Parents of students, if not students themselves, enroled in Maharashtra’s 192 upscale schools affiliated with the Delhi-based CISCE (Council of Indian School Certificate Examinations) and CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Educa-tion), are reeling with shock following a June 8 announcement made by Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, the state’s education minister. Patil announced that the government will reserve 90 percent of capacity in the state’s 630 junior (Plus Two) colleges for students completing their class X school-leaving exams from schools affiliated with the SSC (Secondary School Certificate) examination board of the state government.
In effect, this means that of the total number of 157,500 seats on offer in state government aided junior colleges at the start of every academic year, only 15,750 seats will be available to top-graded CISCE and CBSE students. Against this, an estimated 30,720 students in Maharashtra write the CBSE and CISCE boards’ class X exams every year. The only saving grace of this shock announcement is that the government intends to seek legal clearance of this proposal prior to translating it into law.
Parent communities in India’s most industrial state (pop. 98 million), which has witnessed a rash of new schools affiliated with the Delhi-based exam boards (widely perceived to offer high- quality, globally benchmarked curric-ulums), are outraged by what they perceive to be an attempt by the state government to give students from state board-affiliated schools an unfair advantage over students from more upscale (and expensive) schools affiliated with the pan-India boards. With parents of CBSE and CISCE-affiliated schools openly vowing to challenge the June 8 ministerial pronouncement in court, Vikhe-Patil was forced to issue a supplementary statement saying that the government will solicit legal opinion prior to enforcing the 90:10 admissions proposal.
The prime cause of the latest school education row, which has provoked a flood of letters to the editors of Mumbai’s top five English language dailies and jammed the telephone lines of top legal firms, is the multiplicity of examination boards in the country. School managements have the option of affiliating their institutions with CISCE and CBSE — which demand superior infrastructure and higher investment in applicant schools — or with state examination boards, which are less demanding. Nevertheless for reasons of political correctness, averages obtained in the class X exam of state board-affiliated schools are given equal weightage with marks and grades obtained in the class X exams of CISCE and CBSE schools. But of late, with a growing number of school managements preferring to affiliate with the two pan-India boards, in typical Indian style the state government has resorted to reservations, instead of raising teaching-learning standards in SSC schools to make the latter more attractive to students.
The consensus of informed opinion within the academic community is that there is already an inherent bias in favour of SSC students applying to junior colleges in all states including Maharashtra, inasmuch as notwith-standing their less rigorous syllabus, curriculum and examinations, their marksheets are given equal status with those of class X school leavers from CBSE and CISCE schools. “There is no need to change the system because there is parity between the marksheets of all school examination boards. Junior colleges don’t give greater weightage to the marksheets of CBSE and CISCE students,” says Dr. Nandini Sardesai former professor of sociology at Mumbai’s St. Xavier’s College who served on the admission panel of its junior college.
Moreover educationists in Mumbai discern populist politics in this announcement made on the eve of the state assembly election, scheduled for October this year. “The number of parents with children in SSC schools by far outnumber those with children in the 192 CBSE and CISCE schools of Maharashtra. The ruling Congress party’s expectation is that shutting out a large number of children from ‘rich schools’ will delight parents of SSC schools. Maybe, but this is a sure prescription for leveling down college standards. The 90:10 proposal may serve the short-term electoral interest of the Congress party, but will harm the long-term interests of the higher education system,” says a junior college principal who preferred to remain anonymous.
Like they care!
Bharati Thakore (Mumbai)
Top level vacancy
The University of Pune (UoP), which claims to be the world’s largest university with 520 affiliated colleges and 300 recognised institutes spread across Pune, Ahmednagar and Nashik districts, and an aggregate student population of 650,000, including 14,000 foreign students, has experienced a change of guard. After serving a term of three years, UoP’s vice chancelleor Dr. Narendra Jadhav has moved to Delhi as a member of the Central government’s Planning Commission.
Within the 28,000-strong Soviet-style Planning Commission housed in Yojana Bhavan, New Delhi, which draws up detailed plans to ensure orderly growth of the Indian economy without experiencing inter-sectoral imbalances, Jadhav will focus his attention on the education and social justice sectors. “My focus will be to ensure provision of quality education to every student in the country,” Jadhav informed the Press Information Bureau (PIB) shortly after joining the Planning Commission on June 16.
Jadhav is the second vice chancellor from Maharashtra after Bhalchandra Mungekar, former vice chancellor of Mumbai University, to be appointed a member of the commission. “Right now I am preparing the nationwide rollout of a plan I had introduced in Pune University to provide work-on-demand to college and university students across the country, to reduce the drop-out percentages in higher education institutions,” he says.
Dr. Jadhav, who took charge as vice chancellor of Pune University in August 2006, has earned plaudits from the faculty for smoothing out several administrative wrinkles of this huge bureaucratic institution. Prior to being appointed vice chancellor, he served the Reserve Bank of India for 31 years, rising to the position of chief economist, and also served as economic advisor to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), doing stints in Ethiopia and Afghanistan.
“His tenure as vice chancellor was short but successful. By the sheer strength of his personality, he improved the public profile of the university and made it known to the outside world. It was under his leadership that the UoP made attempts to establish offshore campuses in the Middle East, and attracted a large number of foreign students to Pune’s educational institutes,” says Col. A. Balasubramanian, director of Shri Balaji Group of business management institutes in Pune.
But this is not to say that Jadhav’s incumbency in UoP was without controversy. “His strong and outspoken advocacy of affirmative action for SCs, STs and OBCs ruffled many feathers. Not all of us are in favour of reservations which dilutes the quality of education. Moreover we certainly don’t want reservation in faculty which he favoured and was very vocal about. He was forever trying to make place for Dalits within the varsity administration. In fact, some of us also believe that he was given to capitalising on his OBC status to move ahead in life,” says a UoP lecturer who prefers to remain anonymous.
Meanwhile, UoP’s pro-vice chancellor Dr. Arun Adsool has taken charge as the officiating vice chancellor from June 16. Adsool had served as principal of Vidya Pratishthan’s Arts, Science and Commerce College, Baramati before being appointed the pro-VC of UoP in April 2009. He will officiate until a new full-time VC is selected. Normally it takes more than four months for the process to be completed, after the chancellor appoints a search panel to headhunt a new VC.
According to the UoP grapevine, apart from Adsool, two other candidates are in the running for the VC’s robes — Dr. Bhushan Patwardhan, the head of UoP’s interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, who is currently on a posting at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bangalore; and Gajanan Ekbote, dean of UoP’s medical faculty.
Huned Contractor (Pune)