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Misplaced Emphasis Misguided Policies

By Kashif Mansoor

09 February, 2016
Countercurrents.org

In the Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-17) India has adopted a ‘faster more inclusive and sustainable growth’ as the approach, so that it could embark upon more broad based improvement in living standards of all sections of people by fostering their inclusion as participatory agents in the growth process. Education is the fundamental key, in addition to other equally important factors like health, employment, sanitation, housing, to realizing this goal. The inclusion can be made possible if the people of the country are empowered to play a role in the growth process. The process will then become sustainable. That empowering capability is developed by educating them. What matters to the development path is how a country views education and how it frames public policy in this regard.

The value of education can’t be ignored ever. But Alas!! The present ruling government is unaware of its impact and long term spillover effects. Or more appropriately, it turns its bull’s eyes away from any sensible academic discussions on education in the frenzy garb of its political cow. The way the NDA-led BJP government is pursuing the educational policy is ghastly regressive, counterproductive, anti-nationalist and discriminatory as well.

The government’s move to scrap the non-NET fellowship from the next academic year is an elitist appropriation of economic gains, exclusionary in nature and deliberate institutional barrier to the upward mobility of the disadvantaged sections. Non-NET scholarships have served as big financial support to most of the students whose parents could not sponsor their higher studies. Moreover this will have long term disastrous repercussions in terms of discouraging students to go for doctoral studies and weakening the diversity and multiplicity of knowledge production. The budget cuts in institutions of higher learning especially in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is yet another severe blow. CSIR has been asked by the Ministry of Science and Technology to start self-financing projects and send in their monthly reports on the progress of their researches. CSIR is a premier industrial R&D organization in the country which is dedicated to developing cutting edge innovation and technology in various areas including biotechnology, nanotechnology, genomics, environmental engineering, geophysics, chemicals drugs etc. The Modi government thinks that dhoti wearing pundits, in Rajnath Singh’s parlance, are better equipped with their indigenous panchanga skills. !! The number of CSIR fellowships has also been reduced. The same fate has also fallen upon HIV/AIDS related research centers. Where is the public money going, if not spent on financing education, health? Narendra Modi’s skill development program can’t be realized without proper emphasis on education and well-guided policies.

Education in general and higher education in particular have important functions some of which can be listed as; the development of new knowledge, training of qualified personnel for teaching, the provision of services to the society and academic participation in criticism of public policy. All these functions can be better fulfilled if we see education as a public good (financed by state institutions) at least up to secondary level and higher education as a merit good (subsidized by state) rather than as a purely marketable good in which case the much hyped rationale of privatization (marketisation) is called for. Another argument which is often cited for the privatization or what amounts to commercialization is that the government is fiscally constrained in investing into education and also inefficient. Those who make such claims happen to forget that the amount of forgone tax from the corporate is in excess of what is needed. In 2012-13 the taxes forgone to the companies turned out to be worth Rs 573627 crores, which is well above the estimated investment of $100 billion, as predicted by National Knowledge Commission. It is painfully true that the government is gifting the corporate such sums of money every year at the cost of larger public welfare. It all boils down to the comparisons of competing policy prescriptions. The government ought to take into account the fact that education at all levels with special focus on higher learning has long term impact. It suffices well to argue, without having to scribble the mind and go into deep analytical observation, that education plays a foundational supportive role in economic development. It is education that can liberate people from the shackles of fatal poverty and traps of pervasive inequalities and it can give them real value of life.

The inefficiency argument is well refuted by the past experiences of countries like Russia, China and US. These countries have gone for public funding of education and also spent high proportions of their GDP on education. India in contrast still spends not more than 3.3% of GDP on education. And much smaller than this goes to higher education. Higher education in our country has been long neglected even to the celebrated progress of primary and secondary education. We should take a relook at the 1993-94 Annual Report of MHRD which said, “The higher education system in the country is now sufficiently developed to meet the nation’s requirements. The unmet demand for higher education is not considered economically viable.” There has been continuous decline in the allocations to education sector. The irony is that this has happened despite the increase in GDP. The case should have been of a progressive allocation of GDP in education with the economic growth.

The cause of concerns raised above and what we have seen as a massive #occupy UGC# protest for the last 2 months can be traced back to 1986 when the government in its New Education Policy (1986-92) allowed private investment into higher education. With the stabilization and structural adjustment package which was adopted in the big 1991 economic reforms, this got firmly accentuated. Like other commodities, education also began to be treated like commodity which has a high price tag with it. The commoditization of education in turn led to the mushrooming of private institutions and colleges with the simultaneous withdrawal of the government form the expansionary role and quality check of public-funded universities and colleges. The compromise was even done in the case of regulating the private investors properly with due considerations of certain minimum obligations on them to be met failing which they should be penalized. Then came Ambani-Birla committee in April 2000 which advocated that higher education can be left to market forces. All these culminated finally in the offering of higher education to WTO under General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) in 2005.

UPA II tried to remove all hurdles in this regard by passing various bills including the Higher Education and Research Bill which demanded the complete abolition of bodies like UGC, Medical Council of India, and All India Council for Technical Education and National Council for Teacher Education. However the government failed to pass these bills, successive governments have dented the education system.

The offer to WTO has made the higher education a marketable commercial service. This step of the government has not only entailed the loss of sovereignty and autonomy in syllabi, pedagogy, and research methods into the hands of WTO-GATS but has also meant a level playing field for the international and domestic institutions. The latter means that if the government gives some grants to its domestic institution, it has to give the same grants to the international institution which will be set up in our domestic country.

Students will be seen as customers and teachers as service providers. The privatization will give boost to only those courses which can fetch easy and quick corporate jobs. This is more disastrous for those poor and economically backward people who can’t afford to ‘buy’ education form the rapacious profiteering ‘education’ companies. The obvious consequences would be largely aggravated social divide and highly entrenched economic inequalities, furthering the marginalized from the mainstream. That would feed into worsening their political participation and representation. Such neo-liberal policy will create an ‘inequality of education’ which will perpetuate inequalities of other sorts.

More than half of India’s population is young (15-24 years). This age cohort is the future endowment of the nation. It all depends on the government whether it wants to equip them properly and adequately so that they can be the harbinger of good fortune to the economy and herald of an equitable society or not. Nevertheless danger now seems less avoidable.

Kashif Mansoor, M.Phil Economics, Centre for Development Studies(JNU), Trivandrum, Kerala



 



 

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