Education Agenda for UPA-2: Great Expectations of Kapil Sibal

Following the return to power in Delhi of the Congress-led UPA-2 government and the appointment of Congress party heavyweight Kapil Sibal as Union HRD minister, there’s new hope that the education sector, completely bypassed by the socio-economic reform process of the past two decades, will be given top priority. Dilip Thakore reports

The return to power in New Delhi of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA-2) government following independent India’s 15th general election staged over four weeks in April-May, has aroused widespread hope and great expectation that the gradual liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy which began in July 1991, will acquire renewed momentum. Especially in the education sector, which was almost completely bypassed by the stuttering and sputtering socio-economic reform process of the past two decades.

Certainly the auguries are good. This time around the Congress party led by prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, who as the then finance minister presented the historic Union budget of July 1991 which unshackled post-independence India’s Soviet-inspired centrally planned, control-and-command economy that engendered the country’s infamous licence-permit-quota raj, has increased its seats in the Lok Sabha to 206 from 145 in 2004. This unexpectedly good showing at the hustings has freed the Congress from its dependence on the communist-dominated Left Front parties, which with their visceral hatred of liberal ideologies, vetoed all reformist legislation during the recently concluded five-year term of the 14th Lok Sabha.

With the number of Left Front MPs in the new Lok Sabha reduced to a mere 21 (from 66 in the previous Parliament), the hitherto powerful Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) and its ally the Communist Party of India (which together rule the states of West Bengal and Kerala), have been cut to size and are powerless in the newly constituted Parliament. Likewise the regressive caste-based political parties of the north Indian states — Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s SP and Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP — which held important ministries in the first UPA government (2004-09), have been routed and banished into the political wilderness.

With the communist and casteist parties which traditionally accord low priority to education unable to play spoilers as they did in the 14th Parliament, new hope has sprung within the hearts and minds of committed educationists in Indian academia that education will get the high priority it deserves in a nation hosting the world’s largest child population (450 million Indians are below 18 years of age). The hitherto dwindling hopes of the small minority of genuine champions of reform in Indian education have also been ignited by the appointment of Kapil Sibal, a Congress party heavy-weight and articulate spokesperson of the party on television news channels and in public forums, as Union minister of human resource development (aka education) in the new UPA-2 government.

A Harvard Law School graduate and front-rank senior counsel of the Supreme Court (fee: Rs.5 lakh per day), Sibal chaired the parliamentary sub-committee which finalised the much tossed-about Right to Education Bill 2008, pending enactment by Parliament, and was minister of the low-profile ministry of science and technology in the UPA-1 government, where by all accounts he did a quietly competent job. Therefore this time round his appointment as HRD minister is being widely interpreted as indicative of the Congress party’s seriousness of intent in cleansing the augean stables of Indian primary, secondary, and higher education.

Seriousness of intent to revitalise Indian education is undoubtedly overdue because during the past decades, the education sector has suffered highly damaging acts of commission and omission of arguably the most incompetent HRD/ education ministers in the history of post-independence India. In this connection it is pertinent to recall that in the mid- 1980s, when following the assassination on October 31, 1984 of prime minister Indira Gandhi, her son Rajiv (who won a landslide victory in the general election of 1984-85) was elected prime minister, he became the first PM after Nehru to accord high priority to education. Soon after being sworn in, he changed the nomenclature of the education ministry to Union HRD ministry and appointed future prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao as minister of this new high-profile ministry.

Unfortunately the Rajiv Gandhi government was soon beset by the storm of the Bofors scandal and during the V.P. Singh-led rule of the Janata Dal administration, the Mandal caste-based reservations issue created turmoil in Indian academia. After the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1989, a minority Congress government led by Narasimha Rao was voted back to power, but its preoccupation was liberalisation and deregulation of the economy. And during the rule of the casteist coalitions of 1996-99, Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi which houses the HRD ministry, was almost totally ignored and went into deep hibernation. Worse was to follow.

In 1999, India’s first BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition government was voted to power in New Delhi. Its choice of Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, a physics professor of Allahabad University and a BJP heavyweight as Union HRD minister, seemed to augur well for Indian education, particularly after Joshi flew to New York to sign the Millennium Declaration which inter alia committed 189 signatory nations to universalise primary education in their countries by the year 2015.

With a touch of bravado, while launching the NDA government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (‘Education for All’) initiative, Joshi committed India to achieving this goal by the year 2010. Yet instead of focusing on attaining the MDG (Millennium Development Goal) of universal primary education, Joshi frittered away this opportunity by commissioning the rewriting of school textbooks by ill-qualified Hindutva hardliners, and recklessly interfering with the administration and fee structures of the IITs and IIMs. In the process he made himself so unpopular that the student community actively campaigned against him and ensured his personal defeat in his Allahabad constituency in the general election of May 2004.

Following the surprise defeat of the BJP and the NDA in the 14th general election of 2004, and the swearing in of a Congress-led 17 party UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government in New Delhi headed by economic reformer Dr. Manmohan Singh, the HRD ministry portfolio was allotted to septuagenarian Congress party stalwart Arjun Singh. A former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh who briefly headed this ministry in the mid 1980s in the Rajiv Gandhi administration, Singh is a die-hard socialist of the Soviet school who was unable to come to terms with the appointment of technocrat-bureaucrat Manmohan Singh as prime minister by Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi, and spent his entire term attempting to upstage his prime minister.

This was most spectacularly demonstrated in 2006 when out-of-the- blue, Arjun Singh unilaterally resurrected the Mandal Committee’s Report (1980) to declare an additional reserved quota (i.e in addition to the 22.5 percent quota for scheduled castes and tribes) in all Central government institutions of higher education for OBCs (other backward castes). Given that (according to the Mandal Committee’s report) OBCs constitute 52 percent of India’s population, all the constituent parties of the UPA — and indeed all political parties — were obliged to support this proposal which was expeditiously enacted into the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Act, 2006.
Inevitably this parliamentary coup, which translated into a massive 49.5 percent quota in India’s few best institutions of higher education — including the IIMs and IITs — for candidates based on non-merit caste considerations, provoked a countrywide caste war and rain of litigation. Therefore a complex compromise solution was hammered out under which the capacity of Central government colleges and universities has been simultaneously expanded by 27 percent to protect the merit quota. But in the process, the resources of Central gov-ernment-sponsored institutions of higher education have been severely stretched, which will surely dilute the quality of education they dispense in future.

The upshot of the eccentricities of Dr. Joshi and Arjun Singh, and heavy politicisation of the Union HRD ministry over the past decade, has been a socially damaging inversion of its priorities and severe neglect of its core mission to attain the MDG of quality primary education for every child by the year 2015. Although under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan initiative of the millennium year, gross enrolment ratios in the country’s 1.24 million primary schools has risen from 89 percent in 2004-05 to 98.5 percent in 2007-08, it is mainly because of the expansion of the world’s largest primary school mid-day meal scheme which now covers 140 million children countrywide. Despite this, an estimated 53 percent of the 200 million children who are in primary school at the start of every academic year drop out before they reach class VIII, because the infrastructure of state and local government primaries is pathetically inadequate, teacher absenteeism is rife, and very little education is dispensed by them.

According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2008 of the Mumbai-based education NGO Pratham, which measures learning outcomes of primary school children in 587 of India’s 630 administrative districts every year, 42 percent of class V children in primary education don’t exhibit learning outcomes they should have attained in class II. Little wonder that in an op-ed page article in the Economic Times (June 9) titled ‘A broken school system’, Neeraj Kaushal, associate professor of social work at Columbia University, describes the much-trumpeted SSA as a “colossal failure”.

The on-the-ground situation is hardly better in secondary education. For a start, student enrolment in the nation’s 162,000 secondary schools — including 80,000 Central, state and municipal government secondaries — is a modest 36 million children. Of this population a mere 9 million complete high school (class X) and only 3.5 million complete higher secondary (class XII) education.

Moreover, although the quality of education dispensed in India’s best private secondaries is comparable with the best in the world, a reality which is routinely fudged by government, media and society in general, is that only the 1,500 primary-secondary schools affiliated with the Delhi-based pan-India Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) and the 9,581 schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) provide globally-benchmarked acceptable quality education. And these schools are the exclusive preserve of children of the upper middle class fortunate enough to afford their high (by Indian standards) tuition fees. To this minuscule number add the approx-imately 100 international schools affiliated with foreign examination boards such as the Cambridge International Examinations (CIE), UK and International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO), Geneva, which have sprung up across the country during the two decades past and whose tuition fees, although modest by Western standards, are astronomical by Indian norms.

These much-too-few islands of middling-to-excellent primary-secondary schools (including the 952 Central government promoted Kendriya Vidyalayas and 587 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas) with an estimated enrolment of 4 million children apart, the overwhelming majority of schools are affiliated with regional examination boards of the country’s 29 states. Although it’s politically incorrect to say so, the ground zero reality is that the huge majority of state board-affiliated schools are academically and infrastructurally inferior institutions promoted by state and local governments as well as private sector educationists, for the education of the country’s struggling lower middle class and aspirational poor. Most of them are ‘aided’ institutions receiving teacher salary and other grants from state governments, which transforms them into happy hunting grounds of corrupt state and local government politicians and bureaucrats, who run massive teacher recruitment, textbook printing and admission rackets in them.

Consequently state government and aided schools funded by taxpayers have been transformed into myriad laboratories for ill-educated politicians to indulge in language chauvinism experimentation. Most of the country’s state governments, to a larger or lesser degree impose ill-conceived vernacular language promotion policies — preponderantly driven by textbook printing rackets rather than love of native tongues — upon hapless children in state board schools. While the upper-middle and middle-middle classes enrol their children in CISCE, CBSE and international schools in which the medium of instruction is English, the rest of the population is subject to the whimsical medium of instruction policies of ephemeral state governments.

“The contrast between (state) board schools and CBSE (and CISCE) schools is not merely in their exam results and functioning. It has socio-economic dimensions as well. The state board caters to children of the poorer strata. In most states, non-CBSE schools have a chronic shortage of teachers and poor infrastructure. In MP (Madhya Pradesh), supply of teachers suffered a policy disaster during the 1990s; the state has not recovered from it. The state opted for para-teachers as a solution to the larger problem of fiscal deficit. Many other states used this option, but MP’s case was unique in that it declared full-salary teachers a ‘dying cadre’ which meant no further recruitment of career teachers in government schools,” laments Dr. Krishna Kumar former professor of education at Delhi University and currently director of NCERT (National Council of Education Research & Training) in The Times of India (June 19).

If primary and secondary education in 21st century India widely heralded as the knowledge century, is in a shambles, the situation in the country’s 431 universities and 21,000 colleges is hardly better. With the great majority of institutions in this seemingly-impressive number being small institutes and undergrad colleges, the higher education sector can accommodate only 9 percent of the country’s college/university age (18-24) youth population of 100 million (cf. 60-70 percent in the US and 20 percent in China). Moreover barring a few Central institutions of higher education such as the 13 IITs, seven IIMs, Indian Institute of Science etc, bedeviled with excessive government control and micro-management, most of India’s universities and colleges are little more than academic factories churning out 2.75 million low calibre clerks and technicians annually.

Little wonder that in the latest Times Higher Education-QS rankings of the world’s best universities, after some IITs which were ranked among the top 200, India’s most highly ranked varsity was Delhi University at 274, even as China had four ranked among the top 200. Worse, according to a 2005 McKinsey World Institute-Nasscom study, over 75 percent of the graduates of India’s 2,240 engineering colleges and 85 percent of arts, science and commerce graduates are unemployable.

Shockingly, instead of addressing these major problems of higher education during the wasted past decade, Dr. Joshi of the BJP-led NDA government and Arjun Singh of the Congress-led UPA who presided over Shastri Bhavan, Delhi, inflicted further damage on the system. Consequently neglected higher education supervisory agencies such as the University Grants Commission, All India Council for Technical Education, Medical Council of India, and universities empowered to affiliate colleges, morphed into dens of patronage and corruption, as testified by the spate of scandals relating to auction of medical seats, exam paper leakages and ready approval of ill-equipped study programmes of undergrad colleges.

It’s this mess, characterised by heavy politicisation of the HRD ministry and chaos, disarray, and brazen corruption within the country’s primary, secondary and higher education sectors that Sibal has to clean up as the new incumbent of Shastri Bhavan, if India is to reap its much-trumpeted demographic dividend in the foreseeable future. There’s no dearth of solutions. But the new HRD minister and his team has to get their priorities right and cherry-pick the best solutions to make up for the past wasted decade of Indian education.

For a start, Sibal must employ his sharp argumentative and persuasive skills within the cabinet to forthwith increase the Central government’s annual outlay for education from the current Rs.34,000 crore to Rs.70,000 crore. Next, he has to persuade all state governments to do likewise. Although there is no dearth of wiseacres who argue that efficiency rather than quantum of spending should be the top priority of the HRD ministry, the existing (Centre plus states) annual allocation for education of Rs.133,000 crore (2007-08) for education, it’s pertinent to note, is equivalent to a mere 2.84 percent of GDP. With the annual national outlay for education having slipped below 3 percent of GDP for the first time since independence in the Joshi-Arjun Singh era, larger yearly allocations are urgently required from the Central and state governments to build the country’s pathetically inadequate education infrastructure, particularly in primary education. This is a precondition for preventing 53 percent of children enroled in primaries countrywide from dropping out before they reach class VIII. In this connection unlike his lackadaisical predecessor, the new HRD minister would do well to study the detailed lib-lab-lav plan presented to the ministry and the public by EducationWorld to equip every government primary with a library, laboratory and lavatories, the prerequisite of attracting and retaining children in primary education (see EW April 2008).

Besides successfully arguing within the Union cabinet for doubling the Centre’s education budget and persuading state governments to do likewise, there is much else that Sibal can do to revive the country’s languishing primary education sector, the building block of the national education system. Among them: initiate a harsh crackdown upon shocking (25 percent per day) teacher absenteeism in government schools countrywide, pull up state governments which deny parents the right to educate their children in the English medium and/or harass citizens from promoting educational institutions of their choice as mandated by Article 30(1) of the Constitution. As a successful apex court legal practitioner, Sibal should be aware that these fundamental rights of parents and educationists have been repeatedly affirmed by the higher judiciary, but state governments are still in denial.

The augean stables of secondary education also require urgent cleansing. One of the prime causes of over 100 million children failing to continue their secondary education is the acute shortage of secondaries countrywide. According to statistics compiled by the Delhi-based National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), the total number of secondary schools in India is a mere 162,000, of which 82,000 are privately promoted and managed institutions. Fortunately massive private sector involvement has enabled India’s growing middle class to avail relatively high standard English medium secon-dary education, and contemporary India boasts some of the world’s best English medium day, boarding and international schools.

Yet, as testified by the middle class completely shunning government schools, rising teacher-pupil ratios and lengthening queues annually for admission into the country’s too few private schools, demand for acceptable quality secondary education is galloping far ahead of supply. This is because of stringent approval and NOC (no objection certificate) regulations imposed by state governments upon even the most well-meaning private sector school promoters. There’s urgent need for the new HRD minister to initiate action to end licence-permit-quota raj in secondary education.

Likewise there is urgent need for root and branch reform in India’s moribund higher education sector. As recomme-nded by the National Knowledge Commission, the institutional and study programme licensing powers of thoroughly compromised and corrupt regulatory authorities such as UGC, AICTE, Medical Council of India etc need to be withdrawn and vested in an Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education. Moreover foreign universities and institutions should be liberally permitted to establish offshore campuses in India to expand enrolment to 15 percent of the young adult population. In addition indiscriminate subsidisation of higher education, which has in effect frozen college and university tuition fees since 1950 and bankrupted higher education institu-tions, needs to be abolished and replaced with a regime of targeted subsidies and long term loans for needy students.

To his credit Sibal, who has shown acute awareness of the importance of education in the national development effort in his previous stint as Union minister for science and technology, and in his capacity as chairman of the cabinet sub-committee which drafted the Right to Education Bill, has drawn up intelligent priorities to clean up the almighty mess in Indian education. Immediately after assuming office on May 25, he has drawn up a 100 day plan for the HRD ministry. Enactment of the Right to Education Bill into law, passage of the Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations, Maintenance of Quality and Prevention of Commercialisation) Bill and establishment of a Distance Education Council top his declared agenda. Moreover he has committed himself to making subsidised loans available to targeted needy students, construction of 100 new women’s hostels, ten new National Institutes of Technology and 100 new polytechnics in unserved states.

However it’s pertinent to bear in mind that such brave statements of intent have been made by all of Sibal’s predecessors at the time of assuming office in Shastri Bhavan, New Delhi. Yet the sheer scale of the challenge of successfully arguing for a substantially greater share of Central government tax revenue for the huge mass of India’s 450 million children has defeated them, and reduced all of post-independence India’s HRD/education ministers to the footnotes of history. Will Sibal — a successful legal professional but without a significant political base — prove equal to the challenge of wresting a meaningfully better deal for the country’s voteless and vulnerable children? Although the nation’s reckless getting-and-spending politicians seem blissfully unaware, the future direction of 21st century India depends on it.

With Autar Nehru (Delhi) & Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)