The Public Universities Act 2016, Maharashtra, seeks to set up a Higher and Professional Education Finance Corporation, giving further impetus to commercialisation of higher education, denying affordable quality education to the poor and marginalised.
The liberalisation of economy has resulted in hijacking the agenda of education by vested interests. The State is abdicating its social responsibility by privatising education. It is a short sighted approach. As the noble laureate Amartya Sen says “India is trying to be the first country to become an industrial giant with an illiterate and unhealthy labour force.”
According to the HRD Ministry’s All India Survey on Higher Education, 34.2 million students were enrolled in institutions of higher education in 2014-15, with 22 million students (65%) in private institutions. Around 53% college students are enrolled in private institutions because there are not enough public higher educational institutions. While there is high demand for public higher educational institutions, successive governments have failed to meet the demand, pushing students towards expensive and, very often, low quality private education.
In 1950, the number of universities in India was just 20. And by June 2017, the number rose to 819 — 47 central, 367 state, and 123 deemed and 282 private universities. The TSR Subramanian Committee Report 2016 says uncontrolled privatisation of higher education has resulted in the proliferation of private institutions. In the process of expansion of institutions of higher learning, the quality of education has suffered immensely. This is because, as Ramachandra Guha says, “the elevation of quantity over quality, the contempt for scholarship and research among our political and bureaucratic elite and the fact that the choice of Vice Chancellors and IIT Directors is not left to academics themselves but directed by political calculations”.
The French Economist Thomas Piketty, author of the book Capitalism and Democracy says, “every strong capitalist society in the world and every successful historical experience of capitalist development did include a very strong collective effort to invest in public education. All capitalist countries in the world have invested in public education and in more inclusive development than what India is doing now”. He warns that though the capitalism had brought rising affluence and broken down bureaucratic forms of power, it had created rising inequality.
As per the National Achievement Survey 2017 of government schools, conducted by the NCERT, a class VII student could barely answer 40% of the questions in maths, science and social studies. This poor quality is due to “insufficient investment in public education and the government’s inability to implement the Right to Education Act, in letter and spirit”. Therefore, raising the allocation of funds for education to at least 6% of GDP, rather than privatisation, is the best bet to improve the quality of education, right from primary to higher. Speaking about the conditions of government schools in urban areas, Ambarish Rai, national convener, RTE Forum, says “with crowded classrooms, insufficient number of teachers and students not getting books and uniforms on time, the government schools are in a pathetic condition.” There is shortage of at least 10 lakh trained teachers in government schools. As per the report of the National University of Educational Planning and Administration 2014-15, only 40% elementary schools have regular Head Masters.
It is ironical that in a massively poor country, investment in education is not a priority for the State. No doubt the quality of education has deteriorated over the years. Take for instance Mumbai University — there are about 750 colleges, out of which only 200 are aided. Teachers are employed on year-to-year contract basis. They have no security of service and the salaries they receive are a pittance. This is true of teachers working in unaided and self-financing institutions across the country. The Public Universities Act 2016, Maharashtra, seeks to set up a Higher and Professional Education Finance Corporation, giving further impetus to commercialisation of higher education, denying affordable quality education to the poor and marginalised.
The privatisation of education has benefited mainly the parallel system of coaching classes. The middle and even the lower class people are spending a fortune on their wards’ education by enrolling them in coaching classes. Kota in Rajasthan is a classic example of how coaching classes have turned themselves into factories. The students are under tremendous pressure to perform with no time to rest and relax. Some 24 students, taking tuitions at these coaching factories, have committed suicide in 2017, unable to cope up with the rigorous schedule of the coaching classes. And last year, nearly 450 teenagers in AP and Telangana have committed suicide, due to the pressure of academic performance. This is the price of commercialisation of education.
The privatisation should not be an alibi for the corrupt and inefficient functioning of public educational institutions. The indiscriminate privatisation of education has deprived the children of weaker section and under privileged the opportunity to receive quality education. The state is neither funding their education, nor are they able to afford the cost of private education. It is not a level playing field.
The students of Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai have been protesting against the withdrawal of exemption from fees for SC, ST and OBC students, entitled to the Government of India Post Matric Scholarship (GOI-PMS). Some of these students’ parents are manual scavengers, migrants and landless labourers. The teachers say “the changes in government policy pointed toward a shift to neo-liberal approach making education privatised and profit-oriented making access to all difficult.” The Centre says that backward class students from private deemed universities and self financed institutions are not eligible for the GOI-PMS. The TISS, being a private deemed-to-be university, is facing an identity crisis, a sign of more trouble for its poor students.
The HRD Ministry’s proposal to establish 20 institutions of eminence is a good idea, but its credibility rests on the manner in which the Empowered Experts Committee is constituted to choose them. Nonetheless, the priority should be to arrest the decline of public educational institutions and ensure overall quality of education in universities across the country so that higher education is accessible to one and all.
G Ramachandram is a professor of Political Science and a retired Principal. He has published his Magnus Opus
‘The Trial by Fire: Memoirs of a College Principal’.
