In his last year as chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, US-based switching systems millionaire and architect of India’s astonishing telecom revolution of the 1990s, Sam Pitroda —whose three-year term was extended to March 2009 in October — has fired a broadside at the market economy. In a trademark letter dated November 6 to prime minister Manmohan Singh, he says the market economy is adversely affecting Indian education, particularly higher education.
“There is already a severe shortage of well-trained young doctorates to fill existing posts in research institutes and universities. This problem is likely to be even more acute in the envisaged elite new universities,” says Pitroda in an apparent reference to the six new IITs and 30 Central universities proposed to be established during the Eleventh Plan (2007-12).
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In academic circles in the national capital, this broadside is being interpreted as veiled criticism of the pro-liberalisation lobby which is in favour of easy entry of foreign universities and institutes of profess-ional education into India. “One of the casualties of the expanding market economy has been devaluation of the academic profession, and this is now seriously affecting the desirability of this profession,” warns Pitroda.
According to Pitroda, professional education institutions tend to be vocationally oriented and therefore research and development — typically conducted by traditional government-funded univer-sities — is likely to suffer. “The growth in the number of doctorates has only been 20 percent in India in the period 1991-2001 compared to 85 percent in China. Not more than one percent of those completing undergraduate degrees currently opt for doctoral studies in India, and a substantial number of students prefer to go abroad,” he informed the prime minister, who at the recent Hindustan Times Leadership Summit held in Delhi declared that his “greatest ambition” is to transform India into a fully-educated country.
Well, that ambition is likely to remain unrealised unless there are “urgent government policy interventions, including high priority initiatives to attract and retain the country’s best minds in academia and research,” says Pitroda. His prescription: better pay for academics and researchers and easy technology access to “bridge the language gap in knowledge dissemination”.
Pitroda’s warning letter to the prime minister (posted on the NKC website) has been warmly received in Indian academia. “Pitroda’s demand for higher education policy reform and better pay for academics/researchers is overdue. Increasingly, graduates are avoiding the academic profession as it’s not well paid and the working environment is not conducive,” says Mohammed Ishtiaq, former head of the geography department in Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia University.
Adds Nileash Kumar Singh, director of the NAM Institute of Professional Studies, Delhi: “Very few students in collegiate education aspire to create new knowledge or contribute to society. They tend to look for returns on their investment in education. That’s why private professional institutes are mushrooming. Unless government pump primes the education sector, this situation will persist.”
In the final few months of his term in office as chairman of NKC, there are traces of exasperation in the tone of Pitroda’s open letters to the PM. That’s because throughout the three years past, NKC’s eminently commonsense suggestions for reform and upgradation of Indian education have been check-mated by septuagenarian Union human resource development minister Arjun Singh, a die-hard control-and-command leftist of the old school. Instead of demanding resources for the expansion of capacity in higher education, Singh believes that quotas and reservations are the panacea. And regrettably at the fag end of the Congress-led UPA government’s term in office, it’s clear that for mysterious reasons, his writ — rather than Pitroda’s — has prevailed.
Charan D (Delhi)