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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

From Enclave to Empire by Sukanta Chaudhuri

Bhaskar Dutta’s recent article on this page confirms the new trends in educational planning since Kapil Sibal took charge. Action on the education front is long overdue, but it should not pre-empt ample debate. Such debate has barely got off the ground: Dutta’s article is a valuable contribution.

We lament that with sadly few exceptions, our higher education system does not reach international standards. Most of our young talent goes abroad, is enriched by the facilities and ambience there, and commonly stays out. Hence we are mulling a ‘brain gain’ agenda, reversing the outward flow of talent. The resident academic workforce is almost irrelevant to the exercise.

This is the latest outbreak of a regime of ‘bypass surgery’ adopted since Independence to cure our academic ills. First, teaching and research institutions were separated in a way that, 60 years on, has clearly impoverished both groups. Next, a few affluent Centrally-funded campuses were set up, notionally as model or ‘lead’ institutions but more and more isolated by their privilege. Today, all Centrally-funded institutions are being slotted in a favoured class by bureaucratic rhetoric and preferential funding. But even these, it seems, will not meet our aspirations: we are setting up 14 ‘innovation universities’ at a cost that will leave Jawaharlal Nehru University looking like a rural college.

All along the way, we have evaded the challenge of systemic reform, instead setting up a few privileged institutions with little trickle-down effect — indeed reducing the status and facilities of the rest by contrast. When that thin layer of cream has soured, we have ladled a fresh spoonful on top. What I find disquieting about Dutta’s perceptive analysis is that it ends with precisely this prescription.

Let us consider some unfashionable counter-arguments. First, our belated concern for quality has obscured the gross but equally imperative issue of quantity. The two factors are not mutually exclusive: in fact, they must be combined in an India-sized country. Only 40 per cent of Indians who complete higher education are estimated to possess the basic skills required by a knowledge economy. In the foreseeable future, global economic and demographic trends will offer a chance for India to dominate the world’s knowledge-based service industries. But this calls for a medium-to-high educational system for all our people. Only so can we turn our alarming population rise into an economic asset.

The most crucial move towards this end is a well-endowed, truly universal system of school education. It took us 60 years to accept education as a fundamental right: how many more to extend it to every village and slum child? The nationwide scope of Sibal’s initial pronouncements is narrowing more and more to cater to the metropolitan elite.

With higher education, even the malnourished rural undergraduate belongs to an elite of sorts: we would now create a super-elite. Its overlap with a meritocracy will be all too partial, given the appalling disparities in schooling. It may placate the career demands of a privileged and articulate minority, with a ritual trickle-down to disadvantaged groups. The ‘brain gain’ from such a system will, in the long run, be overwhelmed by a new brain drain. By itself, it will neither sustain our economy nor create a better society.

There is also the question of making best use of the current resource pool. A literally incalculable sum has been sunk over 150 years (the last 60 in particular) in some 300 university-level public institutions. Some scarcely deserve the name, others purvey indifferent routine training. Quite a few (besides the Indian institutes of technology and the Indian institutes of management) have intensive international contacts and exchange: joint research programmes, specialized technical outsourcing, even credit-sharing and joint degrees, or membership of global academic consortiums. They may not number among the ‘World’s Top 200’, but they hold honourable discourse with them. (I say nothing of individual contacts.) Given a modicum of funds, freedom and moral support, many other institutions could be raised to this productive level.

The hodge-podge of the present university system cannot be preserved in perpetuity. But it contains a working order that could be raised to internationally respectable standards across the board in a few years. After all, Indian institutions (again, not IITs alone) are at least good enough to feed the international demands of the ‘brain drain’. For all their glaring deficiencies, there is a bedrock strength in the system that we have not quite squandered away.

Most of these institutions are virtually without resources. A postgraduate department may have two, or one, or no full-time teacher; its annual grant may be in four figures, or three, or nil. The miracle is that not all these institutions have imploded from neglect. Some, still more miraculously, have flourished and grown. Most of the last are state-run rather than Central. Of India’s nine ‘universities with potential for excellence’, six are state-run. Perhaps Sibal could spare 10 minutes to check how this scheme is progressing, and what funds have been released to date.

In simple resource terms, it would be folly to write off this huge reserve of manpower and infrastructure, however disarrayed and demoralized. Still more crucially, we cannot meet a fraction of even middle-level manpower needs without intensively developing the total sector. Of course, true development means differentially rewarding achievement and encouraging potential, not pandering to the reductive whims of political parties and teachers’ unions. Some institutions (indeed individuals) need to be eliminated or marginalized; others will rise to the top from within the system, but their relation to the rest should not be one of exclusion or opposition.

Emoluments, and even more infrastructure and ambience, must be attuned to this end. Academics have been so deprived in the past that one hesitates to criticize any demand in these happier times; but perhaps we are witnessing too many comparisons with US salaries. The real issue is of infrastructure. Apart from sweeping promises of future largesse for ‘innovation universities’, what the Indian State considers lavish grants are paltry by international standards. Private Indian capital, with rare exceptions, does not consider these unprofitable matters at all. There is no hope of raising Indian education to international levels without a quantum improvement across the board: any institution deemed fit to exist must offer at least the standard undergraduate facilities of good centres abroad.

Lastly, the matter of mindset. As in other spheres, we have a genius for frustrating our financial input by inept execution. In Bengal, a special disincentive is the sheer physical dereliction of the campus. Elsewhere, it can be grotesquely feudal obeisance to the vice-chancellor or — most seriously — a suicidal focus on practical courses vis-à-vis basic disciplines, not only in enrolment figures (which is understandable) but in academic priority. Almost everywhere, there is hobbling financial control over the smallest expenditure; the demeaning and time-wasting torment of petty bureaucracy; a lack of informational transparency; and, of course, campus politics among students and staff. Those who consider such ills unique to Bengal have not seen conditions elsewhere. Universities in the West would shut down after faculty revolt if faced with such constraints for a week. It is ironic that the ministry of human resource development pledges to protect the new ‘innovation universities’ from these shackles — but would retain or even increase the load on the rest.

Systemic reform is no easy task, especially if — as must be — it entails politically damaging elimination of the unfit, as assessed by merit or lack thereof. How much simpler to set up a few greenfield institutions, or isolate a manageable handful of existing ones, to satisfy privileged aspirations and have showpieces on display. There is only one drawback: 60 years’ experience shows that such exclusive attention neither satisfies private and class aspirations, nor provides a sufficient knowledge base for a growing economy. It commits us to an endless founding of enclave after enclave. They will never add up to an empire.
 
The author is professor of English, Jadavpur University, Calcutta