The clearance of the draft Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations) Bill 2009 by the Union Cabinet on March 15, which will soon be available for public scrutiny and debate before it is presented to Parliament and enacted into law, offers the academic community a not-to-be-missed opportunity to suggest amendments, additions and insertions to tighten this historic Bill.
Yet, even as they utilise their intellect and experience of the lacunae and infirmities of the higher education sector to give substance to the Foreign Educational Institutions (FEI) Bill, members of the academy need to bear some ground realities in mind. For one, the entry of foreign education providers into Indian higher education is necessary in the national interest. The plain truth is that meaningful expansion of capacity in higher education is wholly beyond the financial capabilities of the Central and state governments which are running massive revenue and fiscal deficits. And given the fact that a mere 12 percent of Indian youth in the 18-24 age group is enroled in institutions of tertiary education (cf. 60 percent in the US and 25 percent in China), capacity expansion in higher education is non-negotiable.
Secondly, if the world’s most well-respected universities and institutions of higher education are to be persuaded to plant their flags in Indian soil — whether by way of offshore campuses or twinning arrangements with indigenous institutions — the Indian academy should make them feel welcome. The obsolete East India Company mindset which presumes that all foreign investors are necessarily exploiters and therefore should be set stiff terms and conditions, needs to be given final burial. The reality is that the top-rung universities that New Delhi aspires to attract through the foreign education providers legislation, have reputations to lose, and are unlikely to risk loss of academic and administrative autonomy to enter into the under-performing Indian higher education sector for illusory gains. The tuition fees of western institutions of higher education will be set significantly higher than of Indian institutions which are heavily subsidised. Indian public opinion needs to come to terms with the reality that higher education is essentially a private good and doesn’t warrant heavy subsidisation, especially at the cost of investment in public primary and school education.
Yet while it’s high time that official and public opinion concedes the inevitable demand of foreign education providers for autonomy related to admission and fees, it’s also important to ensure that a level playing field is provided to indigenous institutions of higher education. If the latter are subject to affirmative action caste quotas, tuition fee ceilings, faculty salary stipulations and government micro-management, while foreign education providers are exempt, they will be quickly reduced to playing second fiddle, the IIMs, IITs and IISc included. Therefore while it is undoubtedly important to roll out the red carpet for foreign education institutions in the Bill, it’s also necessary to liberalise and deregulate the disabling legislation governing the country’s existing 431 universities and 22,000 colleges to create a level playing field for them, in the national interest.
Resist transformation into oppressive minority
Although it has since passed into history and has already been forgotten by shining India’s prospering middle class and the media who set the national agenda, the Union budget 2010-11 presented to Parliament and the nation just a month ago (February 26), has distinguished itself by its neglect of issues which are life and death matters for the struggling majority at the base of the country’s iniquitous socio-economic pyramid. In Budget 2010, the modest direct taxes paid by the 30 million Indian elite were reduced and rationalised at a cost of Rs.26,000 crore to the exchequer. But the issues which matter most to the nation’s poor majority — food, housing, healthcare, education and inflation — received minimal attention.
Indeed the priorities and outlays of Budget 2010-11 provide conclusive evidence of a serious disconnect between the New Delhi establishment representing India’s aggressive 200-250 million middle class, and the great majority of the population which has yet to experience the much-acclaimed India growth story. During the past two decades the country’s housing shortage has grown from 25 million dwelling units to 47 million; 46 percent of the country’s child population under five years experiences severe malnutrition; an estimated 180,000 deeply indebted farmers committed suicide between 1997-2007; citizens living below the country’s austere poverty line are obliged to pay out bribes aggregating Rs.800 crore per year to government officials; and 13 million children countrywide are out of school. Quite obviously the dressed up numbers in Union budgets and Planning Commission tomes haven’t translated into positive outcomes at the grassroots level.
On the contrary, the inclusion failure of post-independence India’s self-serving establishment has translated into negative social outcomes. The steady spread of left-wing extremism manifested by the violent Naxal movement to over 150 of India’s 630 districts; the rising incidence of Islamic terrorism, and the tendency of the country’s ‘unemployable’ youth churned out by the higher education system to resort to mayhem, rioting and civic insurrection on slightest provocation, is testimony to the gradual breakdown of the social contract in contemporary Indian society.
Over half a century ago in his extraordinarily insightful eight-volume magnum opus A Study of History, the late Prof. Arnold Toynbee identified “secession of the proletariat” prompted by the failure of “creative minorities” to improve living conditions of poor majorities as the cause of the decline and fall of mighty civilisations and empires of the ancient world. Failure of creative minorities to discharge this obligation and their transformation into “oppressive minorities” results in secession of the proletariat from the social contract, civil strife and anarchy from which some civilisations (Egyptian, Roman, Hellenic etc) never recovered.
The challenge before the Indian establishment is to resist its transformation into an oppressive minority.