Do something, Mr 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

... contd.

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