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.

Of Examinations and Admissions: Need for a Revamp

Dr. M.N. Buch

Visiting Fellow, VIF

Ever since one can remember admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIsT) was through the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), which is considered one of the toughest entrance examinations for technology students anywhere in the world. My son appeared for the examination in 1988-89 and he topped it. For this he put in twelve to fourteen hours of preparation time per day for a whole year and even though his JEE record stands to this day, till the result was announced he was not confident that he would be selected. There were only five IIsT in those days, with Kharagpur being the oldest. The Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, Banaras Hindu University Institute of Technology and the Roorkee University were considered almost as good as the IIsT, but nevertheless the latter named institutions were considered to have an edge. An IIT graduate was coveted by universities abroad, especially the United States of America and IIsT students could just walk into any university of their choice for postgraduate studies. The students were so good that in G-MAT, the entrance examination for Business Management studies, only five persons have ever achieved 100 percentile point, one being Robert McNamara and four others being IIT graduates, including my son. The Indian Institute of Technology tag carried an academic distinction which was not considered less than MIT, Caltech and the Leyland Stanford Institute of Technology.

The Central Government, in addition to the IIsT, set up institutes of national importance in technical education of which NITIE, the Indian Institutes of Information Technology and the Indian School of Mines were the lead members, followed very closely by the National Institutes of Technology. For admission to these institutions government constituted the All India Engineering Entrance Examination (AIEEE). Students thus had a choice of taking JEE, AIEEE or both. These examinations give an opportunity to bright young students who had completed the Higher Secondary Examination to compete for admission to the best technical institutes in India. The system worked and has been working right up to today.

Running parallel to these All India examinations are the engineering entrance tests conducted by various State Boards for professional examinations. For example, the Madhya Pradesh Professional Entrance Examination Board conducts PET for engineering, PMT for medicine and similar professional examinations for admission to State run colleges in Agriculture, Business Management, Pharmacy, etc. These examinations qualify students for admission in other engineering colleges either run by the State Government or by institutions and universities in the private sector set up under a State Act.

In the States for other disciplines such as Humanities and Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Commerce, etc., the marks obtained at the Higher Secondary level (Class XII) in either the State run Board of Higher Education or the Central Board of Secondary Education and other similar organisations which conduct Higher Secondary Examinations, are the criterion for admission. Depending on the examination score and the cut-off point subject-wise which each college lays down, students obtain admission to a particular course of studies in a particular subject and because of the cut-off point colleges naturally get graded between those most sought after and those which are a last resort for desperate students seeking admission. Within the education system, by distinguishing colleges in this manner, an educational caste system is created which must inevitably lead to downgrading of the quality of education whilst simultaneously giving an inferiority complex to students who come from colleges considered to be substandard.

A natural corollary of the driving need to excel in order that one may get admission to a good college is the proliferation of the so-called coaching classes. The relatively small town of Kota is the epicenter of the coaching earthquake and accommodates approximately four lakh students all eager to use coaching as a means of doing well at entrance examinations. Coaching classes are a direct slap in the face of our formal education structure because it means that our schools are not preparing our students adequately for them to be able to tackle an entrance examination or get adequate marks at the higher secondary level in order to be found fit for admission. The question which arises is whether our entrance examinations have become so mechanical that through coaching and repetitive practice of solving examination papers a student can be automated to do well at an entrance examination. If that be so we need to seriously look at two things: - (1) The standard of our schools and our teachers and the method of education followed (2) The format of our examination papers so that instead of being amenable to answering through a drill they in fact test the aptitude, knowledge, analytical skills and ability to think independently of each one of our students. If the examination system stops being mechanical the reason for the existence of coaching classes would disappear. Unfortunately enough attention has not been given to the issue.

Let me illustrate this. When I appeared for the IAS examination in 1956 for the 1957 batch the Civil Services Examination consisted of three parts.-

(a) Three compulsory papers which were General English, English Essay and General Knowledge.

(b) Lower papers. The Indian Police Service and other Central Services had to take two lower papers, which approximated to a basic bachelors degree level. The Indian Audit and Accounts Service had to take three lower papers.

(c) Advanced papers. The Indian Administrative Service and the Indian Foreign Service had to take three compulsory, three lower and two advanced papers, which approximated to a postgraduate level.

The examination was so organised that for the IAS not more than one lower and one advanced paper could be from a subject studied for the bachelors degree. Because entrance was at twenty-one years and upper age limit was twenty-four years most of us had only one degree. One could take only one lower and one advanced paper from the subject in which one had a degree and all of us had to study for two lower and one advanced paper on our own in a subject which we had not formally studied. For example, my discipline at B.A. and M.A. levels was Economics and I had to take, apart from General Economics and Advanced Economic Theory, two lower papers for which I chose World History and International Law and one advanced paper for which I chose Advanced Political Thought. As a result of the way in which the examination was organised it did not matter whether one came from the Humanities stream, Liberal Arts, Social Sciences or Natural Sciences. Each one of us was examined in subjects which we had not studied in college and for which we had read up on our own. The distinction between Services based on the number of papers one took clearly made IAS and IFS the two senior Services and all other Services were sister Services but not totally equal. That is reflected even today in the vast canvas covered by the IAS and the relatively narrow focus of other Services. However, since this examination system was changed somewhere in the mid-seventies of the last century and there was one single examination for all Services with no distinction about the number of papers taken, with the question papers also being made much more multiple choice, objective type in format, it is people from the streams of Technology, Science and Mathematics who began to predominate because their minds are more given to mechanical answers, whereas Humanities and Social Sciences students are more attuned to analytical logic and reasoning. The nature of the Civil Service has changed and inter-service rivalry and bad blood has increased because Services other than IAS feel that they have taken the same examination and a few percentile points only made a difference to placement. Because of this coordination, cooperation and cordiality between the Services have all been lost, much to the detriment of the administration.

Something similar is happening to the entrance examination for engineering courses. For one thing a system which worked is now being restructured without thinking about all the consequences of such restructuring. The main criticism of JEE which has emanated from the Ministry of Human Resource Development is that it is elitist, weighted against students from small town India and works against any effort to improve school education while encouraging coaching classes. Therefore, the Ministry, working under the cover of the IIT Council, has decided that there will be one single entrance examination for technical education throughout India. It is not clear whether this covers State run colleges or not, but that seems to be the hidden implication. There would be two components of the examination – one is the marks obtained in the Higher Secondary Board Examination, that is, Class XII. The second component would be the marks obtained in the entrance examination and the two would be combined to rank the students. It is also proposed that the top twenty percent of the students would have to take a further test to qualify for IIT. This line of reasoning suffers from a whole multitude of errors and is based on a complete misunderstanding of how our school system functions. We initially started with Boards of Secondary Education which give a Matriculation Certificate after Class X. An elitist large city school which charges high fees and has a better paid and better qualified faculty, together with excellent classrooms and laboratory facilities is at an advantage over less fortunate schools meant for the ordinary child. Pitting these two types of schools against each other is like asking a school hockey team from a village which has never seen a turf hockey field, leave alone an Astroturf field, against the Indian Olympic team.

This may sound harsh but it is a reality and, therefore, in order to protect the rural constituency politicians tend to lower the standards of the Higher Secondary School Boards so that the percentage of rural failures comes down. In other words, almost every State Board functions on the basis of the lowest common denominator, which is certainly not aimed at improving academic standards in schools. The fact that the better schools all over India have shifted to CBSE or, where they can manage it, to ICSE proves that there is a huge gap between the standards of these two Central Boards and the State Boards. Within the State Boards also there are differing standards and there is just not enough evidence available for us to arrive at a template which would enable us to do equalisation in marking. For example, does 97 percent marks in the State Board of, say, Jharkhand equate with 85 percent marks of the Goa Board or 72 percent of CBSE? If such equalisation, which the Ministry calls normalisation, is not possible, how does one take into account Higher Secondary Board Examination marks when determining the ranking of students in the all India single examination system? In an open letter written by Prof. Dheeraj Sanghi of IIT Kanpur to Prof. Baruah, Director, IIT Guwahati this point is beautifully argued and I am sure there is no answer to the questions raised by him.

Let me give an example from Madhya Pradesh where the Higher Secondary Examination and the professional entrance examination for technical education conducted by the M.P. Board of Professional Courses Examination are conjointly considered for admission to engineering colleges in the State. The parents of two students, one of whom had obtained 27 percent in the PET examination and the other had obtained 24.50 percent came to me with a request that I try and get their children admission to a local engineering college. Both had obtained less than pass marks in PET and the XIIth Class Board marks were 72 percent and 52 percent respectively. I asked the Vice Chancellor of the Rajiv Gandhi Technical University, to which are affiliated all the engineering colleges in the State, whether there was a cut-off point in the PET examination for admission. He told me that if a student had got at least 40 percent marks in the Higher Secondary Examination he could be considered for selection even if he has got zero in the PET examination. If this logic is extended to the IIsT and other institutions of national importance we would get illiterates who cannot get one mark in a professional examination being eligible for consideration for admission. Is this what we want to do with our institutions of higher education and technology?

The argument advanced by the Ministry in favour of a single examination is that students have to take too many examinations and because of this they go to coaching classes. The obvious fallacy is that they would go to coaching classes regardless of the number of examinations they have to take because these coaching classes train them for all the examinations which, in any cases, follow a similar format. In a two-tier examination which is now being proposed the coaching classes will in fact proliferate because they will prepare students to get more marks in the higher secondary examination, then try and get enough marks to be in the top 20 percent of the common examination and then further improve their position within the 20 percent so that they can be admitted to an IIT. The present proposal is a boon to coaching classes and is not aimed at reducing their importance. The second argument is that if Higher Secondary Board marks are taken into account for admission, then the standard of education will improve in the schools. How this will happen is beyond my comprehension. The standard of education in some of our schools is excellent. For example, the Navodaya Schools, which are all located in rural areas, admit students from a rural background charge no fees but have relatively good teachers, better classrooms and laboratory facilities than an average government school and are fully residential, have outstripped all other schools in CBSE results. The children are motivated to rise above their rural origins and because they are given a fair chance of getting decent education they have grasped it with both hands.

I had suggested to the Prime Minister since 2004 that the 560 odd Navodaya schools be increased to 10,000 so that schools of excellence could be established in large parts of the country. The Prime Minster agreed and I was informed in 2008 that he had announced that 6,000 such schools would be set up. Unfortunately the Minister for Human Resource Development, Shri Kapil Sibal and the Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission, Shri Montek Singh Ahluwalia thought otherwise and decided that the schools would be in a Public-Private Participation mode, which virtually torpedoed the scheme. My howls of protest ultimately caused government to decide that 3,500 schools would be in the public domain but in my meeting with the Prime Minister I was left with some doubt about this. A government which is not prepared to emulate and imitate its own successful experience cannot really claim that it is interested in raising the standard of school education. In fact my allegation is that government in the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of Higher Education is in conspiracy to ensure that school standards do not improve but rather that our Boards of Higher Secondary Education are led into the paths of deceit and fudge results so that students have a higher percentage in their Board Examination and thus automatically become at least partially eligible for admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology and other institutes of national importance.

As a former civil servant I am naturally conservative, but as one who took premature retirement eight years before my date of superannuation, I am not status quoist. This means that if we need change in the system of entrance examinations for our institutes of higher technology we can initiate them, but this cannot be done ad hoc. Certainly the method of going about this is not for Shri Sibal to drum up support by holding meetings of deemed universities and making them endorse his proposal. I was Chairman, ABV-IIITM, Gwalior and in the IIIT Council meeting this issue was never discussed. Had it been proposed I would have certainly taken a good, sharp look at the proposal and come up with our suggestions about how an entrance examination should be conducted. But what is a real mystery to me is that a perfectly good and proven system of a Joint Entrance Examination for the Indian Institutes of Technology and an All India Engineering Entrance Examination for other institutions which are either equal to the IIsT or just one step below is being abandoned. If MHRD is attempting a revolution what it has achieved is anarchy. Under these circumstances does India really need this Ministry?