Education News

Assocham awakening

Although Indian industry is arguably the major ‘consumer’ of skilled and educated workers and professionals, its mutually antagonistic and warring representative organisations — actually little more than lobby groups perpetually soliciting tax cuts, subsidies and concessions for member companies — have scant interest in education. Apart from paying lip service to education to win brownie points from gullible media, neither they nor their members do much for education. Certainly the plethora of corporate-sponsored labs, libraries, auditoria, sports stadia etc which are ubiquitous on American campuses are conspicuously absent on the campuses of Indian colleges and universities.

Therefore the sudden emergence of the Delhi-based Associated Chamber of Commerce (Assocham) as a champion of higher education reforms has taken academics in the national capital by surprise. An in-house team of the chamber’s researchers and education experts has written a report on the sector’s shortcomings and advocated deregulation of higher education and promotion of public-private partnerships in tertiary education. The report is written and ready, and is awaiting formal release by Union HRD minister Arjun Singh.

"The primary reason why large numbers of Indian students are forced to go abroad and take shelter in their educational institutions is because of inadequate capacity in Indian higher education. This trend can be reversed by simultaneously promoting a large number of high quality colleges and universities under the public-private partnership (PPP) model and completely deregulating higher education," says Assocham president, Venugopal N. Dhoot.

Educationists readily agree that the status quo of government domination of higher education has to go. "Business houses like Birlas, Tatas, Ambanis, Jaypee, Apeejay, Manipal have made great contributions to education. Therefore government should involve them in a bigger way to expand tertiary education capacity and upgrade the quality of higher education. Expansion of capacity is urgently needed to sustain economic development because except for a handful of IITs, IIMs and a few universities, the great majority of India’s 400 universities and 20,000 colleges are in a bad state," says Prof. V.K. Kapoor, director MERI College of Engineering and Technology, Delhi.

That capacity expansion in higher education is urgently needed is underlined by a report prepared by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), Delhi, titled Education in India, circulated at this year’s Editors Conference by the HRD ministry on January 29. The NUEPA study confirms that the gross enrollment in tertiary education in as many as 15 states is below the national average of 9.97 percent in the 17-24 age group which itself is abysmally low by global standards. With the GER (gross enrollment ratio) in higher education envisaged to increase to 15 percent by 2011-12, under intense pressure from the National Knowledge Commission the HRD ministry has agreed to the promotion of 20 Indian Institutes of Information Technology besides 600 polytechnics under the PPP model. But that’s hardly enough.

"Over 150,000 students go overseas every year for university education which costs India a foreign exchange outflow of US $10 billion per annum. This amount is sufficient to build many IIMs and IITs," notes the Assocham paper, adding that heavy handed control of higher education has resulted in low human development in India and multiplication of problems such as corruption, poverty, unemployment, low productivity, low quality primary health, high infant mortality, missed tourism opportunities etc.

The chamber’s paper also highlights the dismal state of vocational education and training vis-à-vis China, which has over 500,000 vocational schools against less than 3,000 in India. "Vocational education is delivered to a meagre 5 percent of the country’s employed workforce of 459.10 million. In South Korea over 80 percent and in Japan and Germany 70 percent of the work force has received vocational education. This makes a strong case for India to allocate a substantial percentage of its budgetary allocations to promote vocational education to make the country a manufacturing hub," says the Assocham paper.

Welcome to the real world, Rip Van Winkle!

Autar Nehru (Delhi)

Exemplary partnership

The prime factor behind the southern coastal state of Kerala (pop. 32 million) having attained a global reputation as India’s most literate state (91 percent of the population is literate), and topping the country’s Education Development Index maintained by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA) with monotonous regularity, is the state government bureaucracy’s receptivity and adaptability to innovative ideas.

For instance although Kerala’s alternating CPM (Community Party Marxist) and Congress-led coalition governments tend to hog all the credit for the state’s high literacy, the major providers of quality primary and secondary education in Kerala are schools run by the Syrian Christian and Roman Catholic churches. Yet instead of discouraging private initiatives in school education, successive state administrations — including Communist governments — have co-opted them into the system, transforming most of them into ‘aided’ schools eligible for enabling government grants.

A similar spirit of willingness to engineer public-private partnerships is in evidence behind the Kozhikode (Calicut) district administration’s launch on February 20 of a free online tutoring service for government school students in collaboration with Learning Scholars — a subsidiary of Arouba Technologies Pvt Ltd — a Kochi-based online tutoring firm.

The service launched well before the state board’s class X and XII Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) examinations, is designed to provide supplementary education to government school students writing the SSLC examination this year. Model question papers are answered online by the teachers of Learning Scholars (estb. 2004), which provides e-tutoring services to students in classes IX and X. "This is the first time in India that an online tutoring system has been introduced for school students as a public-private partnership venture," says Kozhikode district collector A. Jayathilak.

The basic infrastructure requirement of each school to be able to participate in the programme is a broadband internet connection, a projector and classrooms. Therefore the district administration has undertaken the responsibility to provide the district’s 69 government schools with a broadband internet connection, LCD projectors and bear the expense for the construction of a classroom if required. After a school is equipped with the required connectivity, teachers of Learning Scholars contribute an hour a day for tutoring students online.

"We are pleased to help the district administration in this pilot venture. It helps us fulfil our corporate social responsibility by reaching out to students unable to access high quality education because of the remoteness of their location and/or their inability to pay for private or online tutoring," says Vishwanath Arangath, director of Learning Scholars.

In the first phase of the public-private programme the district administration has covered three schools in Kozhikode enabling 450 students to avail of Learning Scholars tutoring services. Gradually, over the next two years all the 69 government schools in the district will be covered.

"We will continue to provide this free service for government school students in Kozhikode district indefinitely. But extending this service across the state depends on resources being available at our end," says Arangath.

Sanjay Pandey (Kottayam)

Fishy popularity

The Left Front government led by the pro-China Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) which has been in power in West Bengal for over 30 years (the longest period in office of any elected communist government) ascribes its electoral success to its care and concern for its core constituencies at the bottom of the state’s socio-economic pyramid. But shocking news of the state of school education in West Bengal which has just come from New Delhi, contradicts the Left Front government’s complacent assumption.

According to a statement by the minister of state for HRD, D. Purandeswari in Parliament on March 17, while the national average for school dropouts in the Scheduled Tribes category (students dropping out before clearing class X) was a dismal 78.97 percent in 2004-05 ("latest" statistics end there), the percentage of ST students dropping out of West Bengal’s 59,223 schools was even worse at 87.9 percent. West Bengal figures at the very bottom of a states’ list followed only by Bihar (88.96). In the Scheduled Castes category, West Bengal ranks 24th with 80.25 percent (cf. national average: 71.25) dropping out of school before class X.

The individual who should be most ashamed of these deplorable statistics viz. CPM’s Partha Dey, minister in charge of school education, is unfazed. Dey dismisses the data as stuff and nonsense. "The statement is off the mark and misleading. The Centre keeps bringing out such reports which show up West Bengal as having one of the worst school drop-out records in the country. But that’s not the reality. It is true that Bengal doesn’t have the best retention rate in the country, but the situation is not all that bad," says Dey.

As minister for school education, Dey should be aware that the Centre is not the only critic of the Left Front government’s school education record. The World Bank’s South Asia Human Development Report also indicts West Bengal for allowing ST school drop-outs to rise from approximately 70 percent in 1999 to 88 percent currently. In a hard-hitting editorial (March 21), Kolkata’s highly respected daily The Statesman commented: "In less than a decade, therefore, the state has achieved a dubious distinction and Mr. Dey as minister will cause far greater damage to learning through his somewhat arrogant attempt to trash the figures... He must substantiate his counterclaim with figures, of which he has none."

According to the consensus of academic opinion in Kolkata, the Left Front’s major contribution to school education in West Bengal has been the dismantling of the education department — against which no complaints had been ever heard since the days of the Raj — on June 29, 1991. The department was split into four separate units — technical education and training; mass education extension; school education and higher education, each with a CPM minister in charge.

Not to any great effect either. Of the 2.21 million children who enroll in class I of the state’s 49,379 primary schools, only 1.01 million made it into class VIII in 2005-06. Unsurprisingly in the Education Development Index (2005-06) compiled by NUEPA (National University of Educational Planning and Administration) which ranks 21 major, seven north-eastern and seven small states and Union territories according to elementary (primary and upper primary) education provision, West Bengal lags way behind at no. 18 of the 21 major states — above only Assam, Jharkhand and Bihar.

Although Dey dismisses this body of evidence as "misleading" data which "the Centre keeps bringing out", there’s no doubt that the public education system in West Bengal, which by common consensus, was in the forefront of education in India a century ago, is in a shambles.

If despite this dismal education scenario the Left Front government and the CPM in particular, keeps winning election after election in the state, something is rather fishy in West Bengal.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Clumsy internship order

Faculty and students in Maharashtra’s 400 teacher training colleges are a confused community following an out-of-the-blue decree that all D.Ed (diploma in education) students — a 24 month teacher training programme for Plus Two graduates — have to undergo a six month internship programme before they are awarded their diploma. According to the decree issued on January 23 by the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) and the State Council for Educational Research and Training (SCERT), Maharashtra’s 98,000 D.Ed students have to intern for six months in a municipal or government-aided school prior to being awarded their diploma.

The peremptory issuance of this order which in effect increases the duration of the diploma course from 24 to 30 months, has dashed the plans of many of the 40,000 D.Ed students who would have graduated in February and who have already landed jobs as teachers in various schools for the next academic year starting June. The six-month internship order which stipulates 180 school working days as an integral part of the D.Ed programme, will spill over into the next academic year, thus preventing them from starting their new jobs in June.

Educationists and teacher trainers say that the January 23 order imposes a double jeopardy on D.Ed students as they are also obliged to work as temporary teachers in government schools after graduation under the state government’s Shikshan Sevak Yojana (SSY) scheme — a probationary period during which they are paid a mere Rs.3,000 per month as against a confirmed teacher’s salary of Rs.8,000 per month.

Alok Deshpande, joint secretary of the Student Federation of India (SFI), Mumbai district, who has taken up the cause of D.Ed students says that "natural justice and equity" demands that at very least, the state government should merge the newly introduced internship period into the SSY programme reducing it from 36 to 30 months. "In a letter to the Centre in April 2007 we had requested NCTE to include the internship period in the SSY scheme and to guarantee all D.Ed students completing the probationary teachers period a permanent job. Such an assurance will boost the morale of D.Ed graduates who will be assured of a job at the end of three years and will also address the problem of joblessness of D.Ed graduates," says Deshpande.

Principals of the state’s 400 teacher training colleges are also unhappy about the internship order which they believe is driven by the motivation to induct "free labour" in government schools where teacher-pupil ratios sometimes exceed 1:100 and which suffer 15,000 resignations annually. "The current two- year D.Ed course is quite exhaustive and complete and has a 15-20 days internship built into it. To give teachers more training experience an additional three-month internship period would have been reasonable, permitting D.Ed graduates to start teaching in June.

"Moreover though the proposal for additional internship has been hovering for the past one year, we were informed of the internship only in January 2008 despite regular attempts to seek information from education officials. The decision was taken in Delhi in December 2007 but we were told to inform students about the move on January 3, a fortnight before the results. This order has also hit enrollment in D.Ed colleges," says the principal of a D.Ed college who prefers to remain unidentified.

But Sheela Tiwari, deputy director of education in Maharashtra, says that the internship proposal which requires D.Ed students to teach in municipal and government schools will provide them greater insights into primary school education and also the maturity needed to manage primary school children. "While there was a training period of 15-20 days built into the earlier D.Ed programme, the duration of the internship programme was too short. Well-trained teachers are needed to provide quality education to primary children and it takes around three-four years for a teacher to settle and evolve. The six-month internship is the first step towards quality education," says Tiwari.

The proposal of a six-month internship to be included in the D.Ed programme was made to the Centre by the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat in 2004-05. With the implementation of the additional six-month internship in the 24-month course in D.Ed colleges in Gujarat and Maharashtra, the Centre is now eyeing several other states for extending the teacher training period.

Hopefully with more notice and less confusion.

Vidya Sundaresan (Mumbai)

Gloomy uncertainty

Student union activity — particularly student union elections in Uttar Pradesh which tend to be accompanied by chaos and violence — has divided the academic community in India’s most populous (180 million) state. Some academics believe that collegiate and university student unions should be encouraged to prepare students for life beyond institutional gates. On the other hand the great majority believe that with political parties infiltrating student organisations and infusing them with the worst practices of electoral politics, union elections are a nuisance and disrupt campus life.

Therefore UP chief minister Mayawati’s order of March 5 revoking the ban imposed last September on student union elections in the state’s 13 universities and 242 colleges has received mixed response. Political parties, most notably the Samajwadi Party (SP), which has been in the forefront of the movement to restore students’ rights, were over the moon. But the average student who has witnessed the mayhem that invariably follows polls in the state’s universities and colleges is disappointed.

"Because of the six-month ban on student union elections there has been commendable improvement in the educational environment and the last academic session progressed in a normal manner," said the state’s chief minister Mayawati, adding that the revocation of the ban on student union elections was made on the recommendation of a special committee headed by the state’s chief secretary.

This explanation doesn’t ring entirely true given that the SP had been threatening to turn the poll ban into an election issue. After a spate of unpopular decisions, such as scrapping the unemployment allowance, Mayawati, who heads the Bahujan Samaj Party which was voted to power in Lucknow in May 2007, seems unwilling to antagonise the state’s youth any further.

The ban revocation order is however strictly subject to student organisations adhering to the rules pertaining to union elections drawn up by the Lyngdoh Committee in 2006, and endorsed by the Supreme Court of India. Among the rules laid down by the committee: only students with a minimum 75 percent attendance can contest; poll related expenditure must not exceed Rs.5,000; use of printed materials or posters for canvassing is banned; the age of undergraduate candidates must not exceed 22, postgraduate candidates 25, research scholars 28; candidates must be enrolled in full-time courses; and a ban on campaigning on caste or communal platforms.

However the defining character of student union elections in UP is unlikely to change immediately. The SP’s posturing following revocation of the ban on student union elections is a telling indicator. The party is demanding that the cases filed against its student leaders are dropped, as a clean police record is the prerequisite for contesting student union elections.

The party’s MP Akhilesh Singh Yadav, who had been spearheading protests against the ban on student union elections, says that while the SP endorses the Lyngdoh Committee’s recommendations, it will agitate against "politically motivated cases". He claims that more than 100 "fake cases" (mostly under the UP Gangsters & Anti Social Elements Prevention Act, 1986, and the UP Control of Goondas Act, 1970) have been filed against the party’s student members to prevent them from contesting student union elections scheduled to be held within six to seven weeks after the new academic year begins in July.

Student leaders across party lines are predicting clashes with the government over the issue of enforcing the Lyngdoh Committee recommend-ations, which they believe will disqualify the state’s most prominent student leaders from contesting union elections. In 2005 the SP’s candidate in Lucknow University was Bajrangi Singh, a notified gangster in the state’s police records with eight cases (including attempted murder) pending against him. The Bharatiya Janta Party candidate had three FIRs (first information reports) filed against him under the Gangsters Act.

Small wonder that academically inclined students deplore this turn of events. Deepika Malwal, a second year BA student at Lucknow University predicts a storm on campuses across the state. "For over six months we have been having regular classes and exams on time. Now it’ll be back to square one," she forecasts.

Against this backdrop of gloomy uncertainty, the forthcoming student elections across UP will be a test case for the Lyngdoh Committee recommendations, as well as of the state administration’s seriousness in cleansing the deep rot in student politics.

Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)

Next best option

For over half a century the focus of reform and upgradation of higher education in the southern states of peninsular India has been science and technology. In particular the 230 engineering colleges of Tamil Nadu (pop. 62 million) have acquired a global reputation for high teaching-learning standards. In the process liberal arts and humanities have suffered a precipitous decline.

This is particularly true of the 64 government arts and science colleges in the state with an aggregate enrollment of 1.2 million students. Last month (March), responding to growing protests from industry leaders about the acute shortage of employable arts graduates, higher education minister K. Ponmudy announced that the state government plans to adopt the cluster college concept to improve the quality of education and employability of arts and science college graduates. Essentially the concept involves several arts and science colleges voluntarily grouping together, sharing pooled infrastructure and resources and offering students a wider choice of elective courses. Simultaneously the state government’s education department also plans to implement the choice-based credit system for electives from the next academic year, and revise the curriculum.

The government’s new initiatives are the upshot of numerous high-level meetings and discussions held with educationists to upgrade arts and science higher education in the state. To this end, the government set up a Tamil Nadu Committee on Higher Education last September, chaired by Prof. S.P. Thyagarajan, former vice-chancellor of Madras University with some senior educationists as members. The committee submitted its report to education minister Ponmudy on March 5 this year.

Based on the committee’s recommend-ations, the government has selected six government arts and science colleges in Chennai — Queen Mary’s College, Presidency College, Government Arts College, Bharathi Government Women’s College, Dr. Ambedkar Government College of Arts and Science and Quaid-e-Milleth Government College for Women — to form the first cluster which will become operational in the next academic year beginning June. If this pilot exercise proves successful, it will extend to link state-run arts and science colleges with neighbouring polytechnics and engineering colleges.

The Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC) mooted the cluster college idea at the start of the Tenth Plan period (2002-07) through pooling of infrastructure and other factor endowments by neighbouring colleges to attain resource optimisation. The UGC expectation is that college clusters will enjoy the advantages of faculty exchange, sharing of laboratories and libraries, running joint courses and research activities, and staging joint seminars and workshops. To encourage colleges to cooperate, UGC offers a grant of Rs.50 lakh to each college cluster.

However, when the concept was tried out during Dr. Thyagarajan’s tenure as vice chancellor of Madras University (2003-06) when three college clusters of government and self financing colleges were formed, the experiment failed. "Clustering requires efficient regulation and co-ordination between member colleges, academic cooperation and extensive faculty training so that teachers understand the basic principles of resource sharing. Lack of understanding between member colleges led to failure of the idea. Yet, given that most government colleges are cash strapped and lack well equipped laboratories, libraries and other infrastructure facilities, besides experiencing an acute faculty shortage, the cluster concept is one answer to their woes. Students will also get the benefit of choosing from a wider range of subjects," says Dr. Thyagarajan, currently director of research at the Chennai-based Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Hospital.

Yet the prospect of private colleges having to share academic and infrastructural resources with government colleges grouped together in a cluster, arouses fears of loss of autonomy and government intrusion. For this very reason, an initiative of the Kerala State Council for Higher Education to set up college clusters in that state got off to a turbulent start this year, with vociferous protests from student unions alleging unwillingness of private college managements to share resources. "Such adjustments are easier among government colleges, hence the Tamil Nadu government has taken the right step by setting up a pilot cluster of only government colleges and experimenting with the concept before rolling it out statewide," says V.C. Kulandaiswamy, former vice chancellor of the Anna, Madurai-Kamaraj and Indira Gandhi National Open universities.

Quite clearly, a lot of groundwork needs to be done and well drafted memoranda of understanding clearly setting out terms and conditions of participation in clusters need to be worked out before the concept can be successfully implemented. Yet with the Central and state governments wary of handling the hot potato issue of raising rock-bottom college fees or providing higher subsidies for collegiate education, the cluster college concept which could make extant resources go a longer way is the next best option.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)