COMMENTARY

Challenges Facing
New Education Policy in India
Arun Kumar

The New Education Policy on the

anvil should encourage academic
talent and innovation to make the
system of higher education more
responsive to the needs of various
stakeholders instead of just
attempting to create a uniform
standardised structure. To ensure
this, political and bureaucratic
interference in educational
institutions, which has steadily
eroded the quality of higher
education in India, will have to be
minimised, academic autonomy
strengthened and diverse
opinions taken into account while
building a new policy framework.

rime Minister Narendra Modis

trip to Silicon Valley in California,
the United States (US) in September
2015 was about technology and attracting
both talented Indians and investment
in technology in India. It highlights the
fact that the best go abroad, leaving
the country short of talent. The gross
enrolment ratio in the country has risen
sharply in the last decade but industry
complains that most students are unemployable. The President of India via video
conferencing addressed students and
faculty of institutions of higher learning in
India and said, India does not have even
one truly outstanding institution among
700 universities and over 36,000 colleges.
He pointed to a casual approach to
higher education and stressed the need
to improve academic management.
Higher education has also come in for
adverse comments from Amartya Sen,
Narayana Murthy and the Reserve Bank
of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan.
While none of them have experience
of the ground-level problems plaguing
higher education in India, their concerns
are valid. If they remain unaddressed,
skilling India and reaping demographic
dividend will remain distant goals.
Would the New Education Policy (NEP)
on the anvil take up these challenges?
Interference and Autonomy

The article is based on the authors

presentation made at the consultation meeting
on Linking Higher Education to Society at
the Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla on
2728 August 2015.
Arun Kumar (arunkumar1000@hotmail.com)
is the founder president of Coordination
Committee of Teachers Associations of Delhi
and former president, JNU Teachers
Association.

14

Sen expressed concern at the interference

in top appointments in institutions.
While the Nehru Memorial Museum and
Library (NMML) director quit under pressure from the government, people with
poor credentials but the right connections
have been appointed in the Film and
Television Institute of India (FTII), the
Indian Council of Historical Research
(ICHR), Censor Board of Film Certification, etc. Could the President be pointing to this aspect of academic management? Unlikely, since neither good institutions are built in a day nor do they

decline within a year. The malaise afflicting our institutions of higher learning
is old and needs to be identified if
corrective measures are to be adopted in
the NEP.
Political interference in top appointments is a crucial factor in the decline of
institutions of higher learning, but this
is not new. In 1952, A V Hill, the biological
secretary of the Royal Society of the United
Kingdom (UK), wrote to Shanti Swaroop
Bhatnagar who had just then been appointed the director general of the newly
established Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR). He expressed
concern that the CSIR laboratories would
drain universities of talented scientists,
and asked who would then train the
next generation? Bhatnagar replied that
the universities are already in poor
shape because their vice chancellors are
political appointees (Kumar 2006). The
implication is that the malaise goes
back to the time of independence.
Often vice chancellors, directors and
principals have been appointed for proximity to the powers that be and not
their academic credentials. This makes
them beholden to political bosses or in
privately controlled institutions to the
moneyed and that erodes their accountability to their academic peers. No wonder civil servants and army men have
been appointed even though they lack
academic imagination. The rot is now
deeper, since there are persistent reports of money being the consideration
for appointments.
The task of those at the top is seen as
managing an institution rather than fostering creativity, or encouraging a questioning spirit. Such people aspire for more
favours to rise in the system and, therefore, remain compliant with the wishes
of their bosses rather than having the
welfare of their institution as their priority. Vice chancellors have increasingly
ceded ground to the bureaucrats of the
University Grants Commission (UGC) and
Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) rather than providing leadership, as was the case up to the early
1970s. This is as true of premier universities like the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) as of the lesser-known universities in the states.

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COMMENTARY

David Gross, the Nobel laureate, pointing to the leadership crisis, argues that it is
due to the mechanical nature of decisions.
He says,
most destructive and silly is the governments policy towards early retirement.
People are forced to retire here at the age
of 60 (65 in some institutes). It is extremely
difficult to find people in their 60s, which is
the optimal age at which people can assume
scientific leadership.

He added, Some people at 60 have been

sleeping since they were 20. Some people
will go on being productive into their
90s. It may be added that many who
were academically weak since they were
20, but politically active, got into positions of power in institutions of higher education, while the creative ones were
largely marginalised.
The MHRD has held conclaves with the
vice chancellors, but can original ideas be
expected from those appointed for their
capacity to comply? Ideas from the Western universities are being mechanically
borrowed for implementation in India.
Take the idea of the Meta University. Can
it work when it is known that university
departments in the same building hardly
synergise each other? JNU conceived
around the idea of interdisciplinarity
has little to show for it. Here, life sciences are taught in several departments
with minimal synergy and the same is
true of economics taught in four centres.
Does a change of rubric change the reality? Similarly, the choice based credit
system (CBCS) and massive open online
courses (MOOCS) have been introduced
even though teachers have protested
that these ideas are not workable in the
Indian situation.
Compliant leadership also surrounds
itself with pliable others to push the
agenda dictated from the outside. A
vast number of senior academics in the
decision-making bodies, like executive
councils of various universities, rarely
oppose questionable decisions of those at
the top, since they also have learnt the
value of compliance for rising in the
system. No wonder, universities and
colleges are run down and do not cater to
their primary task of nurturing talent,
and though society blames academics for
this situation, it does not see the root of
the problem.
Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

DECEMBER 26, 2015

Academic leaders often make their institutions playgrounds for caste, regional,
political and community politics. Appointments are often made for reasons of
such affiliations and/or by charging money
(corruption), making academic merit
secondary. Even when good academics
are chosen, they understand that to
survive, they have to cater to sectional
interests. As the number of such appointments increases, decline of institutions
is inevitable. The Allahabad University
in the 1950s became the arena for the
play between the Brahmin, Kayastha
and Baniya groups and merit became
secondary. In such a situation, many
question the very idea of merit and see
in it a design to exclude some.
The problem is compounded by the
feudal culture prevailing in most institutions of higher learning. Obeisance to
those above and compliance from those
below is expected, thus marginalising
excellence if not demoralising it. So,
challenging orthodoxy and dissenting
are becoming rarer even though that is a
prerequisite for originality.
Narayana Murthys lament is linked to
this. He said at the Indian Institute of
Science (IISc), Bangalore, There has not
been a single invention from India in the
last 60 years that became a household
name globally. In the same vein,
Raghuram Rajan lamented that a whole
generation of economists has been lost.
These are corollaries of nurturing sycophancy and suppression of dissent in
academia.
Attitudes filter down into teaching and
the learning processes of students who
mostly learn by rote while questioning
little. Exams test the capacity to mechanically reproduce what is mugged up.
Richard Thane, an exchange student
from the US, highlighted this fact in an
article where he described his brief stint
at the prestigious St Stephens College in
Delhi University. He wrote:
In 2007 I was a student at St Stephens College
for seven months as part of a study abroad
programme offered by my home institution,
Brown University. What is remarkable is
that all students in India know what I am
talking about. A real education being one
that challenges the intellect and questions
paradigms, not one of rote memorisation and
conformity. my entire study abroad
vol l no 52

experience in India, from an academic

standpoint, was an enormous disappointment. Yet amongst my fellow Indian education alumni, I mostly hear a deafening silence when it comes to action (2013).

One can only imagine the situation in

other lesser institutions.
Exams and degrees have become a
passport to a job. If real understanding
is not the goal, it can be more easily
fulfilled through cheating; even classes
need not be attended. Consequently,
corruption has seeped into exams as
the Vyapam and now the even bigger
Dental and Medical Admission Test
(DMAT) scam point to. The iconic picture
from Bihar of rampant cheating points
to its scale. The rapid penetration of
private sector in education is correlated
with growing irregularities, like question
paper leakage, etc.
In premier institutions, such as the
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and
Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs),
the curriculum leaves students little time
for critiquing content and that minimises
questioning. To get into the IITs, students
attend coaching schools (like in Kota)
with a focus on exam skills. Consequently,
many fail after joining the IIT. Murthy
has been criticised by C N R Rao for his
statement at the IISc for not doing
enough to promote innovation in Indian
institutions.
Teachers and the System
The problem of learning is compounded
by the fact that most teachers also
learnt by rote and they reproduce that
in the classroom. The shortage of faculty
aggravates this crisis. According to the
MHRD, around 40% of the faculty posts
are vacant in the central universities and
medical and engineering colleges. Often,
overworked, part-time and ad hoc
teachers, lacking in skills, carry the
burden and teaching suffers. Research
guidance has deteriorated not only
because of lack of competence among
many academics but also because of the
pressure of numbers. Some to be popular
and others due to compulsion guide 20
to 25 students at a time.
While teachers are to blame, they face
a perverse incentive system devised by
the academic bureaucracy, lacking in
15

COMMENTARY

academic imagination. Reforms have

been introduced since the 1980s to
improve standards. First, teachers were
required to have an MPhil degree for
promotion. Next it became mandatory for
the teachers to undertake the refresher
and orientation courses conducted by the
UGC. This was followed by the requirement of qualifying in the National Eligibility Test/State Level Eligibility Test (NET/
SLET) for selection and then a PhD became
essential for appointment and promotions to certain positions. Finally, with
the Sixth Pay Commission came the
mechanical Academic Performance Index
(API) for recruitment and promotions.
The idea underlying these requirements has been that standards can be
achieved by standardization. But a teaching job has a large qualitative element that
cannot be evaluated the way an office or
a factory job can, where productivity can
be assessed by time and motion studies.
Points under the API can be mechanically
earned without an improvement in quality.
Peter Higgs, the Nobel laureate, wrote
that for 15 years in his annual report he
had stated that he had no publication. He
concluded that in a present-day university
he would not have got a job. It is true
that few are or will be Nobel laureates but
there is a lesson in this for nurturing talent.
Today, many academics play the game
cynically to earn points for promotion.
Contact with students has been devalued
since that gets few points. Poor quality
dissertations, journals and conferences
enable academics to collect points.
Those playing the numbers game are
accumulating points mechanically while
genuine academics fail to do so for their
promotion; mediocrity gets privileged
over talent.
Ahistorical Perspective
and Privatisation
The NEP must refer to the ground realities.
A historical view is essential because
the problems have not appeared overnight. Reports like the AmbaniBirla
Report (1999) or the Knowledge Commission Report (2007) lacked a historical understanding of the evolution of
the Indian system of higher education
and did not address the ground realities
of the system. They implicitly assumed
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that the system is flawed because of its

public sector character and suggested its
betterment and expansion through privatisation. The pressure from the World
Trade Organization (WTO) is also in the
same direction and concerned people
worry about the commitments there.
One way to push the interest of the
private sector is to engineer the decline
of public sector institutions. To accomplish this, the autonomy of central universities and IIMs is sought to be curbed
via amending the acts under which they
were established, and a common syllabi
is being imposed on universities and colleges so that the CBCS can be enforced.
This will make the already largely
mechanical teaching even more so. The
UGC tried imposing a model syllabi in
2002 as well. This was resisted by certain departments in some universities,
but many adopted them since these
became the prerequisite to getting grants
from the UGC under the Special Assistance Programme (SAP) and Career
Advancement Scheme (CAS).
The government schools were set on a
path of decline in the 1970s so that
private sector schools could prosper. The
recent Allahabad High Court judgment
asking government functionaries to send
their wards to government schools has the
potential of being a game changer. The
experiments imposed on the Delhi
University since 2010 have sent the best
university of the country into a tailspin.
Privatisation leads to an increase in
resource availability but often also to a
demand to cut public funding for education. It leads to a change in the mindset
which is not suited to a good public
education system and leads to its further decline. The existing problems and
sharp practices are getting aggravated.
The private sector is best suited to deal
with the short-term issues and that reinforces narrowness of conception, which
is counterproductive.
Education is characterised as a merit
good, has externalities and scale economies and there is asymmetric information. These are situations of market failure
and privatisation is not the solution but
that is being ignored. The result is capitation fees in admissions, charging money
for teacher training, recruitment of

poor quality teachers, coaching and

tuition instead of classroom teaching,
cheating in examinations and fake degrees. These problems existed earlier also
but they are getting aggravated. Further,
demand for raising fees is growing,
costs are rising, equity is getting diluted
and emphasis is shifting from basic to
applied subjects.
Conclusions
Many of the changes introduced in higher
education in the last two decades may
appear rationalbut that is so only in
the short run. A little reflection will
show that in the long run they will have
disastrous effects. With the increasing
sway of the private sector over policy,
the short run has come to dominate.
However, success in ones business is no
guarantee of clarity about the needs of the
students or of educational institutions.
Higher education is about long-term
accountability to society, independent of
both market considerations and immediate political exigencies.
Critics point to the rundown nature of
education and the public has accepted
that it is because the teachers shirk work
and are the problem. This decline in the
status of academics has enabled the politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen to
intervene even though they neither understand the ground realities nor accept
their own role in running the system
down. Reports are that the NEP will be
drafted by a committee consisting of
bureaucrats who are likely to have only
a limited view of problems of education
in the country.
In brief, if talent is to be nurtured, the
NEP must overhaul higher education
based on the ground realities and a
holistic perspective. For this, diverse
academic voices need to be heard rather
than only of those at the top and who
have been the problem and whose
agenda may not be real reform.
References
Kumar, Deepak (2006): Science and the Raj: A Study
of British India, 2nd ed, Oxford University Press
India.
Richard, Thane (2013): Academic Excellence and
St Stephens College: A Response by Thane
Richard, Kafila, 30 April, http://kafila.org/2013
/04/30/academic-excellence-and-st-stephenscollege-a-response-by-thane-richard/.

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EPW

Economic & Political Weekly