Even as the Union HRD ministry is drawing up ambitious plans to increase the GER (gross enrolment ratio) in higher education from the current 13 percent to 30 percent by 2020, little attention is being paid to training and developing faculty required to attain this objective. And with the passage of time, faculty shortages in Indian academia are becoming endemic and are debilitating even vintage institutions of repute.
A case in point is the Pune-based Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute (DC, estb.1821) which enjoys an excellent reputation for research in archaeology and Sanskrit, but is experiencing an acute faculty shortage. Currently, seven of DC’s ten posts in the department of linguistics are vacant, and this has been the situation for several years. The explanation, according to the institute’s director Vinayaka Bhatta, is that it is very difficult to find faculty to teach specialised subjects. The other two faculties of the college — Sanskrit and archaeology — also have vacancies with four out of 14 and eight out of 20 posts vacant.
According to Bhatta, against DC’s 53 sanctioned faculty only 38 are taking classes. The remaining posts are vacant for reasons varying from non-availability of experts to difficulty in finding eligible candidates for positions reserved for SCs and STs.
Deccan College, which was initially established as the Hindu College in 1821, is reputed worldwide for its pioneering work in the fields of archaeology, linguistics, Sanskrit and lexicography. It offers Masters and doctorate programmes in archaeology, Sanskrit and linguistics apart from conducting deep research in these subjects. During the past 190 years, the college has produced several eminent scholars including orientologist R.G. Bhandarkar, freedom fighter Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, social reformer Gopal Ganesh Agarkar and philosopher Gurudev Ranade.
Availability of funds is the least of the DC management’s worries. Following a Bombay high court order of August 16, 1939, the Maharashtra state government is obliged to meet all salary, non-salary and development expenses of the college. Moreover, in April this year, this deemed university’s faculty was sanctioned the substantially larger pay packages awarded by the Sixth Pay Commission with retrosp-ective effect from January 1, 2006. A government resolution (GR) to this effect was issued on April 21 by R.S. Atak, additional secretary in the state government’s department of higher and technical education.
Given its esoteric subject speciali-sations, DC needs highly qualified teacher-researchers. For example, it has initiated a massive Sanskrit dictionary compilation project — one of the world’s biggest lexicography works. It started in 1948 and is expected to take another 40 years to complete. The project has already seen three generations of lexicographers at work in the country’s first-ever department of Sanskrit lexicography. The department also offers Masters and doctorate programmes in lexicography and allows students to acquire hands-on experience by working on the Sanskrit dictionary project. (Lexicology is the science of the study of words whereas lexicography is the writing of the word in some concrete form e.g a dictionary).
Another ongoing project is an investigation into the art and architecture of Konkan’s Shilahara dynasty which ruled the region during the 10-12th centuries. Preliminary excavations in Sindhudurg have revealed a plinth and seven Jain images, even though Jainism had little clout in the region during that time. Even more intriguing is that this structure has been noticed in Sindhu-durg district for the first time.
“Deccan College is a wonderful institution because it offers research in subjects that no other university will touch. However, most of the time we have to self-learn due to lack of faculty. For such specialised subjects, it’s not easy to find qualified faculty,” says a postgraduate student, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“We offer the best facilities for long-term research projects, academics, and opportunities for serious teaching and learning. Unfortunately, interest in fascinating subjects such as archae-ology and Sanskrit is declining. That’s why we are unable to find experts in these fields,” says Bhatta, highlighting a disturbing trend in higher education.
Huned Contractor (Pune)
NLS imbroglio
With New Delhi having agreed to provide financial assistance to all state governments to establish National Law Schools (NLSs) modelled after the by-all-accounts highly successful National Law School, Bangalore (estb.1986), a row has broken out in Maharashtra (pop. 112 million) about where its first national law school should be sited.
When Vilasrao Deshmukh was chief minister of Maharashtra in 2005, the state cabinet decided it should be located in Aurangabad. That decision didn’t go down well with some elements of the state government and several officials of the law ministry argued that the site be shifted to Uttan in Thane (near Mumbai). This prompted a public interest litigation (PIL) filed before the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court, to site the proposed NLS in Nagpur. On November 8, a (Nagpur) division bench comprising Justices Dilip Sinha and Ashok Bhangale issued notice to the state government to file a “detailed statement about its intent, and particularly about the site of the proposed Maharashtra NLS”.
Confronted with contending claims of various parties of the Congress-NCP coalition government currently ruling in Maharashtra, the minister of higher and technical education, Rajesh Tope — a senior leader of Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) — responds with a typical please-all solution: “Set up three!”
Harsh Desai, a law postgrad of Columbia University with 24 years of practice in the Bombay high court, is reluctant to use the word “ridiculous” for Tope’s solution. “It’s like promoting three Harvard Law Schools. It will inevitably dilute the quality of legal education all three will offer. The idea behind one NLS in each state is that it should be an excellent institution, with adequate funding and the best faculty and students concentrated within it,” says Desai.
Rina Kamath, journalist-turned lawyer, agrees. “Leading law firms from across the country and from Mumbai have been scrambling to recruit the graduates of NLS, Bangalore. That’s because it’s a single excellent instit-ution. This is the rationale behind establishing one Bangalore-style law school in each state. Therefore, the proposal to establish three NLSs in Maharashtra is absurd,” says Kamath.
Quite obviously, Maharashtra doesn’t need more common-and-garden law schools/colleges as much as it needs one high-quality law school modelled after NLS, Bangalore, which could serve as an aspirational benchmark for the 106 law colleges in the state with an aggregate enrolment of 5,000 students. Nor is there a shortage of law colleges nationwide. Currently, there are 1,136 law colleges, 700 of whom are Bar Council of India-approved, churning out 80,000 law graduates every year. And their number multiplied from 298 in 1980 to 550 in 2000. But the real explosion in the number of legal education institutions in the country was in the new millennium. Between 2001-2008, another 586 were approved.
However the upsurge in the quantity of law schools and legal practitioners who aggregate 1 million countrywide, has been at the cost of quality. Currently the nation’s legal system is in a shambles. With half-trained graduates of the country’s 1,136 law colleges neither fit nor inclined to graduate into the judiciary, contemporary India hosts a mere 13 judges per 100,000 citizens, as against 55 per 100,000 citizens in the UK and 105 in the US. And with lawyers and judges at best muddling through, it’s unsurprising that 30 million cases are pending in India’s courts. Given the undemanding majority of the nation’s lawyers, the infrastructure of the judicial system is also abysmal, characterised by shoddy court premises and inadequate telecomm-unication facilities with archaic typewriters still used in many courts.
Comments Justice (Retd) Michael Saldanha, a distinguished judge of the Bombay (1990-94) and Karnataka (1994-2004) high courts: “High-quality law schools on the NLS, Bangalore model are urgently required to produce top-quality lawyers and judges who can speed up the slow-moving wheels of the justice system. I am heavily in favour of the so-called elitist National Law School in each state which can also do deep research relating to legal reforms.”
That should be the final judgement.
Rahul Singh (Mumbai)