FEATURE
The business called education.
Prof. B. M. Hegde,
hegdebm@gmail.com
With the going rate for a single vote in the show of strength in the Parliament and assemblies by the ruling kichdi at crores, one might wonder where does this kind of money come from in a country where the majority are still below the poverty line and the daily loss of child life due to malnutrition alone is at its peak at 6000 deaths. Each party is blaming the other for horse trading but, for the poor people all parties are the same actors on the political canvas. They all belong to one party-money making and power grabbing party-least bothered about the poor and the less fortunate. Today an honest, conscientious person can never dream of getting elected what with the established actors spending millions of rupees to get votes. No self respecting human being would venture into that arena. It will be like the puny fellow getting into the ring with a sumo wrestler.
I must admit that we have had a quantum jump in our GDP in the last decade or so but, unfortunately, that has been exclusively for the rich and the powerful with the poor still in the same place where they were a decade ago if not at lower level than that. With the inflation running at double digit mark the plight of the poor would really be pathetic.
A sizeable section of the cunning poor have made it to the political arena and have amassed wealth after independence. Even they do not seem to be bothered about their erstwhile fellow travelers. Money makes man lose all his sense of social conscience as also his social consciousness! Our black money economy is much bigger than the white money market. No one seems to be unduly worried, though.
With the governing class and the beurocracy on the same side of the fence who do we depend on to book the culprits? The media is not an exception, either. They pontificate through their media power but, behind the scenes are aligned with one or the other party. We have had some new entrants trying to spy over the corrupt in one party while they seem to have a blind spot when it comes to their own masters. We are left with that sacred fort of the judiciary to lift the country from that bottomless pit into which our leaders have sunk the country’s honour! Recent revelations in the judiciary show a good percentage of black sheep there as well. So we have come up against a stone wall in our struggle against corruption with the all the fences put in to guard the crop by our constitution makers having started eating the crop! Look at the drama of the Lokpal bill meetings!
Our only hope is to depend on society to set things right by playing a proactive role. That said, I must hasten to add that all is not well in that front, either. Many of the “so called NGOs” are political in some sense. They use intelligent language to sell their agenda respectably. This brings me to that beautiful paper by George Orwell in 1946 entitled Politics and the English language wherein he shows how even some of the great writers and leaders had been misleading the public using vague, unintelligible, distorted language to sell their ideas in favour one or the other political party. The one example, among the many, that he gave in that paper is a very long sentence by Professor Harold Laski where he sprinkles many Latin and Greek phrases to confuse the meaning at the end. Our intelligent media masters use the same tactics in India, nay all over the world. Corruption, our tall political masters would proclaim, is a universal phenomenon. It is called lobbying in the US but called dalalgiri in India. These wheelers and dealers abound around the power centres in Delhi and the State capitals. They make hey when the sun shines.
Our last hope is to trace the source of corruption. It is the unscrupulous non-politicians that try and buy those that wield power at any time with their money power. Most of them are in business of one kind or the other. Each of them harbours a couple of dozen powerful politicians, both in the government and opposition at any given time. They are very intelligent that they do not have permanent friends or permanent enemies they only have their permanent interests in mind! At the end of the day it is they that benefit from this kind of confusion. There many areas to audit but, for the purposes of this article, I shall confine my audit to the most thriving business in India today-the business called education. While it is true that a country of India’s size and population density with almost 70% below the age of 20 in the next fifty years, we need a huge investment in education from the primary to the highest level.
No country on earth could do that using only the tax payers’ money. It is but natural that we need private participation here. For those eyeing education as business do so mainly because in India that is the safest industry to invest in. In education business the raw material comes to your door step, there is no need to have an elaborate and expensive marketing department to sell the finished product in many areas. Labour trouble is at it bare minimum. Work force is in plenty. Infrastructure could be manipulated unlike in other industries where the needed machinery is a must. In the field of education there could always be laxity in all those rules of the game. More than all these there is a huge opportunity to both invest and generate black money which, in turn, could be converted into white very, very respectably. Education business gives the owner, in addition to tons of money, social status and respectability of an educationist, with the attendant Padma awards and what have you. Special place is society with commendable influence comes as a bonus. Even the most powerful (may be the PM or the President) might seek favours in getting their wards into the institution when they do not qualify to get in through the right route! Many of them brag about it after a couple of Black label doses!
The powers-that-be have put in place some controlling bodies to set things right and see that nothing untoward happens in this holy area of educating our future generation. Lo and behold, most of them are worse than the politicians referred to earlier in their capacity to earn black money to grant favours to the unscrupulous players in the field. The very purpose is defeated and the field now stinks. To give one example we have the Syndicates in all State Universities to oversee the running of those holy places. Most of them are selected by the politicians in power thereby defeating the very purpose. Even though all of them have the requisite minimum degree most of them are not educated. Education and having a degree are two different things. Private Universities could have their own say in filling those bodies and they couldn’t care less about the ability of the people-they just want people to sign on the dotted lines! So where are we? Recently I was told that in a metropolis a private university was charging upwards of a crore of rupees for a PG seat. Entry criteria and exit rules could all be bent with that rate for entry! The annual hike in that black money quantum seems to overtake our inflation rate.
The only solution is to let higher and professional education to be open and free from all controls and licenses. The buyer should be the only judge of the quality of education with authentic responsible people in society acting as the watchdog bodies to point out the lapses as and when they occur. Let it be the buyers’ market like automobiles now. The institutions could charge their own fees but the monies collected must be publicly audited. In that scenario the institutions will look for true excellence: the latter is competing with oneself. They will also try and get as many foreign students as they can to get more money into the country. Universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford do not need watch dog bodies or political Syndicate members to keep them excellent. They all might charge very hefty fees for those that can afford, but they never dilute their standards or their entry criteria. Even those universities live on foreign students’ income to a great extent! Those that can not afford the fees must be given interest free educational loans by the private universities through banks, if they like.
It will take some time for our institutions to reach those levels but let us not forget that India had “universities of excellence thousands of years ago when people from all over the world flocked there, while Europeans were hunter-gatherers roaming the forests,” wrote Voltaire, the French philosopher. The tax payer’s money could be better used to give the country’ children compulsory good quality primary education. Here again the onus of responsibility could be shared with those private institutions that run profitable higher education institutions. Each of them could be given charge of a certain number of primary schools to be run for the benefit of the poor and the less fortunate with the best standards of education in their vicinity compulsorily.
The Right of Information Act must be used to get all the details of the running of these private higher educational institutions so that they are answerable to society. It might be argued as interference in their private affairs but they are answerable to society which is providing them their livelihood. I am just floating an idea. It is not fool proof shield against graft but is much better than the prevailing scene which is raking in black money dealings with the beneficiaries trying to run the government with their money and influence. This arena is one of the leading generators of black money as of now. This order of things must change. Saying that all higher education must be run by the government with ministers only making money all the time is an archaic idea in 2011. In the new set up genuine educationists could manage the education departments of the governments.
Prof. B. M. Hegde,
hegdebm@gmail.com
With the going rate for a single vote in the show of strength in the Parliament and assemblies by the ruling kichdi at crores, one might wonder where does this kind of money come from in a country where the majority are still below the poverty line and the daily loss of child life due to malnutrition alone is at its peak at 6000 deaths. Each party is blaming the other for horse trading but, for the poor people all parties are the same actors on the political canvas. They all belong to one party-money making and power grabbing party-least bothered about the poor and the less fortunate. Today an honest, conscientious person can never dream of getting elected what with the established actors spending millions of rupees to get votes. No self respecting human being would venture into that arena. It will be like the puny fellow getting into the ring with a sumo wrestler.
I must admit that we have had a quantum jump in our GDP in the last decade or so but, unfortunately, that has been exclusively for the rich and the powerful with the poor still in the same place where they were a decade ago if not at lower level than that. With the inflation running at double digit mark the plight of the poor would really be pathetic.
A sizeable section of the cunning poor have made it to the political arena and have amassed wealth after independence. Even they do not seem to be bothered about their erstwhile fellow travelers. Money makes man lose all his sense of social conscience as also his social consciousness! Our black money economy is much bigger than the white money market. No one seems to be unduly worried, though.
With the governing class and the beurocracy on the same side of the fence who do we depend on to book the culprits? The media is not an exception, either. They pontificate through their media power but, behind the scenes are aligned with one or the other party. We have had some new entrants trying to spy over the corrupt in one party while they seem to have a blind spot when it comes to their own masters. We are left with that sacred fort of the judiciary to lift the country from that bottomless pit into which our leaders have sunk the country’s honour! Recent revelations in the judiciary show a good percentage of black sheep there as well. So we have come up against a stone wall in our struggle against corruption with the all the fences put in to guard the crop by our constitution makers having started eating the crop! Look at the drama of the Lokpal bill meetings!
Our only hope is to depend on society to set things right by playing a proactive role. That said, I must hasten to add that all is not well in that front, either. Many of the “so called NGOs” are political in some sense. They use intelligent language to sell their agenda respectably. This brings me to that beautiful paper by George Orwell in 1946 entitled Politics and the English language wherein he shows how even some of the great writers and leaders had been misleading the public using vague, unintelligible, distorted language to sell their ideas in favour one or the other political party. The one example, among the many, that he gave in that paper is a very long sentence by Professor Harold Laski where he sprinkles many Latin and Greek phrases to confuse the meaning at the end. Our intelligent media masters use the same tactics in India, nay all over the world. Corruption, our tall political masters would proclaim, is a universal phenomenon. It is called lobbying in the US but called dalalgiri in India. These wheelers and dealers abound around the power centres in Delhi and the State capitals. They make hey when the sun shines.
Our last hope is to trace the source of corruption. It is the unscrupulous non-politicians that try and buy those that wield power at any time with their money power. Most of them are in business of one kind or the other. Each of them harbours a couple of dozen powerful politicians, both in the government and opposition at any given time. They are very intelligent that they do not have permanent friends or permanent enemies they only have their permanent interests in mind! At the end of the day it is they that benefit from this kind of confusion. There many areas to audit but, for the purposes of this article, I shall confine my audit to the most thriving business in India today-the business called education. While it is true that a country of India’s size and population density with almost 70% below the age of 20 in the next fifty years, we need a huge investment in education from the primary to the highest level.
No country on earth could do that using only the tax payers’ money. It is but natural that we need private participation here. For those eyeing education as business do so mainly because in India that is the safest industry to invest in. In education business the raw material comes to your door step, there is no need to have an elaborate and expensive marketing department to sell the finished product in many areas. Labour trouble is at it bare minimum. Work force is in plenty. Infrastructure could be manipulated unlike in other industries where the needed machinery is a must. In the field of education there could always be laxity in all those rules of the game. More than all these there is a huge opportunity to both invest and generate black money which, in turn, could be converted into white very, very respectably. Education business gives the owner, in addition to tons of money, social status and respectability of an educationist, with the attendant Padma awards and what have you. Special place is society with commendable influence comes as a bonus. Even the most powerful (may be the PM or the President) might seek favours in getting their wards into the institution when they do not qualify to get in through the right route! Many of them brag about it after a couple of Black label doses!
The powers-that-be have put in place some controlling bodies to set things right and see that nothing untoward happens in this holy area of educating our future generation. Lo and behold, most of them are worse than the politicians referred to earlier in their capacity to earn black money to grant favours to the unscrupulous players in the field. The very purpose is defeated and the field now stinks. To give one example we have the Syndicates in all State Universities to oversee the running of those holy places. Most of them are selected by the politicians in power thereby defeating the very purpose. Even though all of them have the requisite minimum degree most of them are not educated. Education and having a degree are two different things. Private Universities could have their own say in filling those bodies and they couldn’t care less about the ability of the people-they just want people to sign on the dotted lines! So where are we? Recently I was told that in a metropolis a private university was charging upwards of a crore of rupees for a PG seat. Entry criteria and exit rules could all be bent with that rate for entry! The annual hike in that black money quantum seems to overtake our inflation rate.
The only solution is to let higher and professional education to be open and free from all controls and licenses. The buyer should be the only judge of the quality of education with authentic responsible people in society acting as the watchdog bodies to point out the lapses as and when they occur. Let it be the buyers’ market like automobiles now. The institutions could charge their own fees but the monies collected must be publicly audited. In that scenario the institutions will look for true excellence: the latter is competing with oneself. They will also try and get as many foreign students as they can to get more money into the country. Universities like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Stanford do not need watch dog bodies or political Syndicate members to keep them excellent. They all might charge very hefty fees for those that can afford, but they never dilute their standards or their entry criteria. Even those universities live on foreign students’ income to a great extent! Those that can not afford the fees must be given interest free educational loans by the private universities through banks, if they like.
It will take some time for our institutions to reach those levels but let us not forget that India had “universities of excellence thousands of years ago when people from all over the world flocked there, while Europeans were hunter-gatherers roaming the forests,” wrote Voltaire, the French philosopher. The tax payer’s money could be better used to give the country’ children compulsory good quality primary education. Here again the onus of responsibility could be shared with those private institutions that run profitable higher education institutions. Each of them could be given charge of a certain number of primary schools to be run for the benefit of the poor and the less fortunate with the best standards of education in their vicinity compulsorily.
The Right of Information Act must be used to get all the details of the running of these private higher educational institutions so that they are answerable to society. It might be argued as interference in their private affairs but they are answerable to society which is providing them their livelihood. I am just floating an idea. It is not fool proof shield against graft but is much better than the prevailing scene which is raking in black money dealings with the beneficiaries trying to run the government with their money and influence. This arena is one of the leading generators of black money as of now. This order of things must change. Saying that all higher education must be run by the government with ministers only making money all the time is an archaic idea in 2011. In the new set up genuine educationists could manage the education departments of the governments.
Comments