DESPITE CONSIDERABLE SOUND AND fury, there’s been no explicit education policy formulation in post-independence India notwithstanding the National Adult Education Policy (NAEP, 1978), National Policy on Adult Education (NPAE, 1981) and National Policy on Education (NPE, 1986), all of which were described as policy initiatives. In effect, education development in India during the past 64 years has been Constitution-driven in primary-secondary schooling, and market-driven in technical, medical, pharmacy, dental, management and professional education. NPE was the outcome of the constitutional dream of 1950, while NPAE and NAEP have remained day-dreams. Likewise, collegiate and university education is a result of upward pressures of the growth of school education and pressure from the domestic and global markets. Research and development in institutions of higher education has received little more than lip-service. An analysis of education development in India at various levels substantiates this line of argument.
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Adult literacy. Ex facie considerable progress has been made in adult literacy which has risen from 16 percent in 1951 to 75 percent in 2011. However, on closer examination, this achievement translates into 61 percent in 60 years or 1 percent annually.
On the other hand, most South-east Asian nations were fully literate by 1990.
Primary-secondary education. Curiously, only in 2009, 59 years after promulgation of the Constitution, was elementary education provision declared a fundamental obligation of the State (Central and state governments). But even so the Right to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009 is not time and targets-driven. And this belated initiative was prompted by the media and judiciary who have been critical about the snail speed of universalisation of primary education, globally acknowledged as the pre-requisite of national development.
Indeed, a hidden policy relating to school education in India is discernible. It’s to silently encourage the growth and multiplication of private schools and surreptitiously command and demand government quotas within them to create opportunities for rent-seeking by the politician-bureaucrat nexus. The inclusion and validation of s.12 (1) (c) in the RTE Act which makes it mandatory for private schools to reserve 25 percent capacity for poor and disadvantaged children in private primary schools is the first step towards backdoor control of private education. Instead, the rational option for the State would have been development of a chain of high quality government schools under NPE, 1986 which would have obviated the need for dispossessed children to look to private schools for K-12 education.
Professional education. The predatory policy of the State is visible with greater clarity in professional education. Showpiece government institutions such as IITs, IIMs, NITs, AIIMS, JIPMER etc apart, much of the growth in professional education has been in the private sector.
Privately promoted technical and management institutions sprang up across the country in the wake of the new economic policy (1991) which spurred the growth of the IT/BT/BPO industries in the 1990s. The number of IT training institutes and the demand for engineers grew by leaps and bounds leading to promotion of over 4,000 private sector engineering colleges countrywide.
But with a large number of engineering, medical, management, law, dental, nursing, teacher training and para medical colleges springing up, the predatory nature of the State manifested itself with the government staking claims to seat quotas in private colleges for OBCs, scheduled castes and tribes. The much maligned commercialisation of education and irritating, corruption-driven government regulations grew commensurately with the indiscriminate expansion of engineering, management, B.Ed, dental and nursing colleges and resulted in inefficiency, sub-optimal utilisation of facilities, unfilled seats, college closures and huge wastage of human and other resources.
Unplanned and ad hoc growth of education, early streaming and straight-jacketing of higher education has been at the cost of vocational education and training (VET). Way back in 1966, the Kothari Commission had recommended post-secondary education to develop all-round skills of students, i.e. VET. But this recommendation was ignored. Therefore to this day, post higher secondary VET courses, and industrial training institutes are sparse in the country.
The future. To revive and resuscitate policy formulation for education, a decentralised and federated institutional framework is required. Consensus building among all education stakeholders is vital for building this institutional framework. Private sector entrepreneurs in education, industry leaders, academics, professional bodies, student unions, social workers, the media, and similar tribes should be integral to this consultative process. The national interest demands that the state abandon its predatory policy vis-à-vis private education and focus on developing government schools and colleges, to bridge the widening gap between public and private education institutions.
(Dr. A.S. Seetharamu is a former professor of education at ISEC, Bangalore and education advisor to the Karnataka state government)