The speeches were poignant and moving. The concern expressed was genuine. Our students taking board examinations are indeed under immense stress. Sandeep Dikshit, member of Lok Sabha, gave a pointed rendition of the burden on our children: “We talk of a society free from fear, but our children appearing for the 10th and 12th standard exams are the most terrified lot.” Speaker Somnath Chatterjee added an unusually personal note: “My granddaughter is in Class 10 and the entire house is in a tense mood now.” He expressed support for the sentiment expressed by Dikshit that CBSE and NCERT be requested to look into ways of lightening the burden on children; their childhood needs to be rescued from a demanding education bureaucracy.Certainly, the CBSE could use a lot more pedagogic self-reflection. But it is also an insurmountable fact that no matter how much CBSE modifies its curriculum, in the final analysis we have a single metric of evaluation at the high-school level. Having a single commensurable measure of student achievement is part of a search for non-discretionary, transparent criteria for admission. But it is also a tacit acknowledgment of how little trust we have in our educators. The normal set of instruments that can supplement student performance in exams — internal assessment, references, interviews, other achievements — is considered too untrustworthy and open to manipulation. Exams are going to be important, but a system in which everything boils down to them will be a recipe for undue stress. But Parliament spectacularly misdiagnosed the source of the stress. The primary source of stress on the students is not the curriculum. It is simply that quality institutions in higher education are in extremely short supply. In the current system, every marginal mark might make a difference to your prospects of admission, no matter what the curriculum. An ideal system of higher education has two attributes. There must be an adequate supply of good quality institutions. But equally importantly, the differences in the quality of institutions must be a gradual downward sloping curve. If you did not get into the best institutions, the price you pay for getting into the second best is not that high. In our case, there is a very small cluster of desirable institutions, surrounded by a sea of low quality colleges. Unless the supply and quality of higher education institutions are changed, the quest for the marginal mark will continue to produce stress on grandparents like the Lok Sabha speaker.With all due respect to the speaker and Sandeep Dikshit, nothing has destroyed higher education more than the unholy alliance of the Left and the Congress since the ’70s. Between them, they managed to run our public universities into the ground; and they created a structure of regulation for private players that ensures that very little creativity takes place in this space. It is unfair to deflect the blame for the stress on our children to the CBSE and NCERT. The responsibility lies with our political class. Like a broken record, one has to keep rehearsing the long story of why India is not a global powerhouse in higher education, and instead is miserably failing its students. But let us not delve into the past. Just look at the UPA’s recent doings. Most people agree that the licence permit regulatory system in higher education needs to be modified. What does the government do? The government has twiddled for four years. It gets some recommendations from the Knowledge Commission. And then it appoints another 27-member committee to look into the matter, a committee that seems dominated by individuals and civil servants who created this mess in the first place. This looks like a recipe for inaction. Allocations to higher education have increases under the 11th Plan; the government also wants to build 16 more central universities, three more IITs, etc. This is all well and good. But it has not given the slightest indication that it has a road map for the reform of the public university system. It fails to acknowledge that decades of decline in our PhD programmes have left us with an unfathomable shortage of teachers. Attracting faculty, which is the core of any system of higher education, will require radical reforms of the sort that are not even on the conceptual horizon of our policy-makers. Our regulatory system is already a corrupt mess. What do we do? Announce that NAAC accreditation will be made mandatory for more than 20,000 colleges. And all of this will be done via inspection. You do the mathematics on how long this will take. And you judge whether NAAC ratings exemplify the old paradigm of accountability to centralised bureaucracies, rather than empowering students to make better decisions. All that increased allocations suggest is that the UPA has a strategy for university buildings, not building universities.And even the absorption capacity for increased allocation is in doubt. Remember that the Oversight Committee had recommended increased allocations to central institutions to help them increase the intake as a result of reservations. But the actual expenditure has been a pittance compared to the extra amount allocated. Estimates indicate that the increase in expenditure from their prior levels of expenditure for the NITs, IITs and IIMs was about Rs 100 crore, Rs 80 crore and Rs 8 crore — roughly one-tenth of the additional Oversight Committee grants of Rs 780 crore, Rs 988 crore and Rs 80 crore, respectively. And, as many have pointed out, the so-called increase in allocations to central universities in this year’s budget is really all the unspent money left over from past years. We don’t know what the Supreme Court judgment on reservations will be. But this pattern of utilising the extra money allocated for that purpose last year suggests one of two things. Either the government has given up on reservations. Or it has decided not to prepare our institutions. Suppose the Supreme Court were to uphold the implementation of the quota for OBCs. Our institutions will be exactly in the same state they were last year. There has been no preparation. This is another instance of the way in which education has indeed become a numbers game. We have killed the system and now want to bloat the corpse. Perhaps the Lok Sabha speaker ought to realise that while rich students in India can secede from the system, it is the poor that suffer most by depredations his party has wreaked on both the public and the private systems. If the speaker truly feels for his granddaughter’s generation he ought not to go on and on about the syllabus. The writer is president, Centre for Policy Researchpratapbmehta@gmail.com
