Expansion and division games

The Moily Oversight Committee, entrusted with coming up with a strategy to implement the proposed OBC quotas in Central institutions, had a thankless task: to come up with a plan to expand current institutional strength by almost 30 per cent within two-three years. In the context of Israel’s recent actions in Lebanon, a British diplomat is reported to have said,”If you redouble your efforts after an error, chances are you will square the error.” While the final report is not yet out, there are some interesting silences in the interim report and it looks increasingly likely we will indeed square the error as far as institutions of higher learning go. While the committee stresses achieving expansion in a way that is compatible with excellence, in the end the only prop it has for quality enhancement is the obscure hope Hegel once articulated: quantity can mysteriously turn into quality.

There are some crucial ambiguities in the interim reports which might have a decisive impact on how OBC quotas will be implemented. For one, current thinking appears to be that the final cut-offs for eligibility be left to the institutions themselves. A lot will turn on how much leeway institutions have in this matter. If the cut-off is kept high you might have a pipeline problem, in terms of finding the number of eligible candidates. On the other hand, if the quotas are filled even with high cut-offs, then the argument for reservations actually becomes redundant. Either way reservation as a targeted policy fails. The third possibility, as has happened earlier, is a race to the bottom and we do not have any assurance that this won’t indeed happen.

But while the committee’s mandate excluded consideration of more sensible policies of affirmative action, some had still hoped that it might leverage this opportunity to recommend fundamental reforms in higher education. But far from initiating those changes, its purely statistical approach to the issue will exacerbate the problems, not solve them. To begin with, it is high time we acknowledged that the size of institutions here is a real obstacle to their quality. IITs and IIMs admit barely a few thousand, but they are fundamentally designed this way. One of the committee members asked that if MIT admits 5000 students, why can’t each IIT? But this analogy is dubious because MIT is more like a university and has the entire gamut of programmes a university offers. The real Achilles heel is the universities. Universities like Delhi, Mumbai and Osmania already have over 1,50,000 students. They cannot respond to developments in knowledge simply because their structure has to be created through negotiation with thousands of teachers and pedagogic techniques do not cater to individuality and excellence but to homogenisation and standardised exams. It is absolutely amazing that we think that we can expand institutional capacity by 30 per cent without first adding hundreds of new institutions. Do we want to invest all new resources into expanding current disciplinary matrixes? Shouldn’t expansion mean reconfiguring knowledge systems rather than blindly expanding encrusted disciplines? Rather than think of a new architecture for universities which makes them more nimble, the committee has been formulaic in its approach. Expanding current institutions is like making immovable giants even more immobile.

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