A characteristic weakness of regulatory regimes in India is that they concentrate on motives and intentions rather than on likely outcomes. Nowhere is this more the case than in education. While the legislatures have often designed regulation badly, the courts have compounded these fallacies. Just to take one example from a recent court decision, in State of Andhra Pradesh v/s J.B. Education Society, the Supreme Court held that the consent of the State government is necessary before starting an engineering college and the AICTE cannot grant approval without this consent. But one of the grounds on which this determination was made is astonishing. The judgment says ‘‘the State authorities alone can decide about educational facilities and the needs of the locality. If there are more colleges in a particular area the state would not be justified in granting permission to one more college in that locality.’’

This is quite extraordinary. There may be good reasons to involve state governments in granting permissions, but this argument is premised on faulty logic many times over. Why are the Justices assuming that competition will not be good for the locality, both in terms of price and quality? What will be effect of granting quasi-monopoly rights to the existing college? Isn’t the agglomeration of institutions in a locality often a good thing for education? (Just think of Cambridge, Massachusetts). In case there is no government money involved, except for usual zoning considerations, why should the state exclude more colleges from coming up in a locality? This ruling is symptomatic of the rather odd character of our regulations.

Our regulation is faulty, because it contemplates very little place for diversity of experiments. The requirement that all private colleges grant degrees through existing universities is, with rare exceptions, a real deterrent to innovation. And it corrupts the state system further because often universities pretty much sell these affiliations. If the intent of this affiliation was quality control, the intent has failed. In the debate over regulatory regimes we also often fail to adequately take into account the general equilibrium effects of a policy, as opposed to its specific equilibrium effects. Many of us find individual private colleges in Karnataka, and their policies, distasteful from a moral or educational point of view. But there is little doubt that the existence of the private colleges movement has helped bring dynamism to the economy of this state over the long run, whereas a state like Kerala, that has all other advantages, languished because of the diminished supply of higher education. Good policy sense is probably worth more to the economy than an easy moralism impervious to prudence.

Chhattisgarh’s mode of creating private institutions was appalling. I will not discuss here the technical question of what jurisdiction the UGC should have over state universities. But the premises which the court brought to bear on the Chhattisgarh case should also be a cause of worry. Relying on its own earlier judgment in Tamil Nadu and Anr. v. Adhiyaman Educational and Research Institute, the court has defined the power conferred on the UGC under item 66 List 1 as follows:

‘‘The expression ‘coordination’ used in Entry 66 of the Union List of the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution does not merely mean evaluation. It means harmonisation with a view to form a uniform pattern for a concerted action according to a certain design scheme or plan of development. It therefore includes action not only for the removal of disparities of standards, but also for the occurrence of such disparities.’’

To be honest, it is difficult to fathom what this means. If one takes the most obvious interpretation then this claim does not make too much sense. Higher education is fundamentally about distinction. What would an education system where there was no disparity of standards across institutions look like? The general goal should be that average quality of education improves. But to suppose that the UGC should be empowered to prevent all disparities across thousands of institutions is odd, to say the least. The only way disparities can be prevented from arising is by laying greater premium on the lowest common denominator.

Again, the main thrust of this argument is to prevent diversity of institutional forms. We will need all kinds of institutions: some that educate the bright and others that cater to the not so bright, and all combinations in between; some that are experimental in their pedagogy and others that are traditional. In effect we have confused the upholding of standards with standardisation. It is not an accident that among the key words the court uses in this judgment, the terms ‘‘uniformity’’ and ‘‘homogenisation’’ make their appearance at crucial points in the argument.

The suspicion of diversity is also apparent in the way we have regulated admissions. There are two legitimate worries about admissions processes, namely, that they should not be too arbitrary, and they must not be based on criteria that are irrelevant to the pedagogic mission of the institution. But our fear of the exercise of discretionary power has led to a faulty conclusion: that we need simple and objective yardsticks of merit, through standardised tests and exams, or single dimensional criteria. And the courts have seen these criteria as the only way an institution can signal non-arbitrariness. Thus even weightage granted to interviews has been regulated.

The oddity of our approach to exams is that we convert threshold benchmarks into the predominant criteria of admission. Standardised exams can and should be, at most one criterion that goes into determining admission. Whatever one’s views on proper admission procedures, the central question remains: Why cannot institutions be granted autonomy over the academic criteria that determine whom they wish to educate? And again, different institutions, depending upon their objectives, will use different mixes of criteria. Fundamentally what our excessive fear of discretion boils down to is this: we do not trust individuals or institutions. But then every tyranny insinuates itself by characterising society as untrustworthy.

The writer is President, Centre for Policy Research. The views expressed here are personal.

email: pratapbmehta@yahoo.co.in

PART I

PART III