Dirty dozen corrupt practices destroying Indian education
There is widespread apprehension that the United Nations’ Education For All goal by the year 2015 — translated into the former NDA government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan — cannot be attained without eliminating a dozen pernicious corrupt practices which bedevil Indian education. Dilip Thakore reports
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Eleven-year old P. Ramesh (name changed) is a class V student of a primary school run by the Municipal Corporation of Bangalore (pop. 7 million), the fast-expanding megalopolis known worldwide as the information technology (IT) capital of india, a nation foolishly over-hyped as an emergent it power in the crystallising fully-wired world of the 21st century.
But if Bangalore is widely regarded as a hi-tech city of developed world standards, Ramesh is wholly unaware of it. Let alone connectivity, the Bangalore Mahanagar Palike Higher Elementary School, Austin Town which has 800 boys and girls aged five-14 instructed by 18 teachers on its muster roll, doesn’t even provide drinking water or toilets to its students or teachers. Together with other children from poor families, Ramesh goes through the motions of learning history, geography and maths from poorly printed, low-quality textbooks written in Kannada, the official language of the state of Karnataka (pop. 56 million). Teacher unpunctuality and absenteeism in this municipal school is persistent and incurable and multi-grade teaching is the norm.
Little wonder though Ramesh has been attending school for four years, the best he can do is read and write his name and address accurately as he struggles with elementary maths. The drinking water infrequently available in the four recently installed taps in the school is dangerous and the two toilets (for 800 students) in the school are shunned by teachers and students. As per a policy directive of the state government which funds the school where education is provided free, Kannada is the medium of instruction in all subjects, though English — the language of business which has made Bangalore globally famous as the back-office of the world — is inexpertly taught as a second language. After four years in school Ramesh cannot read, write or converse on a par with his counterparts in western or eastern countries. But in the rapidly emerging free-trade global economy, he will have to compete with them in the marketplace for innovations, goods and services.
Tragically, Ramesh’s predicament is the rule rather than exception for 90 percent of the estimated 146 million children enrolled in primary (classes I-V) schools across the country. Herded into cramped, insanitary multi-grade schools bereft of furniture and elementary teaching aids in which little learning is dispensed or absorbed, only 59 million children stay the course to complete middle school (class VII). Given this weak foundation of the initial schooling years, it’s hardly surprising that the quality of students who persist through middle school and beyond is the cause of much lament within Indian industry, if not in government where paper qualifications rather than actual education is at a premium.
It is against this sobering backdrop that well-intentioned monitors of the socio-economic scene need to assess the probable impact of the 100-day old United Progressive Alliance government’s welcome, even if belated boost to elementary education. In the Union budget for 2004-05 presented to Parliament on July 8, the newly inducted UPA government imposed a 2 percent cess on all Central government taxes with the dedicated purpose of raising the Centre’s annual outlay for elementary education. The cess is expected to augment New Delhi’s (Rs.11,000 crore) annual education outlay by Rs. 4,000-5,000 crore. Moreover in his budget speech Union finance minister P. Chidambaram committed the UPA government to raising its annual outlay for education from the current 4 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) to the long-promised 6 percent, albeit in a phased manner.
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| BMP, Austin Town students: motions of learning |
Though social scientists and educationists across the country have unanimously welcomed this long overdue government assurance of committing resources towards fulfilling New Delhi’s pledge of attaining the United Nations millennium development goal of Education For All (EFA) by the year 2015, there is widespread apprehension whether the EFA goal — translated into the former NDA government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan programme which somewhat recklessly promised to realise EFA by the year 2010 — can be achieved without eliminating a dozen pernicious corrupt practices which bedevil Indian education. Informed opinion within the groves of Indian academia is unanimous that throwing money at the endemic problems of Indian education rooted in open, uninterrupted and continuous corruption, will not vanish them away. On the contrary there is a distinct possibility that as per Gresham’s law, bad money will drive out the good from the nation’s education system.
"In a country which is ranked among the five most corrupt in the world, it is utopian to expect even the noble profession of teaching to be untainted by this pervasive phenomenon. EducationWorld’s list of corrupt practices prevalent in Indian education is as accurate as it is overdue. Unfortunately for the past half century, influenced by western development experts who predicted the inevitability of the trickle down benefits of economic growth into education, unlike the governments of China and South-east Asia, our government and central planners accorded low priority to investing in education. This neglect has created grave shortages and quality-of-education problems in the vast government schools sector and has bred pervasive corruption. Therefore unless the corrupt practices which have disabled Indian education are addressed and substantially rectified, it is doubtful whether the additional allocations which the UPA government has committed to education will make any significant impact upon the system," says Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore.
Seetharamu’s forthright comments on the pervasive rot within India’s over-hyped education system are seldom articulated by Indian intellectuals who for reasons of misguided nationalism and exaggerated pride in sub-optimal academic achievements, tend to gloss over the deep inequities, injustices and corruption in the nation’s education system which has denied globally comparable education — particularly elementary education — to the overwhelming majority of midnight’s children.
Regrettably the media too is guilty of fudging hard issues in education. However in EducationWorld we are firm in our belief that rigorous, unsparing diagnosis is the pre-condition of reform. Hence after widespread consultations with eminent educationists across the country, we have drawn up a list of 12 corrupt practices which are crippling Indian education. These dirty dozen practices which are destroying the nation’s primary, secondary and tertiary education systems need to be squarely addressed as a prerequisite of attaining the millennium development goal of EFA as well as deriving value from the additional investment proposed in the Union budget. Our list of 12 corrupt practices which are relentlessly destroying Indian education:
1. Pernicious licence-permit-quota regime
The economic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of July 1991 which transformed Indian industry into a globally competitive force has completely bypassed the education sector. A slew of licences, permits, NOCs (no-objection certificates) and quotas which have to be obtained to promote and maintain institutions of learning have generated artificial, man-made shortages and bred pervasive corruption in the education sector.
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| Gopalkrishna: rife discretionary power |
"The promotion of education institutions is very difficult except for people who are either very rich or exceptionally determined," says Dr. K.P. Gopalkrishna chairman and promoter of Bangalore’s show-piece IB, GCSE and CISCE-affiliated The International School and five high-performance National Public Schools in Bangalore and Chennai which have an aggregate 5,500 students on their muster rolls. "The process begins with applying to the state government for a no-objection certificate. In Karnataka an NOC is granted only if the proposed school’s promoter undertakes to institute Kannada as the medium of instruction in classes I-IV. Therefore there are hundreds of English medium primary schools which are registered as Kannada medium institutions. From class VI upwards NOCs are granted entirely at the discretion of officials in the state’s education department who insist upon observance of stringent conditions, none of which are applicable to government schools. Even CBSE and CISCE affiliation is given — at the discretion of the managements of these examination boards — after several years when a school commences class IX lessons. The exercise of discretionary power at too many points generates excessive and unwarranted corruption within India’s education system," says Gopalkrishna.
The vast discretionary powers invested in education department officials of every state government to block the promotion of private sector schools and/ or extract rents and bribes from usually idealistic educationists is one explanation of the curious phenomenon of post-independence India’s industrial class failing to emulate western and particularly American businessmen-philanthropists in promoting institutions of learning. The founders of the Tata and Birla business dynasties promoted great institutions such as the Indian Institute of Science, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and BITS, Pilani apart from several primary and secondary schools. But these initiatives were taken before independence and the commencement of the licence-permit-quota regime in industry. To expect businessmen to undergo the travails of the licensing regime in education as well, was perhaps to expect too much.
Consequently with standards in government institutions of learning continuing to plunge, the mantle of promoting quality-conscious schools and colleges devolved upon middle class idealists and — at the other end of the spectrum — on tough, hard-headed businessmen who learned the ropes of licence-permit raj introduced in the heydey of Nehruvian socialism. And quite clearly while this latter genre of ‘edupreneurs’ is more than making ends meet, the former tribe is losing all conviction.
A case in point is N. J. Mukund an engineering graduate of Bangalore University and promoter-CEO of Tejasvi Engineering Industries, a Bangalore-based machine tools servicing firm. In 2002 upon the urging of his sister Srividya a chemistry postgraduate of Bangalore University and former teacher, Mukund promoted a primary school to provide English medium education to deprived suburban children on the outskirts of Bangalore. Two years on, Mukund and Srividya have decided to throw in the towel and wind up the Surabhi School constructed at a cost of Rs.25 lakh because of continuous harassment by officials in the state government’s education department.
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| Government school classroom: man-made shortages |
"Though we were doing so in the public interest, setting up a new school was a very unpleasant and stressful exercise," recalls Mukund. "First the state government refused us an NOC citing a law which requires all schools to offer primary education only in Kannada upto class V. The general practice is to bribe government officials to get around this provision of law. It took us over seven months to clear all the paper work to admit our first batch of 25 students in June 2003 and only after we paid Rs.25,000 through a middleman. Even during the past year we have been regularly harassed by education department officials demanding bribes and donations for religious festivals. This has completely shattered our idealism and we have taken a decision to either sell or close down the school this year," says Mukund.
Though this example is specific to Karnataka, it’s an open secret that bribe-seeking from promoters and managements of independent schools — widely perceived to be the playgrounds of the children of the rich and famous and therefore socially sanctioned targets under socialist behavioural norms — for real and imagined infringements of local government laws, is common to all states of the Indian Union.
2. De rigueur kickbacks in school construction contracts
Educationists and media personnel who never fail to highlight the shabby conditions in government schools seldom complain about the kickbacks which are routinely paid to politicians and bureaucrats, PWD (public works department) engineers by contractors who inflate building costs and cut corners routinely ‘forgetting’ to build drinking water and toilet facilities. According to Prof. Seetharamu of ISEC (quoted above) the award of construction contracts and kickbacks is the largest revenue source of education department officials across the country.
3. Denial of information: Opaque state/local government education budgets
Acquisition of departmental papers of government — especially state governments — is a strenuous exercise at the best of times, and getting access to education department data is the most difficult. This difficulty is deliberately compounded by state government officials who citing professed love of their native languages, insist on providing papers and data in them. Bilingual or translated documents are very rare. Surprisingly, neither the Union government nor the growing number of education champions across the country press for bilingual departmental publications and documents in the interests of transparency and data analysis. However it is well known that over 90 percent of education outlays in every state of the Indian Union are consumed by teachers and administrators’ salaries and perquisites. And given that teachers’ remuneration is embarrassingly modest, quite obviously the provision made in Central and state government budgets for education is grossly insufficient.
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| Vashishta: secrecy shroud |
"There’s a shroud of secrecy over allocations made for education and how they are disbursed and this is a major cause of pervasive corruption in Indian education. I believe it is important for information about education outlays to be easily available down to the village level and for all expenditure to be posted on public notice boards," says Prof. Umesh Chandra Vashistha an alumnus of Garwhal, Delhi and Indore universities and currently head of the faculty of education at Lucknow University.
4. Unchecked textbooks publishing, printing and distribution rackets
It is difficult to envisage any of the numerous rackets which have dumbed down Indian education to unimaginable depths being more pernicious than the open, continuous and uninterrupted rackets in textbooks publishing and printing. Critical to the management of the huge textbook rackets which are endemic in all the 29 states of the Union is sub-national linguistic chauvinism and insistence upon under-developed regional languages being the medium of instruction for primary and even secondary school children. This vital precondition enables local politicians and education ministry officials to auction textbook contracts to small-time, small-scale and often fly-by-night textbook racketeers who hire kith and kin of uncertain qualifications and antecedents to write shoddy texts containing outrageous untruths, untenable conclusions and biases. With local language intellectuals usually co-opted upon quality scrutiny committees, shoddy textbooks are cynically imposed upon captive students in government schools at taxpayers’ expense.
"The money involved in printing textbooks for government schools in the state of Uttar Pradesh is huge — over Rs.1,000 crore per year. The people involved in this business are in it for the money rather than promotion of love of learning. And politicians ensure that printing contracts are awarded in much the same manner as liqour vending contracts," says Prof. Vashishta quoted above.
5. Teacher appointments in state government and municipal schools
Despite its vital importance, the teachers’ community in post-independence India has received very shabby treatment from state governments and even from private school edupreneurs. It’s hardly a secret that in most states of the Union, teachers’ jobs are auctioned by venal politicians. For example a case is pending against Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chauthala in a criminal court for allegedly substituting his own list of teachers in lieu of a list of teachers selected (reportedly on merit) by the state government’s education department.
"In Maharashtra to side-step a legal obligation to pay teachers higher salaries as mandated by the Fifth Pay Commission, two years ago the state government passed an official resolution permitting government schools and colleges to hire teachers on a ‘contract basis’ which entitles schools and colleges to pay them a fraction of non-contract, permanent teachers’ salaries. Under this resolution teachers who work for three years as contract teachers can be recommended by a principal for permanent appointment. But quite often the education department doesn’t agree to confirm contract teachers because of the government’s bankruptcy. As a consequence in Maharashtra people have begun to shun the teaching profession which is likely to create a grave teacher shortage in the near future," says Arundhati Chavan, principal of Mumbai’s 20-year old Akbar Peerbhoy Girls Polytechnic and president of the city’s Parent Teachers Associations United Forum.
6. Teacher transfer and salary payment rackets
Not only do teachers have to bribe greedy politicians and babus to land jobs in government schools, but even after they take on their thankless task, they are obliged to keep them in good humour lest they are transferred to inconvenient locations. On the obverse side of the coin, there is a flourishing, continuous and unacknowledged racket in transferring teachers — for a price of course — from village and hardship postings to towns and cities with superior civic infrastructure and facilities. Moreover another cruel racket out of which callous education department officials derive incomes is the timely ‘release’ of teachers’ salaries. "In rural schools in particular, it’s routine for teachers’ salaries to be delayed and for raising their remuneration to pay commission scales," says Arundhati Chavan, president of PTAUF, Mumbai.
Nor is the delayed salary payment racket limited to rural areas. In the professedly hi-tech city of Bangalore, salary cheques of teachers of government-aided schools are released only upon payment of a standard Rs.100 per teacher which results in an estimated annual windfall of Rs.32 crore to education department officials. Reports from correspondents in other states indicate this cruel racket is not peculiar to Karnataka.
7. Negligible investment in infrastructure — especially libraries and laboratories
It’s incontrovertible that given the size of India’s youthful population, the annual outlay of government (Central and state combined) for education estimated at Rs.70,000 crore is grossly inadequate. Given that 280 million citizens are below 18 years of age and are entitled to education, the per capita allocation for education for them is a mere Rs.2,500 per year to cover capital, maintenance and operational expenditure. Little wonder that one-fifth of the 834,000 government primary schools across the country are multi-grade, without proper buildings, and two-thirds don’t provide drinking water and toilet facilities. Against this background of endemic infrastructure shortages it is hardly surprising that libraries are a rarity in government schools and perpetually out of stock in institutions of higher education.
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| Sanyal: lab-lib lacuna |
"A distinguishing charac-teristic of Indian students is their lack of library and laboratory cultures. This is because the practice of utilising libraries — which in most government schools don’t exist — to supplement classroom teaching is foreign to the overwhelming majority of Indian students. Likewise even at the college level, laboratories are under-equipped and under-utilised. Instead practical sessions are offered by way of private tuitions by professors in several Kolkata colleges," says Dr. Sunando Sanyal, former professor of English at the Ramakrishna Mission College, Kolkata and currently a member of the All India Save Education Committee.
8. Inspector raj is pervasive and flourishing
Inspector raj, a perennial complaint of Indian industry — especially small and medium scale units — is perhaps even more pervasive in the education sector. Within Indian academia it’s a well-kept secret that education department inspectors and officials accumulate huge fortunes by shaking down school and institutional managements for real and imagined infringement of safety and administrative regulations on a continuous basis. For a price they are always ready, willing and able to sanction and/ or condone safety violations as in the Kumbakonam fire tragedy which resulted in the holocaust of July 16 in which 93 students of a primary school were charred to death (see EW cover story of September).
Disturbingly, reports of inspectors of reputed all-India examination boards such as CBSE and CISCE following the example of state government education officials are also being increasingly heard. Ditto of tertiary level assessment and rating boards such as NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council — a subsidiary of the University Grants Commission) and NBA (National Board of Accreditation), a subsidiary of the All India Council for Technical Education.
9. Examination paper leakages and correction rackets
With the teachers’ community having acquired an unenviable reputation for mass absenteeism and petty corruption during the past half century after independence, governments at the Centre and in the states have incrementally resorted to decreeing public examinations to test teachers as much as students. The good performance of students of a school in CISCE, CBSE, JIEE, NDA and state-level school board exams is increasingly being interpreted as a benchmark not only of student capability, but also of faculty competence.
Inevitably, given the amorality which has become pervasive in this failed republic of rackets, a new and under-reported racket of question paper leakages is acquiring pan-India ramifications. In early April when Ranjit Verma a Delhi-based businessman was arrested for leaking the exam papers of the all-India pre-medical test (AIPMT) conducted by CBSE, evidence of his subversion of the entrance exams of several other boards was also unearthed. But since then nothing further has been reported about his prosecution and sentencing. There’s a distinct possibility that a massive cover-up operation has been decreed.
According to a senior CBSE official who spoke with EducationWorld’s Delhi-based assistant editor Neeta Lal on condition of strict anonymity, the root cause of the numerous rackets which characterise the nation’s amoral education system is "absurdly low pay scales across the spectrum". "In examination boards such as CBSE, most of the personnel who have access to confidential exam papers are paid so poorly that they are tempted by even a few thousand rupees. In the AIPMT exam papers leak earlier this year, a computer technician who had been working with CBSE for a long time for a pathetic wage was corrupted by the Sahdeva PT College (a Delhi-based coaching school) and sold the exam papers to the highest bidders. To eliminate corruption and malpractice within the teaching and academic professions there has to be equity and respect in remuneration packages," says this CBSE official who adds that there are as many rackets in correction of exam papers by under-paid and over-worked academics as there are in leaking them.
10. College entry and admission rackets endanger idealism
Incremental government interference and micro-management in higher education has almost completely devalued vocational and undergraduate education in post-independence India. The original sin of insufficient funding for the promotion of an adequate number of schools and colleges has been compounded by rigidly licensing and regulating the promotion of private sector institutions of education (see corrupt practice no.1 above) resulting in the creation of acute capacity shortages which has generated corruption and amorality on a massive scale. Surprisingly despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation Case (2002) upholding the right of all citizens to "establish and administer educational institutions of their choice" as mandated by Article 30 of the Constitution, state governments and the judiciary itself have exhibited extreme reluctance to liberally sanction the promotion of new private sector institutions of education or loosen governments’ asphyxiating administrative stranglehold over privately promoted professional and higher education institutions.
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| College admission queue: towards out-of-sync syllabi |
The consequence is a mad scramble within the aspirational middle class to secure admission into government and private colleges of professional education (medicine, engineering, dentistry) under the heavily subsidised government quota. The standoff between the Karnataka state government and promoters of private medical and engineering colleges in the state over the issues of admission quotas and fees payable by differently classified students which is likely to result in Central government legislation to regulate admissions into colleges of professional education, is testimony to the confusion and disarray into which the professional education system has been plunged. In this environment the number of agents, stubborn government officials and academics who steal huge sums from students desperate for quality higher education has multiplied manifold.
11. The great merit hoax and coaching classes boom
With the supply side of high-quality colleges and institutes of professional education severely constrained by the licence-permit-quota regime which discourages idealists and private sector eduprenueurs from promoting education institutions, ‘merit’ in terms of high scores in public entrance exams — themselves vulnerable to exam paper leakage and assessment scams — has become the magic mantra for streaming the brightest and best into the too-few institutions of higher education such as the blue chip colleges, IITs, IIMs etc. But while ex facie this seems a fair methodology to determine admissions into the best institutions of higher education, the ground reality as highlighted by one of the judges in the landmark T.M.A Pai Foundation Case (6 SCC 481) is that success in the open entrance exams for admission into the best colleges and institutes is greatly dependent upon the ability of aspirants to afford the stiff tuition fees of private tutorial colleges/ coaching classes which have sprung up across the country with the sole purpose of coaching students to top public entrance exams. Therefore India’s tertiary education system offers the curious paradox that the too-few heavily subsidised ‘merit’ seats in colleges and institutes of professional education are grabbed by students from rich families (who can afford private tuition/ coaching) while students from poor households have to pay higher ‘management quota’ fees for admission.
"The overwhelming majority of so-called merit students who top competitive entrance examinations are those who can afford the exorbitant fees charged by exam coaching schools. Ironically many of these tutorial colleges/ coaching schools which are big businesses today are promoted by and/ or employ government school and college teachers moonlighting as private tutors. For all entrance exams ranging from GRE, TOEFL, JEE, CET, CAT and MAT among others, professional coaching provides the additional edge for fee-paying students to acquire ‘merit’," says D. Victor, former director of collegiate education in Tamil Nadu and currently the Chennai-based director of the Academy for Quality and Excellence in Higher Education.
12. Obsolete syllabuses and sub-standard teaching in higher education
Ironically students who top competitive open examinations after considerable getting and spending are usually confronted with crumbling infrastructure, obsolete syllabuses and indifferent teaching even in the best colleges of undergraduate education. With tuition fees pegged absurdly low, and institutional managements abjectly dependent upon state governments (which pay faculty salaries of most colleges) and supervisory bodies such as the University Grants Commission and All India Council for Technical Education for capital and maintenance grants, institutions of higher education are in shabby, run-down condition.
"It would be rare to discover a head of department or principal of a college who doesn’t complain that Delhi University’s syllabus has been out of sync with the needs of students for decades. This is because those who design and mandate syllabuses don’t bother about the viewpoints of teachers or students. Indeed student feedback or inputs from hands-on academics and industry leaders are never taken into account when syllabuses are framed. Obsolete, archaic syllabuses are destined to result in sub-standard teaching," comments Dr. Aruna Chakravarti, an alumna of Miranda House who has been teaching English in Delhi University since 1961 and who is currently principal of the all-women Janaki Devi Memorial College, Delhi (estb.1959) which has 1,800 students on its muster-roll.
With the trade and tariff walls which insulated and cosseted the low-productivity Indian economy from global competition crumbling in the new age of economic liberalisation and globalisation, this is a decisive moment of truth for the Indian establishment which is given to entertaining grand delusions of India attaining super-power status in the near future, to squarely address the vital issue of the rapid erosion of the foundations of the nation’s education system across the spectrum. By raising its annual budgetary allocation for education, the newly inducted UPA government has taken an overdue first step in this direction. But the prerequisite of efficient utilisation of the proposed additional financial inflow into the education system is rooting out the dirty dozen corrupt practices which are bleeding Indian education.
Unless a preliminary clean-up of the stinking augean stables of Indian education is initiated in right earnest, the proposed additional investment in developing this nation’s high-potential human resources will prove to be yet another getting and spending exercise with nothing to show for it — except perhaps the tears and disappointment of India’s 280 million cruelly deprived children.
With Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai); Vidya Pandit (Lucknow); Neeta Lal (Delhi); Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore); Pallavi Bhattacharya (Kolkata) & Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)