If one accepts the proposition that a test of character is ability and willingness to pay a fair and honest price for a good or service, India’s great middle class fails the test. One of the great iniquities of post-independence India’s Nehruvian, Soviet-style centrally planned economic development model, is the plethora of unmerited or hidden government subsidies it showers on the middle class. For over half a century the great Indian middle class has enjoyed subsidised electricity, water, food, cooking gas, higher education, health and transport services etc. According to an estimate made by Union finance minister P. Chidambaram several years ago, the total value of unmerited subsidies delivered mainly to middle class citizens aggregates 14 percent of GDP, which would translate into almost Rs.600,000 crore per year — a sum equivalent to six times the country’s annual education outlay.
It’s important to understand that a subsidy is essentially a transfer of the price burden from one section of society to another. In the end someone has to pay the actual price of subsidised goods and services. In post-independence India, the actual price of subsidised goods and services has always been paid by the poor at the base of the country’s socio-economic pyramid in terms of basic services foregone — law and order, health services, education, housing, electricity, water etc — and/or rock-bottom prices for the goods and services they provide. There’s something inherently unstable and unfair about a socio-economic model built on unmerited subsidies for a priviligentsia, while the peasantry languishes in grim poverty in rural outbacks. That’s why the Soviet Union imploded two decades ago.
While a case can be made for some subsidies, perhaps the most indefensible of all is the populist over-subsidisation of higher education. In a society where the overwhelming majority of government primary schools lack buildings, blackboards, teachers, drinking water and sanitation, the monthly price of tertiary collegiate education is less than of a packet of cigarettes or a cup of coffee. Moreover a curious characteristic of Indian tertiary education is that in sharp contrast to current practice around the world, over here subsidisation is indiscriminate and universal, i.e wholly unrelated to ability to pay. Yet inevitably a price has to be paid for such extravagance; and it’s been paid by way of a sharp decline in the quality of higher education dispensed by the great majority of the country’s 400 universities and 18,000 colleges. The compulsions, economics and iniquities of over-subsidisation of higher education and its pernicious fallout for society, is discussed in this month’s insightful cover story.
An issue which deserves equal importance is education of the world’s second largest Muslim community which resides in India. Following the publication last year of a report of the Justice (Retd) Rajinder Sachar Committee which highlighted the pathetic socio-economic backwardness of the Muslim community, the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions has recommended the establishment of a Central Madarsa Board for improving the secular content of education dispensed in the country’s 30,000 Muslim madarsa (primary-cum-secondary) schools. Against the backdrop of divided opinion within the minority community, in this month’s unprecedented special report, our Lucknow-based assistant editor Puja Awasthi (Uttar Pradesh hosts over 16,000 madarsa schools) examines the pros and cons of the proposal to modernise madarsa education.
