Charity begins at Oxford

Charity begins at Oxford

The Vajpayee government has, indeed, perfected the art of `slogan Swadeshi, action Videshi', certainly in the field of education. Its decision to endow Oxford University's Oriental Studies department with Rs 12.23 crore and the Chicago University-based American Institute of Indian Studies with Rs 1.5 crore, while higher education at home suffers from a massive cash crunch smacks of rank hypocrisy. In fact, the combined funding of these two endowments alone is more than half the Rs 20 crore annual budget of the Indian Council of Social Science Research, which is today in a state of penury. The annual budget of the Indian Council of Historical Research is about Rs 4 crore. The Indian government's grant to Oxford University alone could have run three such institutions, producing hundreds of better history books than those produced by an `Orientalist don' in England. At a time when, with the exception of a handful of central universities, most state-run universities do not even have the funds to pay lecturers andprofessors the University Grants Commission guaranteed salaries, and allocate funds even to maintain elementary laboratory equipment in colleges all over the country, the government is unashamedly squandering away public money on sops and subsidies to cash-rich Western universities.

Why is the begging bowl in the hands of the West for a change? The Margaret Thatcher years in Britain witnessed a massive cutting of funds to higher education. The radical Oxford faculty and students, guilty of denying Thatcher her honorary doctorate, suffered the most. The first departments to be affected were Oriental studies. The scenario was repeated in the United States. During the mild economic recession of the early 90s the US policymakers followed the Thatcherite model in hacking funds to universities. The affected departments were once more cultural and area studies. On top of that the PL-480 rupee funds had dried up. This affected the South Asian departments particularly adversely. In the US, some of the cuts were offset by endowments built up at Stanford and Berkeley by the voluntary efforts of the Non-resident Indian community. Most of these efforts, however, were diverted to research on the Indian diaspora. Traditional subcontinental concerns suffered. But that should be the West's problem, notours.

If External Affairs minister Jaswant Singh gets his `dream realised' by funding Oxford, he should ask his prosperous cousins, the ex-Maharajahs of Rajasthan to fund it. After all, the Nissan Foundation funds the Japanese studies at Oxford, not the Japanese government. Chicago is a private institution and so is the AIIS, funded largely by the Smithsonian Foundation. And even if some Asian tigers from Southeast Asia have begun public funding of some chairs at some of these Western universities, the plight of their universities at home is certainly not as pitiable as ours. Ironically, it has become fashionable to provide sops and subsidies to education abroad and unfashionable to provide it at home. Most public funding of research abroad is any way used to build patron-client relationships. Soon the offsprings of neta-babus will be researching ethnic subjects at Oxford at the taxpayers' expense.