education. But the quality of our rural schools does not inspire much hope.

The real problem is the state's priorities -- under-involvement in elementary education where it should be focusing all its energies; over-involvement in higher education where it should encourage independent initiative. Worse, in spite of a disproportionate spending on higher education, which is highly subsidised, universities are in a mess.

Ironically, the model for higher education doesn't have to be imported. It lies at our doorstep. One solution is autonomy from the government, best illustrated by the IIT example. Writer and educationist P.V. Indiresen, who was a director at IIT Chennai, points out that besides imparting a fine education in engineering, the IITs also provide lessons on running educational institutions. There is a fundamental difference between the IITs and other Central universities: the act of Parliament that created the IITs insulates them from political meddling. From admissions to faculty appointments, there is no scope for politicians and bureaucrats to interfere.

Contrast the IITs with the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), still the country's premier medical college. The AIIMS Act makes the Union health minister chairman of the governing body which includes several MPs and bureaucrats. The result is that faculty appointments and promotions are often the rewards of intense lobbying. D. Mohan, head of the department of psychiatry, a faculty member since 1970, has been proposing a complete review of the AIIMS charter for several years. "No one listens," he says. "And though we are still considered the best, unlike the IITs we are going downhill. Urgent action is called for."

All educationists agree that political influence peddling in faculty appointments and politicisation of teachers is largely responsible for the rot in universities. The bulk of the higher education budget goes to pay teachers' salaries. Yet, as Indiresen points out, "politicised teachers' unions resist change and refuse to discharge responsibility". Reservation of seats has also contributed to a systematic lowering of standards. "If half the seats are reserved standards will fall," says Indiresen. The low university fees means that the government is underwriting the education of graduates who end up being bus conductors. Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi agrees that there must be a cut in subsidies for higher education. "The problem is that most political parties oppose this," he says.

There are other solutions -- open university, hike in fees, emulating the iit model, insulating institutions from political meddling, encouraging colleges to become autonomous and raise private funds. But what is lacking is the political will to push these changes.

The best news at the beginning of the millennium is that even the poorest of India's poor want to educate their children. For the first time since Independence, politicians like Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh and Andhra Pradesh's Chandrababu Naidu are seeing electoral gains in education. The result of this pressure from below is that several innovative education schemes are setting new benchmarks in rural India. One such is the DPEP (District Primary Education Scheme), partially financed by the World Bank which now extends to 176 districts in 15 states. In Karnataka where the scheme covers 16 of the 28 districts, one lakh vacancies for schoolteachers have been filled in five years. According to Vijay Bhaskar, the state project director: "The dramatic decline in school drop-out rates indicates that if you reach out to people with a good scheme they will respond."

But all scope for improvement is circumscribed by the fact that India spends just 3.8 per cent of its GDP on education, while countries with a good record of erasing illiteracy spend up to 9 per cent. It is time our planners realised a country's human capital depends on the quality of its education system.

	METRO TODAY \| DAILY NEWS \| ASTROLOGY \| ARCHIVES \| INDIA TODAY \| HOME