Education News

Bleak anniversary

The Congress Party, which heads the 17-party United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in New Delhi, is the only political formation which celebrated the third anniversary of the UPA government on May 22. Coming hard on the heels of the party’s rout in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, even Congress’ celebration was muted and restricted to a report card of claimed achievements which left most people cold.

In particular, there is widespread disappointment in academic circles with the performance of the Union HRD ministry headed by master divide-and-rule politician Arjun Singh who in keeping with his seniority and loyalty (to the ruling Congress dynasty) has been given free run of the HRD ministry. Several surveys of the mainstream media have shown up this septuagenarian minister in bad light and indicate that he is very unpopular.

According to an NDTV survey of print media editors, Singh’s major achievement as HRD minister has been to polarise Indian academia along caste lines. "Education is in the concurrent list of the Constitution. Therefore the Union HRD minister has to be a statesman-like individual able to persuade state governments to accept and implement an integrated education policy in the national interest. Arjun Singh doesn’t fit the description; he is the most divisive and disliked politician in contemporary India and is completely in the clutches of communists and a corrupt bureaucratic coterie," opines Udayan Namboodhari, deputy editor of the Delhi-based daily The Pioneer. According to Namboodhari under Singh the HRD ministry has frittered away all the initiatives launched in the early years of the new century in primary, secondary, technical, professional and higher education by the previous BJP-led NDA government.

Nor is this a solo opinion. "This government inspired great hope by supporting the Right to Education Bill and reconstituting CABE (Central Advisory Board of Education). But three years down the line, it is unwilling to implement recommendations of its own committees. Before this government came to power there was the hope that a Right to Education Act would be legislated by Parliament. Instead the Right to Education Bill which made it mandatory for government to ensure elementary education for every child, has been diluted into a model Bill for the states to enact with the promise of Central assistance," says Karan Tyagi, secretary of the National Alliance for the Fundamental Right to Education (NAFRE).

Meanwhile, unfazed by the volley of criticism, the HRD ministry released its own 23-point report card trumpeting its achievements of the past three years. Among them: a 38 percent increase in the Centre’s budgetary outlay — from Rs.20,745.5 crore in 2006-07 to Rs.28,674 crore in 2007-08; 93.5 percent gross enrollment ratio in primary schools under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (Education for All) programme; construction of 240,000 schools, 98,000 classrooms and additional 7.38 lakh teachers appointed; 2,180 Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (JNV-style residential K-XII schools for girls) sanctioned upto March 2007, of which 1,000 were operationalised in 2006-07; a national means-cum-merit scholarship scheme for 100,000 students annually; commissioning of major Institutes of Science Education & Research at Pune and Kolkata; commissioning of universities in all the states of north-east India; establishment of a national commission on minority educational institutions, and decks cleared for establishing three IITs in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan during the Eleventh Plan period.

But while all this looks very good on paper, the academic community is less than impressed. The general opinion is that Singh’s most notable contribution has been to fracture the tenuous national consensus that existed on education and to politicise it. "In the cause of inclusive education, the minister has given a push to the brain drain and severely damaged the few remaining institutions of excellence — AIIMS, IIMs and IITs," says Namboodhari.

Informed academics also believe Singh is responsible for inflaming the quota issue in higher education. "Capacity in secondary, technical and higher education is very limited and there is an urgent need to expand the education infrastructure, especially in rural India. Unfortunately, we still don’t have a clear cut policy on private-public partnerships in education," says J. Veera Raghavan, former HRD secretary and currently director, Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, Delhi.

Three years on, the general impression in Delhi’s academia is that the HRD ministry under Arjun Singh’s stewardship has run very hard to stay in the same place. The moot point is that capacities in the system have not expanded to cater to the rising demand of India’s 450 million children. Against this backdrop allocation of quotas within a stagnant system is likely to exacerbate rather than diminish tensions in campus India. As usual the supply side of Indian education which would create some slack in the system has been ignored.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)

Steady descent

Although established way back in 1877 (as the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College) by the legendary educationist Sir Sayyed Ahmed as a model institution of secular education for all, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) has not only lost its academic reputation but secular credentials as well. That’s perhaps because of its antecedents and nomenclature, this institution with an aggregate enrollment of 30,000 students has been embroiled in the maelstrom of minority politics ab initio.

In 1920, the Mohammedan Anglo Oriental College was transformed into AMU by central legislation. Almost half a century later, in Azeez Basha Vs. Union of India (1968) the Supreme Court ruled that because of the original intent of its founder, AMU couldn’t be classified as a minority institution. But in 1981, Parliament passed an AMU Amendment Act reaffirming the minority status of the university. However two decades later, in 2005, the Allahabad high court declared the AMU Amendment Act 1981 unconstitutional and reaffirmed the apex court’s judgement that AMU cannot be designated a minority institution and particularly that it’s policy of reserving 50 percent of admission capacity for Muslim students was ultra vires and void.

Following an appeal by the university (supported by the Union government), in May 2006 the Supreme Court decreed that AMU can be classified a minority insitution but refused to stay, until final hearing and disposal of the case, the Allahabad high court’s verdict striking down 50 percent reservation for students of the Muslim community. Since then there’s been a spate of bad news from the sprawling 1,200 acre AMU campus on the outskirts of Aligarh, indicating that Sir Sayyed’s dream is fast transforming into a nightmare.

On April 8 Mohammed Saquib, a commerce student of AMU was caught in a crossfire between two warring student groups and killed. Barely two weeks later, on April 25, Quaisar Shakil Mazhar, a final year engineering student was shot dead in the early evening while on his way to deliver class notes to a student in the chemical engineering faculty. Neither student was involved in campus politics. But the fact that the murders occurred in the middle of the month-long state legislative assembly election which ended on May 11 (with a resounding victory for Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party) has prompted widespread speculation of a political (i.e. Samajwadi party) conspiracy to create student unrest.

As is normative in Uttar Pradesh’s violent student politics, AMU’s proctor Akhlaq Ahmed was assaulted and had to be hospitalised while the registrar Faizan Mustafa’s home was pelted with a rain of stones. Both officials, together with the controller of examinations, resigned soon after as students pressed for their ouster. Moreover on April 26, students ran amok destroying classroom furniture and ransacked the varsity’s admin block even as a 200-strong Rapid Action Force deployed to the campus stood idly by, presumably on the orders of the erstwhile Samajwadi party state government.

AMU students’ union president Nafees Ahmed says that the university administration must share the blame for violence and lawlessness on campus. "A number of students with criminal cases against them who had been rusticated, were permitted to return to the campus to stir up trouble during the assembly elections. These criminal elements are the cause of the recent violence and rioting and not serious students who want to get on with their studies," says Ahmed.

In mid-May Professor P.K. Abdul Azis, currently vice-chancellor of the Cochin University of Science and Technology, was designated the new VC of AMU. Azis who will assume office in mid June is confronted with a formidable set of challenges even though all is quiet on the AMU campus as year-end exams are being written currently. But concerned alumni and educationists who are bracing themselves to deal with the new Mayawati-led government in Lucknow, are drawing comfort that in a departure from tradition, Azis is neither a bureaucrat nor a police officer. Therefore he might have a better chance of brokering peace between students and faculty factions of a high potential university rapidly going to seed.

Vidya Pandit (Lucknow)

Ragging scepticism

Delivered just before the start of the new academic year, the Supreme Court diktat to educational institutions and state governments on May 16 to curb ragging — a hardy, perennial problem on India’s college campuses — with an iron hand, has been widely welcomed as timely. The court’s directive comes in the wake of a detailed report submitted by the R.K. Raghavan Committee constituted in December 2006 by the Union ministry of human resource development (under the direction of the apex court) to study the root cause of this enduring campus initiation ritual which often results in suicides, grave injuries and lasting psychological damage to school leavers entering institutions of tertiary education.

Headed by R.K. Raghavan, former CBI director and currently security advisor to Tata Consultancy Services in Chennai, the seven-strong committee which was constituted under the orders of the Supreme Court while hearing a special leave petition — University of Kerala vs. Council of Principals of Colleges in Kerala (2004) in December 2006 — submitted a well-considered and detailed report to the HRD ministry in the first week of May.

Some of the significant recommendations of the committee which deplored the poor conviction rate for ragging cases, include addition of a new section to the Indian Penal Code (IPC) making ragging a severe non-bailable offence, and providing a comprehensive definition of the offence. Moreover abetment and criminal conspiracy to rag, unlawful assembly, rioting and public nuisance, violation of decency and morals, injury to body, causing hurt or grievous hurt, wrongful restraint, wrongful confinement, use of criminal force, assault as well as sexual offences, extortion, criminal trespass, offences against property and criminal intimidation are all included in the new water-tight and all-inclusive definition of criminal ragging.

The committee has also recommended amendments to the Indian Evidence Act to shift the burden of proof to the accused and to the Criminal Procedure Code to ensure that ragging cases are tried speedily.

Raghavan admits that the thrust of the committee’s report is to make institutional managements and officials accountable. "The authorities suppress incidents of ragging for fear of losing institutional reputation and discourage victims and their families from complaining to the police. In most cases, the perpetrators are from influential and politically well-connected families, so they are handled with kid gloves. Unless there is involvement of colleges, higher education authorities, district administration, university, regulatory bodies and state and Central governments, no regulation will be effective. We plan to rigorously monitor implementation of the Supreme Court’s order by educational institutions and ask for progress reports," he says.

Raghavan’s call for wider societal involvement to curb this increasingly violent academic initiation rite makes sense because previous efforts have proved ineffective. In 2001, the Supreme Court imposed a ban on ragging and set out guidelines for colleges to tackle the menace. Following the court’s directive, Delhi and Punjab universities banned ragging and the Tamil Nadu Prohibition of Ragging Act 1997 laid down strict punishment for breach of provisions of the Act. However, these laws are practiced more in the breach and not a single state has succeeded in entirely eliminating the problem though Tamil Nadu has fared comparatively better in spreading awareness of the evils of ragging.

According to the Coalition to Uproot Ragging from Education (CURE), 25 ragging-related suicides have been reported in the past seven years. Of the 61 cases reported since 2005, in 11 cases the victims died; 12 students suffered prolonged mental problems, and five victims opted out of college. The crudest and most cruel ragging is reported from professional, especially medical and engineering colleges. "Campus authorities refrain from taking stern action against the perpetrators out of misplaced concern for their future careers. Soft solutions have not worked. Therefore college authorities must expel ragging perpetrators without compassion. The time has come for severe action to curtail this menace," says Dr. T. Ravindran, dean of the Stanley Medical College, Chennai.

Although students and academics have widely lauded the Raghavan Committee report for its stern anti-ragging recommendations, doubts still persist whether college administrations will fully comply with the new laws and regulations. The belief that ragging is an innocuous and fun-filled rite of passage is too deeply embedded in Indian academia — where students are still regarded as children rather than as adults with serious learning intent — to be immediately eradicated.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

Right priorities

Even as the Maharashtra state government entertains fanciful notions of transforming Mumbai into a world class financial hub — the city’s outrageous real estate prices and crumbling infrastructure notwith-standing — a recently released report of the global consultancy KPMG, forecasts a massive shortage of qualified finance professionals in India. The report was released by KPMG’s chairman (new & emerging markets), Ian Gomes in Mumbai on May 25.

The KPMG report was released at a well attended Education, Training and Qualifications (ETQ) seminar staged under the auspices of UK-India Education & Research Initiative (Ukieri). The report titled Global Skills for Graduates in Financial Services is the output of an exhaustive research study conducted by KPMG as its contribution towards the Ukieri partnership. Its objective according to Gomes, is to alert employers and educators to prompt them to bridge the gap between industry expectations and current skills availability. "London will experience a shortage of 500,000 finance professionals by 2014 and the shortage in India will be a multiple of that," said Gomes while asserting that as a major employer of finance professionals in India and the UK, "KPMG knows the importance of recruiting the right talent and some of the skills shortages that will emerge".

KPMG is a key partner of Ukieri in financial services skills exchange. Besides facilitating academic links between institutions in this field, the firm has also given pro bono support for research into the global skills needs of employers in financial services in the UK and India. Moreover KPMG is working with Ukieri to identify partners and training institutions and collaborating with higher education supervisory bodies in the UK and India to facilitate exchange programmes for finance graduates. This innovative project focuses particularly on developing the employability attributes of fresh graduates aspiring to careers in the financial services industry.

Yet even if there is considerable scepticism in India about Mumbai, weighed down by endemic political corruption, ever realising its Shanghai emulation aspirations, it isn’t shared (or articulated) in the UK. "Just as in the UK where a healthy financial sector is a prerequisite for overall economic growth, Mumbai in India too is working towards becoming a world class financial centre, making most of its ideal location between major Asian markets and London," said Bill Rammell, Britain’s minister of higher education in a message to the seminar.

The report highlights that financial services organisations in the UK and India need academically qualified professionals equipped with teamwork, communication, client relationship management, customer services, business awareness, problem solving and achievement orientation skills.

In India employers’ needs are less articulated but there is evidence of a growing number of finance sector firms working closely with education institutions to sponsor programmes and offer summer and winter placements to develop the practical experience of finance students to make them industry ready. Ukieri has already committed nearly £25 million (Rs.19 crore) over the next five years to this initiative. More than physical infrastructure, the availability of trained finance professionals is the prerequisite of transforming Mumbai into a global financial hub. KPMG and Ukieri have got their priorities right.

Ronita Torcato (Mumbai)

Teacher training initiative

Following turn-of-the-century global and national focus on primary education, there’s dawning awareness within Indian academia that capacity expansion and upgradation of teaching-learning standards in secondary education has suffered dangerous neglect. The system directly and the teachers indirectly, are being increasingly indicted as contributors to student-stress, examination psychosis and other forms of learner de-motivation.

Unfortunately organisations like the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and the state boards of secondary and higher secondary education, run at public expense and mandated to continuously upgrade and standardise school curriculums and learning assessment, have signally failed to fire the creative spark among students as well as teachers. As a result, children are driven to learn by rote and have become incrementally examination oriented. This development in secondary education contrasts sharply with the global trend of a shift in favour of learning by comprehension and problem solving. Poor teaching by indifferent teachers is being identified as a major cause of the malaise in secondary education.

To address this ballooning problem, the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C) has undertaken a pilot project to train secondary school principals and teachers in new pedagogies based on comprehension-based learning. Specifically, the IIM-C’s Management Centre for Human Values (MCHV) conducted a three-day programme in end May on the art of improving teaching-learning outcomes in secondary education.

"In our programme workshop we emphasised that every child is unique and has the right to respond differently to the learning process," says Ranjan Mitter, MCHV faculty member and one of the two educators who conducted the programme. "The problem with the average secondary school is that it relentlessly drives students to perform from day one. As a result, a large number of children develop a distaste for learning. If a child is unable to come up to scratch, she is ridiculed by parents, teachers, peers and society in general. Therefore our first objective is to teach teachers to reduce stress in their classrooms," he says.

The initial MCHV programme is the first of a long-term exercise. In this phase, principals and teachers of 40 CBSE schools from across the country were trained in each "school education management module". This is the first time that IIM-C, or indeed any of the IIMs conducted a teacher training programme. In the first phase the emphasis was on training teachers to accept that individual attention is important for the all-round development of children. "If the way the child is taught matches the level of maturity of the child, he will crave for more knowledge," says Mitter who adds that it’s wrong to categorise children as quick, slow or average learners. "In India, we are still in the sorry state where teachers have to be told that learning by rote has become obsolete," he rues.

The MCHV school education management programme is charting unmapped seas in a maiden attempt to bridge the teacher-student gap in 40 schools across India. IIM-C hopes to develop a student-centric teacher training programme which can subsequently be adopted by teacher training colleges countrywide.

Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)

Unexceptional generalities

It is an irony that education standards in Karnataka variously extolled as India’s most infotech savvy state, knowledge centre and the nation’s education capital, are falling precipitously. Several education assessment surveys including the Mumbai-based Pratham’s Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER) 2006 and a study conducted by the National Association of Software Services Companies (NASSCOM) indicate that the learning achievements of students in the state are far from satisfactory. Astonishingly, ASER 2006 found that students’ maths learning achievements in Karnataka were below those of their peers in Bihar.

Under public pressure, the ruling Janata Dal (S)-BJP coalition government in the state constituted an 11-member Karnataka State Education Perspective Plan Committee aka Eduvision Committee in November 2006 to halt this decline and present a detailed action plan to sharply upscale education standards at all levels during the next decade. Chaired by former DSERT (Directorate of State Education Research and Training) director D. Jagannath Rao, the committee comprising educrats of DSERT and SSA (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Karnataka) and education researchers of the Azim Premji Foundation, Bangalore, submitted its first interim report to the state government on May 11.

In higher education the committee recommends the abolition of the much-hyped common entrance test (CET) for admission into professional colleges and suggests that admission should be based on applicants’ class XII score sheets. The committee has also recommended introduction of a semester system in classes X-XII. "In our opinion science students shouldn’t have to face the conundrum of choosing between two public exams at the end of the two-year pre-university course. Class XII exams are conducted in all fairness and hence CET may be abolished and class XII marks considered for admission into professional courses," says Jagannath Rao.

In Karnataka’s 48,000 primary schools the committee has recommended upgradation of labs and libraries, and provision of science kits and books to 5,000 higher primary schools in the state every year so that in the next five years all schools will be well equipped. Moreover it has recommended provision of at least two computers to each of the 48,000 primary schools in the state in a bid to stanch the dropout rate to less than 10 percent by 2008 and 5 percent by 2009.

In the secondary education sector the committee intends to present a plan to prevent dropouts and ensure all children in the state complete class X by 2015. The committee has recommended that the mid-day meal scheme should be extended to all schools including unaided institutions, and that the scheme should be continued during summer holidays. Grading of secondary schools on the lines of NAAC’s five-point scale by an external agency also figures in the list of recommendations.

Couched as if it is in politically correct and unexceptional generalities, educationists are pleased with the Rao Committee’s proposals. "The recommendations are very good and are unlikely to be resisted by anyone. However the catch is always in implementation. Right now I prefer to wait and watch to what extent, if any, the state government will implement the Rao Committee’s report," says G.S. Sharma chairman of Karnataka Unaided School Managements Association.

Sharma’s caution is well advised as this is the preliminary report of the Eduvision/Rao Committee. The litmus test of the state government will be its ability to raise and deploy the resources required to translate the unexceptional statements of intent of the high powered committee into live on-the-ground projects. On that score there’s widespread cynicism in Karnataka’s beleaguered institutions of education.

Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)