FEATURE

EDUCATIONAL SCENARIO IN INDIA TODAY



"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."
William Shakespeare.


Prof. B. M. Hegde,
hegdebm@gmail.com

Professor James Tooley of the Newcastle University has been studying the educational pattern in India for some time. He has an advice for his countrymen that India could teach a thing or two to Britons about educating their people in England. He also feels that the Indian experience could be very useful for many other developing countries. This might sound preposterous when most Indians would want to believe that Indian educational system needs to borrow ideas from the West. I was sorry to read a write up by an Indian writer in The Statesman the other day, wherein the person was pontificating on the virtues of govt. schools and colleges and was very critical of private initiative in education in this country.
I did reply to the editor explaining the other side of the coin. How I wish our writers really worked hard to get to the bottom of the problem before writing about any field that is new to them. I suppose the learned journalist did not see the brighter side of higher education in the private sector. Having been in this field of higher education for four and half decades, I feel that empirical experience (anubhooti) teaches many housekeeping details that one can not get from any amount of reading.
Let me start with the government sponsored "Public Report on Basic Education in India" (PROBE) to understand the whole gamut of education in general. The report could be replicated about higher education without any change!
• Only in 53% of schools in the villages of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, UP and Rajasthan was there some kind of teaching going on.
• Teachers were absent in one third of the schools surveyed.
• Many teachers had closed their schools and were running their shops in the buildings.
• In some schools teachers were dead drunk; they even expected the pupils to get them their daily share of the heavenly liquid.(Daaru)
• Some teachers were asleep in the school most of the time as they were busy otherwise at other times of the day and night.
• Some teachers engaged the pupils in their house hold chores.
• Baby sitting in the teachers’ houses was the commonest job the students had to do in many schools.
More and more parents, therefore, were turning towards private schools even in villages and wayside slums. The PROBE team discovered that private schools, even in remote villages, were very active in teaching and getting good results for their pupils. In the private schools the teachers did not have job security and consequently, their continuation depended on their performance, watched both by the owners who wanted a fair name for their schools and the parents, who could shop around for a school with a good name, anyway. That motivates the teachers to work hard and put their heart and soul into teaching. Those village schools charged very reasonable sum of 35-50 rupees per month; in the city slums the going rate was 60-100 rupees per month.
These private schools were more popular because they all taught English, in addition. In the slums around Charminar in Hyderabad alone there were as many as 500 such schools belonging to a single Federation, serving predominantly the poorer sections of society like the Rickshaw pullers, daily wage earners, vegetable sellers, fisher women, and the like. They charged very modest fee of around a thousand rupees an year. None of them depended on government subsidy! These schools also had an altruistic motive in reserving a quarter of their seats for the poorest of the poor in the locality giving them away free. Similar experiments were going on in many other developing countries like Thailand, Columbia, Tanzania, and Chile. This method could be easily replicated elsewhere. In fact, Prof. Tooley recommends many of these methods to the inner city area schools that starve for want of funds and good teachers.
This self-help idea was the one that prompted the first ever private medical college in India in Manipal by a thinking man, Late Dr. T. M. A. Pai, who wanted that the motivated students should be provided with an opportunity to pursue their interest, assisted by their parents chipping in their lot to sustain the institutions. The Manipal University, is the result of his initial effort. Independent surveys have given us very high rating not only in India but abroad. We have students from thirty English speaking countries. We have been assessed as one of top four colleges in medical education.
Institutions do not depend for their growth on either the government or other owners. Educational institutions get their name and fame because of the men and women who struggle to keep up the highest academic standards as also the ethical values. Our founder’s motto was to nurture the best of teachers. Having been in these institutions for forty five years I could vouch for that truth. Universities should be proud of their faculty and not their brick and mortar or equipment as much. Our powers-that-be do not seem to realize this naked truth.
It is only in our country that private effort in education is being looked down upon and treated badly. People outside governmental control have founded some of the great institutions all over. A banker, like Dr. TMA Pai, founded the University of Edinburgh, way back in the eighteenth century. That was the time of the Scottish enlightenment when Edinburgh was considered to be the Athens of the north. Except the University of Georgia Medical School, most of the American medical institutions of repute are in the private sector. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and most of the others belong to that class. The Guy brothers, business tycoons of those days, founded the famous Guy’s Hospital Medical School in London. They are not untouchables in their countries, but are venerated very much as centres of excellence and repute.
This pioneering Manipal experiment, the first of its kind in India, unfortunately has been badly replicated by many others to make it into a big "business" in higher education. These kind of unscrupulous methods are being abetted and nurtured by politicians and their goons for their own benefit. That is no reason why the original idea of Dr. T.M.A.Pai should be found fault with by our thinkers. Many of the later institutions do not have even the bare minimum necessities, not to speak of the all-important faculty. It would be shocking to know that a sizable percentage of them thrive only on visiting faculty, who rarely visit. People in authority would overlook all these so long as their machinery is well oiled and greased! Thanks to the munificence of our greedy powers-that-be, such institutions thrive better in India. It is only the honest and the meritorious that suffer in this environment.
What is the need of the hour? Many of our journalists with the holier-than-though attitude towards private efforts at higher education and many of our armchair intellectuals who live in ivory towers, having no touch with reality and without any personal experience in the field, think that education, outside the government setting, is getting commercialized in India. They feel that this is the greatest sin and should be curbed at any cost. We would be happy to host them here to have first hand knowledge of the trials and tribulations of running excellent educational institutions.
Similar arguments were put forward for "socialism" of the Russian variety in the ‘50s, despite the fact the Mahatma Gandhi had strongly advocated the cottage industry and village development as the need of the hour. Now even the champions of the mega things in development are convinced that "small is beautiful". The country is suffering from the fall out of that sin at an enormous cost to the people. Governments got involved in every aspect of the common man’s life, starting from transport, electricity, water supply, food distribution, industry, medical care, hotels, and what have you. None of them function properly even after half a century! It has now dawned on the politicians that they should get out of these as soon as possible. Education is another field where the government has miserably failed. Sooner they realize this the better for our future generations.
We must nurture and develop private schools and even professional colleges that keep up excellent standards of education. There should be no compromise on standards. Let us learn the lessons of the PROBE study. Let private institutions depend on their excellence for their very existence! Allow them a level playground without throttling them. Let there be an independent accreditation body of independent people of integrity that periodically publicizes the standards for students and parents to know.
Let there be survival of the fittest without any outside agency bringing in unreasonable restrictions. Let the buyer, the well-informed student, take the pick. The bad institutions would die a natural death in the process. That is the exact way how American medical education was cleaned of the unscrupulous medical schools of which there were more than two hundred in the fifties. Flexner Committee, an independent body, rated all of them. Their findings were made public by the government repeatedly in national dailies over a period of a month or so. Only seventy-two colleges survived, as the rest died a natural death for want of student aspirants to fill their seats. No amount of regulations and rules would work that effectively, since the crooked owners could twist many of the latter.
This reminds me of a lecture given by Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister of Britain, in one of the conferences on "quality control". She got up to speak and started by narrating her own experience, as the grocer’s daughter, at her father’s shop, when she was young. "Whenever the vegetables we sold were good the customers came back; when the vegetables were bad the vegetables came back and the customers went away to other shops! That is quality control." How true! The institutions should survive on their merit alone and not on rules and controls in the open market. That would be healthy for higher educational institutions as well. The really bad institutions will die a natural death under those conditions, as no student would want to go there.
The private institutions should be allowed to grow without the usual constraints of the "licence-raj" let loose on them both by the politi
cians in the government and their henchmen. The above categories do not want to loosen their grip on the private institutions. The corrupt people’s bread and butter are these institutions. That is precisely why they want to have their complicated regulations and rules to have an absolute control over private effort at education. Our biggest curse is this "license-raj" system. The root of all corruption starts there. The more rules that the government puts forward, the better for the greedy in power. Every single rule is an opportunity for corruption.
This country, or for that matter, even the developed countries, would not be able to subsidize primary education, leave alone higher education, in the new millennium. The recipient should pay for higher education. If he is poor or hails from an economically backward community, the government could help him raise a loan from the Educational Development Bank, on the same lines as Industrial Development Bank, to be repaid only after he gets a job and the interest thereon could be waived or reduced depending on his economic status.
Most governments would not be able to service the interest on their foreign borrowings in the next decade even with all their revenue collection. Many of them would not have the money to pay their staff! In that situation education could only be in the private sector. Our netas should not be under the delusion, that by selling the idea to the gullible public that commercialization in education is bad for the country, they feel that they could continue to use this "milch cow" to fill their coffers for elections and also to hoard money for their progeny. They seem to forget that they can not take the hoarded money with them when they go to meet their maker.
Even the famous "Unnikrishnan" judgement of the Supreme Court subscribes to this view that private education is bad in principle. I am sure with the present scenario one could go back to the Supreme Court for a revision of that judgement in the background of the wisdom from the PROBE investigations. With more evidence accumulated against the view, our adversarial system of justice might agree with the new wisdom.
As of now the private institutions face great hostility from the government. They are viewed with suspicion as thieves. While there are thieves in every field of human endeavour, there are also excellent institutions run on ethical principles. Of course, there is no free lunch anywhere. The private institutions should be allowed to get back a reasonable return on their investments and also be able to break even to sustain themselves. A logical financial assessment of the needs vis-à-vis their expenditure could be made by an independent body whose members’ credentials could be bared for public scrutiny before being appointed, but the committee should not have any kind of restrictions, either from the governments or the watchdog bodies. I am sure there are many in this country that are honest and ethical. In fact, they are in the majority, but they are a silent majority not noticed by our media and also the merit award giving bodies of the country! Let them be given at least this thankless job of overseeing private initiative in educating our masses in higher studies.
Many of our leaders in the government behave as if they belong to a higher race. I am reminded of what French President Giscard d’Estaing wrote in his memoirs in 1981. "In my country" he said, "there is the idea that those who govern belong to another race."
Earlier we change the set up and clean up the stables the better for the future generation. With more than five hundred million young men and women looking for higher education in the country in the next fifty years, we would create chaos in the near future unless we set our house in order. There is no desirable pattern of non-governmental educational efforts in higher education prescribed so far. Consequently, the unscrupulous would want to commercialize education. Unfortunately, they are the ones that get all the perks from the powers-that-be as they supply the needs of the latter. Those who want to be honest and authentic get all sorts of hurdles put on their way.
Every rule is made to be used to either make money for the rulers and their ilk or for having some control over the hapless organizations in the field of higher education. A survey of the present facilities for higher education in the existing set up would throw up worse things than what was brought out by PROBE team in primary education.
While the government set-ups have very little infrastructure, the private ones are made to achieve the impossible. I get a feeling that there must be a deep-rooted conspiracy to keep up the governmental hegemony in education for the politician and the bureaucrats to make money perpetually. This reminds me of the nice study published from the Cato Institue in Washington edited by Doug Bandow and Ian Vasquez entitled Perpetuating Poverty, wherein the authors have systematically shown how the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have promoted poverty in the developing world for the ultimate good of the big powers, so that they could keep the former under their thumb perpetually. Writing a commentary on the book, Melvyn B. Krauss, professor of economics at the NewYork University, has this to say: "This book destroys the myth that the multilateral aid agencies are forces for good and shows they are instead a major fraud perpetuating poverty in the developing countries…………..The editors are to be congratulated for editing this precise, cold-eyed, and extremely important collection of essays that merits a wide audience."
I think our governments are in a similar setting, professing to look after the good of society at large but really working hard to keep the people poor and ignorant so that the powers-that-be could make hay when the sun shines. The election process, the selection of officers and staff in the government set up as also the educational process along with all things that matter in the common man’s day-to-day existence are being kept under their control, so that they could dictate terms to the common man for all times to come.
Earlier we get the all-important higher education out of their clutches the better for mankind. Let there be a national debate on this to see how best we could achieve this goal. There will be teething troubles but they will get over sooner than we think. Change will bring difficulties in its wake, but change is the essence of life itself. Let the process of education try to get the best out of every child for the common good of man on earth.
"Be just and fear not."
William Shakespeare.