In a sweltering summer of high temperatures and humidity, West Bengal’s academic and bhadralok (middle class) communities have received bad news which is causing much hand-wringing and despair. Not even one student from West Bengal was ranked within the top 100 in IIT-JEE 2010 (joint entrance examination for admission into the Indian Institutes of Technology) when results of this annual exam open to class XII school leavers were announced on May 26. India’s seven Central government-promoted IITs at Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Roorkee, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Guwahati, are unanimously acknow-ledged as the country’s best (undergrad) colleges for engineering and technology education, and competition for admission is intense.
This year, approximately 350,000 higher secondary school leavers wrote the joint entrance examination to compete for admission into the IITs. Of them, 13,104 (3.7 percent) in the 98 percent decile were short-listed for interview after which a final cohort of 7,000 will be offered seats in one of seven IITs at the option of their managements. In the context of the intense competition for admission into these world-class engineering colleges, for a student to be ranked among the top 100 in IIT-JEE is a singular achievement and every student in all IITs is branded by her AIR (all-India rank).
The anguish and hand wringing in the groves of academia and elsewhere in West Bengal is prompted by the news that for the first time in memory, the highest ranked of the 59,039 students from the state who wrote IIT-JEE 2010 was Siddharta Sarkar with an AIR of 159.
Independent academics and monitors of West Bengal’s education system attribute the dismal performance of state students in all-India competitive exams to the iron control and massive infiltration of academia by cadres and apparatchiks of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) which together with several other leftist parties has ruled West Bengal uninterruptedly since 1977. During this period powerful CPM-backed teachers’ unions have taken charge of 57,487 government schools and control most of the state’s 18 universities and 15 government colleges, most of which are in a dilapidated condition because of the ruling CPM-led Left Front government having frozen tuition fee for the past 30 years. Even the newest university viz, the West Bengal State University (estb. 1998) levies a monthly tuition fee of only Rs.100.
Not surprisingly, none of West Bengal’s top rankers in IIT-JEE is inclined to enter collegiate education within the state. Sarkar has opted for IIT-Kanpur; ditto Susanta Mandal (AIR 237), while Sounak Dhar (AIR 253) has opted for Mumbai. Even the sterling reputation of IIT-Kharagpur sited in West Bengal, hasn’t stopped the flight of intellectual capital, which is also why the state’s 52 private engineering colleges offering 2,700 seats aren’t attracting school leavers either. Last year, 2,500 seats were vacant after the end of admission season. “In some institutions barely 30 percent of the seats were filled up. Colleges may be forced to shut down if the government does not take immediate measures to fill up the vacancies,” says Dhurjoti Banerjee, director of Ballabhum Institute of Technology and assistant secretary of the Association of Owners of Private Engineering Colleges.
This tendency to look to the state government to resolve academic problems has become second nature to academics reduced to the status of plaintive petitioners during three decades of CPM rule in West Bengal. Only when they become aware that the state government is the problem rather than the solution, will West Bengal’s engineering colleges which were the best in the country half a century ago, regain their lost glory.
Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)