I often wonder about the casual mindset of the pundits in the grandiloquently titled Union ministries of human resource development at the centre and in the states who devise education policies which so heavily impact the future of the estimated 450 million young citizens less than 19 years of age. Even as their whole working lives stretch before them, they carry within them the awareness that they bear the disadvantage of a passage through a substandard education system.
Now disturbing evidence which indicates that the great majority of the nation’s institutions of higher education are dispensing obsolete, date-expired education of little relevance to industry and the new era Indian economy struggling to come to terms with the rapidly emerging new global order, is piling up.
The serious and ambitious within the student community are well aware that syllabus development and pedagogic practices in Indian academia are ponderous and archaic. Hence the great annual scramble to secure admission into foreign, particularly American universities where they take the business of education much more seriously. Despite tuition and residential fees which are astronomical by Indian standards, the number of Indian students emplaning for higher education abroad is increasing year by year.
Quite obviously given the depressed incomes and pathetically poor purchasing power of the great majority of Indian households, higher education abroad is a pipedream for the overwhelming majority of the nation’s youth. And though the brightest and best can perhaps avail the benefit of world class education in the too few institutions of higher learning which have survived the depredations and levelling down efforts of post-independence India’s unique Midas-in-reverse politicians, for the next best category of ambitious students who can’t afford to study abroad or make it into the over-crowded front-rank colleges and universities, the options are very limited and the future bleak.
For this next best category of students entering higher education, the news that foreign universities and institutions are queuing up to deliver their reportedly superior education packages in India is manna from heaven. But inevitably unmindful of the dismal state of Indian higher education, the nation’s powerful educracy and academics are rubbishing this development and have imposed an onerous regime of licences and regulations upon offshore universities bearing the gifts of twinning and other education programmes to India. Against the backdrop of the General Agreement in Trade Services (GATS), our cover story weighs the pros and cons of foreign institutions of higher learning planting their flags on Indian soil.
Our second lead feature in this issue is tangentially connected with the cover story. It examines the root cause of student disenchantment with higher education in India — a growing awareness that the syllabuses prescribed by the educracy and curriculums devised by academics may be dangerously date-expired. How much substance is there in the witticism that contemporary India doesn’t have an unemployment problem, it is stuck with the problem of millions of unemployables because the education system is out of sync with the needs of the economy? Hopefully our special report will provide some answers to this conundrum.
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