Between the Left and crass commercialism
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| Rajiv Desai |
In 1969, India’s fire-breathing populist government introduced legislation that empowered it to nationalise banks. Banking took on a whole new meaning. Freed from the imperative of commercial viability, the entire system became focused on opening branches across the country. Banks were charged with the responsibility of garnering small savings accounts and disbursing small, mainly unsecured, loans to ‘deserving’ customers, regardless of their financial solvency.
A few months after I returned from America in the late 1980s, I happened to be at a luncheon where I met the authors of the Bank Nationalisation Act. I asked if nationalisation detracted from risk management, which I saw as the primary objective of banking. I was laughed out of court. "In India, we cannot merely go by commercial imperatives," a grandee sneered at me, "we have to take into account the fact that India is largely rural and poor."
Bank nationalisation spurred a demand for administrative staff. Since the entire function of risk management was rendered null and void, all that nationalised banks needed by way of staff were employees who could fill forms and stamp paper. In hundreds and thousands of bank branches in India, there rose a demand for bureaucrats. These recruits did not need the selective finesse of the Indian Administrative Service, just passing acquaintance with finance and commerce.
Around that time too, there was a sea change in India’s higher education system. Ideology rather than competence became the sine qua non of acceptability. India’s prized university system became a servant of reigning populist ideology. It mattered little whether you were a good teacher and guide or if you were an original researcher. You had to be politically correct. A whole new system was engendered.
My brother, who is among the brightest people I know, tells a story of his teacher in a commerce college, affiliated to Gujarat University. Apparently, this teacher used to commit his lectures to memory and would occasionally fluff his lines like a bad actor, whereupon the entire class would erupt in laughter. "Like a poor player, who struts and frets his hour upon the stage," my brother recalls, quoting Shakespeare.
The way my brother describes it, the mainstream university system in India is true to its British origin as a factory which produces clerks. Over the past decade, the Indian economy has integrated with the mainstream global economy. The demand right now is for people with special skills in computer software, media, telecommunications, civil aviation, hospitality and various other disciplines including marketing, public relations and insurance.
An incredible number of colleges, training institutes and even universities, have sprung up to fulfill this demand. Many of them are beyond the purview of regulatory agencies such as the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education and others. It is a veritable free-for-all. There are no standards of curricula and testing. The norm is: pay the money and become qualified.
Into this breach, a vast number of foreign education institutions have plunged, offering degrees and diplomas, never mind learning or scholarship. The Indian education system has become a lot like the American automobile industry at the turn of the 20th century: a vast transfer line that stamps out graduates by the million. While India’s grounded traditional higher education system rots on the shoals of ideology and bureaucracy, the new dispensation is mired in the sand of commerce.
As such, there is a stand-off between the irrelevance of the traditional higher education system and the short-term commercialism of the newly-emergent degree and diploma factories. There is no question that the government has to step in with proper regulatory mechanisms. Instead this coalition government is preoccupied with its questionable ‘common minimum programme’, in which the commissars of the Left parties have an undue say. Since the Left draws its support from the traditional university system, it is difficult for the government to pursue reforms in higher education.
Under the circumstances, the UPA government is silent about higher education while throwing money at primary and elementary education. Nobody understands this conundrum better than prime minister Manmohan Singh, who has served as chairman of the University Grants Commission. But his hands are tied because of the Left-dictated common minimum programme.
In the interim, India’s biggest infrastructural need — the development of human resources — has taken a back seat. Even as highways get built, airports are modernised and traffic management systems are put in place along with reforms in telecom, real estate and retail trades, India’s human resources will continue to languish between the rock of the traditional university system and the hard place of crass commercialism of multiplying training factories.
The tragedy of this impasse will be felt in the coming years. India needs not just technical education and political correctness but informed debates about democracy, social welfare, human rights and the rule of law. The new generation must become acquainted with the classic tomes of global culture including Plato and Aristotle, Chanakya and Kautilya and other classicists whose works have inspired great civilizations. This is the lesson to be drawn from the emergence of the Congress-led UPA and the defeat of the BJP-contrived NDA. Unfortunately, the legions of the Left in the traditional higher education system and the political brigands who benefit from the new commercial education factories stand in the way.
(Rajiv Desai is the Delhi-based chief executive of Comma, a PR consulting firm)