The Imbalance in Education in India

Dr M N Buch, 

Dean, Centre for Governance and Political Studies, VIF

Education is a multi-layered cake in which the icing and decoration is on the top, in which the base is the foundation on which the whole system rests. Obviously the base of every education system has to be the entry point nursery, kindergarten, primary, middle level, high and higher secondary schools. If the schools, by and large, are of a certain standard in which the objective is to impart education rather than just teach literacy, the general standard of all students, regardless of caste, creed, social or economic status will be of at least a minimum acceptable level. The strength of the American Public School System (in India that would be the Government School System) is that in the matter of funding in the public domain there is a degree of equality, though richer communities are free, through the School District Board, to raise additional funds to upgrade the school infrastructure. The principle of bussing or using school buses to transport school children to even distant schools where they might have been admitted, is a great leveller because through this that country has been able to substantially reduce racial discrimination by admitting and transporting white children to black majority schools and vice versa. This is not to state that the American school system is ideal, but because the vast majority of children study in schools in the public domain, the average American child has access to a fairly good quality school from the earliest age.

The situation is totally different in India. The Right to Education Act notwithstanding, the standard of government, panchayat and municipal schools is abysmal and the difference between rural schools and urban schools is a veritable chasm. The infrastructure in terms of buildings, furniture, teaching aids and laboratories is disgraceful, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan notwithstanding. In rural areas in many places teachers are more often absent than present, a number of schools are single teacher, learning is by rote and it is a rare and unusual village teacher or teacher in a government school in the towns who looks upon it as his duty to arouse the curiosity of children and make them partners in the learning process. Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was fortunate in that in his village in Rameshwaram he had a teacher whose dedication ultimately produced a great scientist who went on to become the President of India. I had the fortune to run across Pannalal Pawar in Neempani Village of Betul District who, in the Tribal Welfare Department, ran with great imagination a primary school. He made children partners in the process of learning, fish keeping, raising poultry and cultivating a vegetable garden. Apart from reading and writing he taught them the skills which would make them better farmers and he imbued in the children a desire for education.

In the bleak landscape of school education we have the refreshing oasis of about 560 Navodaya Schools located in rural areas, admitting only rural children, with a decent physical and educational infrastructure, reasonably good teachers, complete residential facilities in which all the children are educated, fed and looked after free of cost. For some years now the children from these schools have put in the best performance of all schools in CBSE examinations. We need thousands of such schools and whereas the Prime Minister sanctioned 6000 of them, our then HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal and the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, virtually torpedoed the scheme by introducing the red herring of the PPP mode. With such policy makers how can India educate itself?

I have dwelt on schools at length because with the public sector failing to provide that number of schools which can give us universal education of a reasonable standard, schools in the private sector have proliferated. There are high fee charging so-called public schools and a very large number of high fee charging schools which are not a part of the Headmasters Conference, that is, they are not residential public schools on the model of the British public schools such as Eton and Harrow. Though these schools charge a high fee and their infrastructure is better than that of government schools, the standard of education imparted is very patchy. There are some very good schools but the vast majority of them are just commercial ventures which mint money because of the general hunger for education, impart a degree of literacy which can lead to a higher secondary certificate, but do not educate in the sense of developing the young minds. Our good schools are better than anything that the rest of the world offers. Our average schools are mediocre in the extreme and the average government or private school is the pits. On this huge, unstable, unanchored foundation of schools, which is shaky and liable to collapse, we are trying to build a multi tiered cake or a pyramid in which the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research, the Indian Institutes of Management, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Institutes of Information Technology, the National Institutes of Technology and Central Universities are at the apex.

A mountain top is only as stable as the base of the mountain and if that base is flawed the mountain can topple any time. The base, the foundation, is not only the school; it is also a mofussil college and the state university. Both are extremely poor examples of an education system, which form the ground floor of the structure. For example, Bhopal has more than one hundred so-called colleges of science and technology in the private sector. The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Information Technology have a faculty shortage of approximately 45 percent. The National Institutes of Technology are no better. Where will all these private colleges of technology get teachers? We need 8000 Ph.D. in technology every year if we are to feed both the research sector and the education sector. We produce only 800 per year. The private colleges, therefore, use fresh graduates to become teachers on contract and these people, who are hardly educated themselves, can certainly not educate the children whose fate is put in their hands. The Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Gwalior is running a very successful Training for Professionals (TFP) course of three months duration and now this has been upgraded to an advanced course. The objective is to bring in graduates from lower level institutes of technology and engineering and through intensive training teach them both soft and hard skills. It is amazing how much has to be taught to students who have been exposed to four years of so-called technical education. IIITM, Gwalior is only scratching at the surface because the maximum intake of a course is fifty, three courses are run every year and one hundred and fifty persons acquire the skills necessary for them to become employable. The number of so-called engineering graduates runs into lakhs. Incidentally, TFP was introduced in many Indian Institutes of Technology and National Institutes of Technology but IIITM, Gwalior is the only one which has successfully run the programme. The point being made is that the vast majority of our so-called colleges of technology are producing a product which has actually not been educated at all.

That brings us to the apex institutions. The feeders of these institutes, the schools, generally do not produce the students who can imbibe higher education. Though a larger number of people from rural areas are now beginning to compete, by and large it is the same group of elitist schools which produce students who are admitted to universities such as Delhi University, to the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Information Technology, the Indian Institutes of Science, Education and Research and the Indian Institutes of Management. These students are the cream of the cream but all come from a limited collection. To these one can add the students who have come through crammers as represented by coaching classes in places such as Kota, but whereas they have learnt the ability to pass an entrance examination it is doubtful whether their minds have been developed by the coaching classes to a level where they can both assimilate the education given in our apex institutions and to grasp the relevance of research and then set their minds in a research mode. With the brightest students in India neither the IIsT nor the IIsM have a research record which comes anywhere near such universities as Cambridge, Oxford Sorbonne, the Berlin Technical University, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, MIT, the University of California, Berkley or Leyland Stanford.

The infrastructure in our institutes is adequate for research, the teachers are highly qualified, the students are very bright but the environment for research is not there, with the result that these top institutions are looked upon more as training grounds for increasing one’s employability, finding a job which gives a very high salary and in moving into the corporate world here and abroad. To my mind if these institutes become only employment centres then they can hardly be called educational institutions.

For our top level institutes of technology to achieve both their potential and their objective we need to strengthen our entire system of technical education in which the average engineering college is given the infrastructure and the faculty which can impart good undergraduate education. It is these students who on graduation will either move to employment, mainly in the public sector, or will pursue higher studies in an NIT, IIIT or IIT. These apex institutes could then become vibrant centres of academic activity and research. The removal of the present imbalance is the responsibility of government. Unfortunately government in the Ministry of Human Resource Development is far too busy using education as a political tool than in addressing basic questions of education at school and college level and, therefore, the reforms we need are not only on the back burner—they are in deep cold storage.

There is another form of imbalance which escapes our notice on which we must focus. Before I proceed to discuss this let me add that the imbalance in the field of technology and science is reflected in other fields also, such as medical education and agriculture education and research. That, however, calls for a separate paper. To return to the subject in hand, education is not a function of Science and Technology alone. Equally important are the Humanities, Social Sciences and Liberal Arts. When I joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1957 engineers and doctors of medicine were prohibited from appearing in the UPSC examination for Civil Services. This was because it was felt that since the nation has invested so much in teaching a student to be an engineer or doctor, both professions which are extremely valuable to the nation, it would be a complete waste of money and effort to divert this talent to the mundane task of administration. Therefore, students who had studied Economics, History, Physics and Chemistry, English Literature, Sociology and allied subjects dominated the Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Foreign Service. When, however, the doors were thrown open to doctors and engineers and the format of the examination changed so that objective tests replaced the more analytical narrative form of questions and answers the balance tilted in favour of people from the technology stream.

What students study largely depends on what lies at the end of the course of studies. If a student of technology has a better chance of getting a job in government, in the public sector or in the corporate world, why should a student study History, Literature, Arts or Economic? Therefore, gradually the status and level of Humanities, Liberal Arts and Social Sciences declined, not only in India but in most parts of the world and now there is a very real fear that whereas education which narrows the focus of a student on to a particular subject is gaining ground, the more widely focused education which develops a student’s mind all-round and his liberal outlook is declining. This has had a cascading effect on value systems, administration, environment awareness and the decline of a class of citizens that is concerned with good government, national integration, integrity and personal honesty.

We need to do a great deal of thinking on the interaction between the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Liberal Arts, Management, Technology and Sciences. We need a very solid injection of Humanities and Social Science education in our Institutes of Technology and Management so that these disciplines act as the pivot around which the more specific disciplines evolve and develop and the student himself becomes a much more well-rounded person. We also need to encourage students to go in for liberal education because it is this which will evolve a sense of values, morality, of liberal thoughts and, therefore, develop a liberal, democratic, honest and decent society. Has the Ministry of Human Resource Development even thought of these ideas, much less articulated them? If India is to continue to be a civilisation to be proud of then a Panini will have to be put on the same pedestal as an Aryabhat because if a great scientist is of importance to India, a Kabir with his down-to-earth philosophy is equally important. The civilisational base of India needs this. If technology is the servant of man, if untamed technology can alter the physical, climatic and environmental contours of earth, then the man using technology has to be more than a scientist, a technologist, and a person expert in physical things. He has to be sentient and sensitive, liberal in thought and action, attuned to nature, synchronised with people, personally honest and, in short, what we called civilized. To quote Rousseau, “The noblest work in education is to make a reasoning man …” Even to know that Rousseau existed calls for more than technical education. It needs a far ranging mind that spans the whole universe. Of course, the wonder of technology is that helps us to locate Rousseau, the wonder of the mind is that it helps us to understand him. We need both.

Things Fall Apart, the Centre Will Not Hold

Dr M N Buch, 

Dean, Centre for Governance and Political Studies, VIF

In 1947, despite the fact that Britain was the imperial power and India was the Indian Empire of the British Sovereign, the British did leave behind certain legacies, certain institutions, which did provide us the framework of administration and which still forms the skeleton and the sinews of our republic. India was governed by laws and we are a society of laws. At the level of the District and Sessions Court, the High Court and the Federal Court (now Supreme Court), the Judiciary was independent of the Executive and though the Magistracy worked under the District Magistrate the District and Sessions Judge exercised powers of both superintendence and supervision over the magistracy, apart from judicial superiority. The Legislature was functional both at the Centre and in the States (then Provinces) and there was an organised Executive consisting of the Covenanted Services (now the All India Services), the Central Services and Provincial Services. The Police was a part of civil government and though a servant of the law it worked under the superintendence of government. However, in the investigation and prosecution of offences the police enjoyed complete autonomy under the Code of Criminal Procedure, a position reinforced by the provisions of Chapter XII Cr.P.C., 1973. The difference between the Code of Criminal Procedure of 1861 and 1898 and the present Cr.P.C. is that the present law brings about total separation of the Judiciary from the Executive even at magisterial level and whereas the Executive Magistracy continues to function under the District Magistrate and is no longer under the supervision of the Sessions Judge, the Judicial Magistracy now stands subordinated to the Chief Judicial Magistrate who, in turn, is subordinate to the District and Sessions Judge.

The nearest thing to a Constitution that British India had was the Government of India Act 1935. This gave India a federal structure in which the centripetal forces were strong and which moved India towards a representational democracy. The Constitution of India as adopted by the Constituent Assembly on 26.11.1949 and made effective from 26th January 1950 borrows heavily from the Government of India Act, 1935, especially in terms of the relationship between the Union and the States. The centripetal character of the Government of India Act 1935 is carried forward in the Constitution of India. Of course we have borrowed from other democratic constitutions also and the Chapter on Fundamental Rights is inspired by the Bill of Rights which forms a part of the American Constitution. Certainly the British, as represented by the Viceroy, did have overriding powers, especially in matters relating to the maintenance of the empire, but seeds of independent, republican India were undoubtedly sown by the Government of India Act 1935. It would be churlish to deny this. The major contribution of our Constitution is that it did away with limited franchise, it recognised all citizens as equals, it extended the constitutional right of equality before law to all persons within the territory of India by Article 14, it eliminated separate electorates, it introduced universal adult suffrage under Article 326 and gave every Indian an equal say through his vote on who will govern India and how it will be governed. This is no mean achievement for a country which virtually shifted overnight from imperial rule to complete independence and that, too, in the midst of strife caused by partition and the massacres which went with it. This happened largely because the British left us the basic infrastructure of a State and our leaders were wise enough to not only keep it intact but to strengthen it. Pakistan lapsed into military dictatorship, despite the fact that we shared a common system and heritage of administration, because Pakistan had no leaders worth the name. The paths of India and Pakistan have diverged completely and whereas our democracy is strong enough to withstand even the onslaught on it between 1975-1977 through declaration of Emergency by Indira Gandhi, Pakistan continues to be just one step away from total chaos.

The first two decades of independence were glorious. The Nehruvian version of a planned economy resulted in massive investment, largely in the public sector, which created the basic capital goods industry in which we were lacking, built the infrastructure of roads, railways, power, irrigation and other key elements of a modern State, revolutionalised agriculture through the Green Revolution and lifted India from the depth of poverty and backwardness to a level where it began to be recognised as a State with great potential. Because the dream of Nehru was socialist, equity was at the core of all development and certainly land reforms gave the farmer hope and the public sector kept the predatory private sector at bay. The present day votaries of liberalisation and privatisation would find these words anathema, but they are too young to have seen the India into which I was born, in which a total of five thousand towns and villages were electrified (India has 5.5 lakh villages), the tiller of the soil was not its owner and we had just staggered out of the shock of the Bengal famine which killed over three million people. These economists, these acolytes of the private sector, who now denounce socialism, would probably not have reached the present place of eminence but for the institutions of higher learning created by the State. Macaulay may have made some Indians literate, but it is Nehru and Maulana Azad who made us educated. The Indian Institutes of Management which were not then the predatory agents of the corporate world, both to provide them employable youngsters and to train them at the cost of the State, charged a modest fee and created management cadres which have served the newly emerging corporate India with great distinction. This is because the fees structure was affordable, the State bore the cost of education, the students were not under pressure to get really high paying jobs because it was government which had invested in their education and, therefore, they were in a position to imbibe education rather than merely improve their own employability. The Indian Institutes of Technology and the Agriculture Universities such as the Punjab Agriculture University, the Pant Agriculture University and Jawaharlal Nehru Agriculture University produced experts in technology, agricultural science and veterinary science who on the one hand propelled India into the space age and on the other converted India into a country of agricultural surplus. It is the State which played the lead role and this is something we must never forget. Today IIsM charge a cripplingly high fee and institutions such as Indian School of Business at Hyderabad and Mohali in the private sector charge a fee which would put Harvard to shame. This has driven any desire for real education out of the management students and made them strive for that skill which will make them fit for high salary corporate employment. The day the Indian Institutes of Technology follow suit, higher education in India will take a nosedive.

Growth has both a positive and a negative side. Without a certain basic level of the economy the nation would be one in which resources are scarce and the economy and psyche of its people will both be coloured by a scarcity syndrome. In an environment of scarcity where there is a cut-throat competition for available resources, it is but natural that the law of the jungle will prevail, the strong will corner the major part of resources and the weak will be reduced to a level of serfdom. Let me give one example. Anyone who visits both Pakistan and India is shocked by the low level of agricultural productivity in Pakistan and is impressed by how far India has developed in agriculture. Not that we do not have drought and hardship from time to time, as is happening in Maharashtra this year, but thanks to Verghese Kurien we are the world’s biggest producer of milk, thanks to Y.S. Parmar we are one of the largest apple producers and because our land reforms have made the tiller of the soil its owner, the incentive to invest in long term improvement is strong and, therefore, whether it is wheat, soya bean or paddy even States like Bihar have moved into an era of surplus. By contrast in Pakistan 120 families own the major part of agricultural land and because the system of tenure and tillage is feudal, despite having the largest perennial irrigation system in the world, the Indus irrigation system, Pakistan’s agriculture is in dire strait. There are many amongst us who decry land reforms because according to them business like capital investment is thereby precluded from agriculture. I have never heard such hogwash in all my life because if we take the cumulative investment made by small farmers, with very encouraging results, it far exceeds the investment that would have been made had agriculture been made over to the corporate world. All this has been possible because India claims to be a socialist republic, not in terms of dogmatic socialism but certainly as an economy in which equity and social justice are the ruling principles and, therefore, land reform became the sine qua non of equitable government.

This is not an essay on socialism and undoubtedly many elements of the Nehruvian model are in tatters. The politics of the country is highly fragmented and fragile and because the desire for power has completely overtaken the desire for service, politics has become immoral, venal and totally unprincipled. There is so much corruption, not only at policy making level but right down to the lowest functionary with whom a citizen may be forced to interact, that we are almost beginning to compete with Kuomintang China. There is no area of endeavour, public or private, in which money, muscle power, intrigue, violence and cheating are not the dominant factors. India was considered a spiritual nation, but now spirituality is replaced by superstition and materialism has eroded value systems. In some ways the country is beginning to resemble a cartoon in which there is a long line of fish ranging from minnow to shark. The larger fish is trying to swallow the smaller one virtually ad infinitum, with the ultimate target being the minnow. Whether it is politics, or business, or social organisation, the largest predator is the one who is bound to win. This is the very antithesis of the society we must try and create so that the words of the Preamble, “Justice, social, economic and political” come true.

The much wider question of ethics, morality, principled politics and good, effective government will be addressed a little later, but let us first see what went wrong with our model of planned development. One can consider here two different models, the Soviet plus Mahalanobis model of a much milder one of state planning as adopted by India; and the Meiji era model that Japan adopted after the Meiji revolution. As the West impacted Japan and that country watched in shock and awe how Commodore Perry’s small American fleet with modern firepower easily overcame the Japanese forces. The Shogunate was overthrown, the Emperor, or Meiji, assumed power and Japan decided to modernise. Being a highly disciplined and organised people the Japanese sent droves of students to foreign universities to acquire a modern, scientific and technical education and the State made heavy capital investment in modern industry. The Japanese economy was totally state driven then, but the great business house, the Zaibastu, were co-opted very early to build and operate the economy. Being practical people the Japanese constantly reviewed development plans and as the business houses acquired skills, managerial ability and trained manpower, the State stepped back, let private business manage industry and increasingly adopted the role of a helper, a facilitator, but also a very strong regulator.

By contrast in India we just allowed the public sector to bloat itself. For the politician it became a cow to be milked for personal profit and a venue for extending patronage. All public sector undertakings became grossly over stuffed, with efficiency being in inverse proportion to staff expansion. Corrupt politicians corrupted the managers and almost the entire public sector became a byword for mismanagement, corruption, inefficiency, indiscipline --- with almost all undertakings making heavy losses and undermining the economy. Because we did not review, evaluate, step back where necessary, co-opt the private sector as it matured , we have brought the entire model into disrepute. Perhaps wholesale disinvestment is not the answer because today the private sector is also thoroughly corrupt and inefficient, but we need to loosen the control of government, give genuine autonomy to the management so that it runs the undertaking efficiently and swiftly punish all objectionable deviations and perversions. The public sector and what we have made of it is only one of the factors which has brought India to its present sorry state. I have been writing ad nauseam that after 1967, when the culture of purchasing power through bribing legislators afflicted us, the objective of being in politics has changed from the old concept of serving the country and instead it has made power and what can be personally gained by power the new paradigm. The old style politician who had come through the freedom movement and was still influenced by the austere philosophy of honest service, ahimsa, satya and satyagraha of Mahatma Gandhi, did not consider power an end in itself, acquisition of power as the sole purpose of being in politics and the loss of power representing the greatest tragedy, gave way after 1967 to a new breed of acquisitive, power hungry, unprincipled and dishonest politicians. The minute this happened no party any longer had any room for ideology, programmes, principled politics, a national vision and a declared and widely publicised policy statement or manifesto. In the absence of ideology and declared policy what remains is (1) management of elections by fair means or foul to maximize representation in the Legislature, (2) coalitions, generally between parties which had no common interests, which would bring the coalition partners to power, to retain which immediate expediency, unprincipled compromises and sheer populism would be the guiding principles of government. All these require complete eradication of conscience, values and morality from one’s psyche, a total rooting out of any feeling of guilt at wrongdoing and a mentality in which wrong became right because it is wrongdoing which brought profit and power. This, then, is the root cause of corruption, because purchasing of power itself is corruption and only corruption can feed the means by which power can be purchased. Corruption then becomes a way of life and once there is indifference or even acceptance, the nation is doomed.

Let us take any issue. There is inflation, which causes middle class unrest and the government answers by tightening money supply through high interest rates. The real cause of high prices is the parallel economy which is not amenable to fiscal or monetary control. A principled government would tackle the parallel economy, but an unprincipled government will not touch it because it is the main source of money for buying power. Therefore, in order to feed the parallel economy and keep it intact unscrupulous businessmen bribe politicians who, in turn, pressurise the civil servants whose duty it is to ensure good government, subject to policies framed by the politicians. The civil servants, in turn, begin to participate in corruption because why should they be left out when everyone else is making money. At a higher policy level this hurts the nation, but it does not directly affect the common man. Corrupt civil servants, however, do not restrict themselves to the high plateaus. They descend into every valley and gulley, and the common man, the one who is most exploited, is squeezed by lower functionaries in the village itself. What is more, all the programmes meant for his upliftment, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, are subjected to such massive corruption, such massive leakages, that very little reaches the beneficiary and the major part is swallowed by politicians and officials. This is a negation of government.

We have no shortage of laws and the Indian Penal Code already has sufficient provisions for dealing with murder, rape, communal violence, etc. However, the politicians and influential criminals do not permit the Police to exercise its legal power vested by Chapter XII of the Code of Criminal Procedure, to detect and investigate and prosecute offences. After a while the police also become participants in corruption, with the result that crime goes unpunished. What is our answer? We enact more laws. Old laws are not enforced, harsh new laws increase the opportunities for corruption, crime remains uncontrolled, the average citizen suffers and politicians and civil servants garner wealth. How can such a system function? I am trying to avoid the retired civil servant’s disease of harking back on old days as a golden period and the present era being a black hole by comparison. However, the fact remains that upto 1967, by which year I had put in ten years of service, then upto 1975 till Indira Gandhi imposed a State of Emergency, India did have honest politicians and parties which had ideology. The civil servants, right down to constable, forest guard, village level worker and the Patwari, were not under the present day pressure to collect money for unscrupulous politicians and, therefore, were better, more honest, more people friendly officials than those of today. When the politicians become corrupt the civil servants are bound to be victims of this disease and this should cause us a great deal of anxiety.

We need to bring principles back to politics. Articles by me and speeches by learned people will not achieve this because ultimately the political parties themselves have to decide to go back to ideology and programmes. It is doubtful whether this will happen spontaneously and, therefore, it is for the electorate to punish every politician who fails to come up to their expectations. I have faith in the electorate because it is the people of India who voted Indira Gandhi out of power in 1977 for imposing Emergency and brought her back to power in 1980 because the Janata Government failed. I hope the day is not far when members of unscrupulous coalitions are similarly punished by being defeated at the polls. Meanwhile public pressure must be kept up to punish wrongdoing, to enforce the law, to ensure that every public servant is assigned responsibility and then held accountable and by social boycott, through the vote, by publicity, by building of public opinion, unprincipled politicians and corrupt officials are weeded out. At present the words, “Things fall apart, the centre will not hold”, seem to be true in India.