There are usually two reasons why governments appoint commissions. One, because they genuinely want to make changes and need information on how and what to do; and two, when they want to postpone necessary changes for as long as possible. It saddens me to report this week that the celebrated National Knowledge Commission, headed by the venerable Sam Pitroda, falls into the second category. This has been my view for some time now and it was confirmed last week when Pitroda made a comment in Ahmedabad that seemed to come from the depths of despair.
As reported in this newspaper, this is what Pitroda said: “India, with her huge population of young people, can become the workforce of the world. All we need is rapid expansion and reforms in education. We have 370 universities when we need 1,500. Right now only ten per cent of our children get college education. More than 550 million young people are in need of education and the progress of the education sector in terms of opening more colleges and universities is not fast enough.”
If this is what the chairman of the knowledge commission is saying, then it is clear that neither the prime minister nor his boss is paying any attention to the dire straits in which the Indian education system now finds itself. Things are so bad that finding a place in an Indian college has become impossible for students who do not score impossibly high marks. We must be the only country in the world where a student can lose a college seat after scoring 90 per cent marks because the ‘cut-off point’ that year happens to be 97 per cent. The pressure is so overwhelming on both students and parents that when it comes to college admission time, the most centred people verge on nervous breakdowns.
We must also be one of the few countries in the world where schoolchildren kill themselves at exam time because the pressures of the system they work under are so murderous. If the end result was a fine education, it might still be alright, but usually it is children who master the art of learning by rote who make it to the top and not those who might have real imagination and intelligence.
