With the first eight of the 21 business days of the winter session of Parliament having been adjourned because of slogans-shouting, disruptions and unruly conduct of MPs, there’s little chance of the 31 pending and 23 new Bills on the agenda of the Congress-led UPA-II government being passed in this session. Of them, 12 Bills including NCHER, Foreign Educational Instit-utions (Regulation of Entry and Operations), National Accreditation Regulatory, Prevention of Malpractices, and Education Tribunals Bills propose overdue reforms in Indian education and higher education in particular. Once again, the fate of these long-pending Bills, which require parliamentary debate and deliberation, is uncertain.
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“The debate on what needs to be done ought to be over, the time now is to focus on action. The Bills have already been drafted but none of them have been tabled in or passed by Parliament,” lamented Sam Pitroda, the country’s former telecom pioneer and chairman of the National Knowledge Commi-ssion, who is now advisor to the prime minister on Public Information, Infrastructure and Innovations, at the ‘FICCI Higher Education Summit 2011: Strategies for Expansion in Higher Education in India’ held in New Delhi last month (November 11-12).
The Planning Commission has set a target of achieving a higher education GER (gross enrolment ratio) of 15 percent by the end of the current fiscal, and 21 percent by 2016-17 (end of 12th Plan) and the Union HRD ministry 30 percent GER by 2020. According to a recent Ernst & Young report, at the current annual growth rate (3.3 percent in the decade 2000-10), the GER is well short of target. To achieve the ministry’s 30 percent GER, the decadal growth rate needs to be more than doubled from the current 3.3 to 8 percent. Presently, 14.6 million students are enroled in India’s institutions of higher education. Therefore, an additional capacity of 25 million seats is required to be added over the next decade entailing an investment of Rs.1000,000 crore. Assuming that the private sector will create capacity for 52 percent of aggregate enrolment (as in 2006), private investment in higher education would need to be Rs.50,000 crore per year during the next eight years. Against this, the current quantum of private invest-ment in higher education is Rs.40,000 crore per year.
“To attract private investment of this magnitude in higher education, the Central and state governments will have to simplify the regulatory framework and provide greater operational autonomy to private institutions, while keeping a check on quality and transparency. Moreover, measures to deal with structural challenges such as shortage of quality faculty and lack of adequate physical infrastructure should be expedited,” says Amitabh Jhingan, partner, Ernst & Young.
With shortages of management professionals and skilled personnel becoming endemic and driving up salaries and wages, the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) members are also beginning to feel the heat. FICCI spokespersons complain that although education is a priority sector under the 12th Plan, if the reform agenda drawn up in the 11th Plan is not implemented pronto, the higher education system will go from bad to worse. “The delay in implementation of (education) reforms is a serious impediment for the econ-omic development of the country,” says FICCI president, Harsh Mariwala.
At the FICCI summit, the consensus of academic opinion was that it’s high time the HRD ministry and higher education bodies such as UGC, AICTE, MCI etc consider following the example of other countries and switch to outputs-based regulation by measuring outcomes such as knowledge, place-ments, employability etc. to supervise higher education institutions.
Currently, the higher education regulation system is inputs-based with private educationists obliged to provide land, infrastructure, faculty etc, subject to inspection-based approvals which is usually subjective. This creates disparities of quality, access, geogr-aphical distribution and gender, and is an impediment to the growth of tertiary education. For instance, 51 percent of readers and 53 percent of lecturers’ positions were vacant in Indian universities in 2007-08. The system is plagued with poor academic standards, outdated curricula and ill-equipped libraries (average nine books per student vs. 53 in IIT-Bombay).
But for MPs blocking parliamentary business for petty political gains and brinkmanship, the education of the world’s largest child and youth population is evidently a low priority issue.
Autar Nehru (Delhi)