Students of Pune’s famous Film & Television Institute of India (FTII, estb. 1960) are up in arms against a draft report prepared by the Gurgaon-based Hewitt Association on ‘upgradation of FTII to international standards’. “The Hewitt report states that FTII should be re-modelled along the lines of public-private-partnership with introduction of exorbitantly priced short-term courses to make it a profit-generating institute. We find this unacceptable because FTII is not even in a position to honour its present commitments to regular students and should not be turned into a money-spinning machine like the rest,” says Samarth Dixit, president, FTII Students’ Association.
According to the students association, FTII’s syllabus for the 14 programmes it currently offers needs to be urgently upgraded and a new batch of students must not be admitted until the curriculum revision process is completed. Improvement of existing infrastructure including hostel facilities (a new building which was to be ready last year is incomplete) and technical equipment to accommodate an increas-ing number of students, a freeze on tuition fees, and filling up of vacant faculty positions are the other demands made by the FTII Students Association.
Addressing the media and students on the institute’s campus on November 12, FTII director Pankaj Rag said Hewitt Associates had made recommendations, but is not the authority to implement them. Meanwhile a P.K. Nair Committee favoured by students has been appointed to study the course structure and give its proposals to upgrade the syllabus and infrastructure. Predictably, the Nair committee which comprises filmmakers Jahnu Barua, Saeed Mirza, Kundan Shah, Shaji Karun, Nachiket Patwar-dhan, screenwriter Shama Zaidi, and actress Meeta Vashisht, among others, has rubbished the Hewitt Report.
The unwillingness of FTII students to pay anywhere near market-related fees (private institues charge at least Rs.1.5 lakh per year while FTII demands a mere Rs.33,000) for their capital-intensive study programmes is at the heart of their agitation. For almost half a century, the education of FTII students has been heavily subsidised by the Union ministry of information and broad-casting’s annual grant to the institute. Consequently the merely 126 students admitted annually into the fully residential programmes offered by the country’s most well-known film and television training school, situated upon a scenic 21-acre campus (the site of the Prabhat Studio formerly owned by popular cinema actor-director V. Shantaram) lead a sylvan existence with the citizenry footing the bill.
Typically, the institute’s students want new course content, excellent faculty and infrastructure upgradation without having to pay for it. And they can always count on the support of FTII alumni — most of them leftists — who have prospered from their subsidised education without giving much except Bollywood trash back to the public. In 1997-98, when the well-known stage and screen actor Mohan Agashe was direc-tor of the institute and had proposed introducing short-term courses to generate additional income for FTII, the students went on a prolonged strike resulting in Agashe’s ouster.
Now a decade later history is repeating itself in FTII.
Huned Contractor (Pune)
RTE Rules inertia
While parliament passed the long-gestation Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) in August last year which came into force on April 1 this year, implementing this historic and overdue legislation across the country is proving to be as laborious a propo-sition as drafting and legislating RTE. India’s 29 state governments which are obliged to draw up state-specific Rules under the RTE Act, are making a mess of it.
Even as a spate of writ petitions have been filed by several representative organisations of the country’s 175,885 private unaided schools against some provisions of the RTE Act in the Supreme Court, the Rules drawn up by the Maharashtra government’s educat-ion department are increasingly being questioned and criticised. The draft Rules, made public on November 5, three months after RTE became law, are under rising criticism because they don’t contain state-specific modifications of the model Rules prescribed by the Union HRD ministry. Stakeholders in secondary education were expected to submit their suggestions for amend-ments to the state government by November 25.
“Clearly, the authors of the draft Rules — a committee of former government bureaucrats who might have worked in the state’s education department — are not experts on the subject and they seem to have done no research whatsoever. The Rules fail to address some serious issues. For instance, there is no explanation on how exactly as mandated by s.3 (1) of the RTE Act, the state will ensure that all children study till class VIII, when many schools in Maharashtra don’t have classes beyond V and VII. Also under the Act no student can be failed up to class VIII as per s.16. But the Rules are silent about non-performing students and quality of their education. The state government’s Rules book says absolutely nothing on learning outcomes and academic monit-oring,” says Madhav Chavan, founder-director of Pratham (estb. 1994), a Mumbai-based NGO which manages 36 supplementary early childhood centres in 19 cities countrywide.
The Rules prescribed by the state government are also silent on several other vital sections of the RTE Act. For instance, no guidelines are provided for implementing s.12 (1) (c) which makes it mandatory for every private school to admit poor children from its neighbour-hood to make up 25 percent of the strength of class I. The Maharashtra state government’s Rules don’t spell out which authority defines ‘poor’ children or what are the boundaries of a ‘neighbourhood’. Nor do they detail how School Management Committees prescribed by s.21(1) of the RTE Act are to be constituted.
“There are some well-intended provisions like maintaining a pupil-teacher ratio of 1:40, but implementing it in schools like ours, with 60-65 students per teacher, requires time and money. The RTE Act came into effect from April 1, with schools given time until April 2013 to meet the requirements of the Act. Almost a year has already been wasted in framing the Rules. Also there are many low-budget schools for children from low-income groups established in small two-room flats. How will they meet the infrastructure provision prescribed in the Schedule? The Rules should contain some suggestions or guidelines,” says Zahir Kazi, president of Anjuman-I-Islam group (estb.1874), which runs 50 K-12 schools in Mumbai. According to Kazi, although the Central government has said that madrassa schools are exempt from provisions of the RTE Act, the state government’s draft Rules are silent on the issue.
Under the provisions of the RTE Act, state governments are obliged to formulate Rules to spell out the nitty gritty of the legislation bearing local conditions in mind. Quite clearly replication of the Union HRD ministry’s model Rules without adaptation and/or elaboration is indicative of the inertia and non-application of mind of the state government’s education bureaucracy. In short, business as usual.
Swati Roy (Mumbai)