This week’s column makes an argument that is best understood in three parts.
India’s universities are more inclusive—but still fail to deliver excellence and opportunity (representative photo)Movement of glaciers towards equinoctial
This author was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University when the Mandala 2.0 moment was popularly known in 2006. The then education (or human resource development) minister of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, Arjun Singh, announced the extension of reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in all centrally funded higher educational institutions. Till now these benefits were available only in government jobs.
Now, there are enough legal/constitutional provisions to debate the issue of reservation for OBCs. It is constantly being warned with a “creamy layer” clause and will now be sub-stratified to distinguish between ‘less OBCs’ and ‘more OBCs’ – which bodies like the Justice Rohini Commission are said to have recommended – a clear indication that this is far from a black and white question.
But none of this should fool you into believing that reservation in India is a purely legal or academic debate. My generation of students and those in higher education saw our campus first-hand when Mandal 1.0 took place in 1990 under the VP Singh government. Opposition to reservation in universities was, in praxis, quite reactionary, even bordering on violence. It was BR Ambedkar’s political popularity among Dalits that led to the signing of the Poona Accords which paved the way for reservations for Dalits and tribals before independence. It is the sheer democratic weight of the OBCs that has ensured that despite judicial reservations after independence the executive and the legislature have carried their weight behind reservations.
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The character of elite universities and other such educational institutions has changed after Mandal 2.0. They now have significantly more OBC students. Many, if not most, of them are far less privileged than the cohort of students studying in these places before the policy came in. One can unequivocally argue that our publicly funded higher education institutions are now more socially representative than they were before 2006. That we, as a society, are slowly but surely shaking off a part of the historical understanding of social inequality. It should be celebrated. It should not surprise anyone that with increasing numbers, subaltern or pluralist political activism or demands have also increased in Indian higher education institutions.
But only equality in representation, not the guarantee of equality of opportunity that education is expected to produce. The wave of positive action following Mandala 2.0 falls between two main headwinds.
The first was a lack of sensitivity (albeit inadvertently) to the fact that educational methods were not tweaked enough to cater to a large cohort that did not carry the greater “intellectual” endowment of privileged students. Someone sitting in a postgraduate political economy lecture at JNU and being asked to read a Morris Dobb text will act very differently depending on whether they studied at an elite Delhi University college or university in a Tier III city in Bihar or Andhra Pradesh and have never even been taught English, let alone come across such a demanding text. Mandala 2.0 has shifted the balance of the student body further.
The second was a complete inability to cope with the teaching workload in terms of volume. 54% increase in seats with Mandal 2.0 and workload per teacher is seen to worsen significantly in most of the centrally funded universities. This has placed a serious constraint on teachers’ ability to engage personally with students. A teacher of mine who taught me in my undergraduate economics course, and was largely responsible for my greater interest in the subject he wanted to give me personal time, told me about it a few years ago. “When you were a student, the class was small enough for me to give individual attention to interested students. Now, even if I tried to do that, I would go crazy because the class size has now increased more than three-four times”.
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These two factors, combined, have blinded the system to the needs of those who deserve it most. Now, bring on the systemic bias and caste-based hatred that permeates our educational institutions; And matters can be significantly worse at higher academic levels given the hierarchical power a supervisor enjoys with the student. Which of these is yours? There is an objective premise that universities are becoming time bombs of latent inequality waiting to explode. Given the hierarchy, it often consumes the student rather than the system. This is what the stories of student suicides in higher education institutions present in their most horrific form.
Viewed in this larger context, any rational mind would find it difficult to agree with the larger intent of the much-debated UGC recommendations which were recently set aside by the Supreme Court. It remains to be seen whether these recommendations see the light of day with the same legislative/executive support as was seen in the case of reservations or whether they are allowed to be diluted or even derailed under judicial cover. In a way, it will also test the efficiency of India’s larger subaltern politics whether its effectiveness stops at winning representation or equality after representation.
Absence of a framework for quality
However, the controversy does not end here. India’s ability to harness the demographic dividend, or lack thereof, will not be determined by the outcome of the all-important battle for representation and equality of opportunity in education. Here’s why.
Last week, the Financial Times ran a long story calling China’s talent program a key driver of advances in the cutting-edge field of artificial intelligence. To cut a long story short, the Chinese state identifies exceptionally bright students at an early stage, tests them through internationally recognized competitions like the Science Olympiad, selects the best of the best, and then ensures that they enter the best institutions for higher education. Among the biggest incentives for a student to pursue this line is that they can avoid the Gaokao, China’s notoriously difficult university entrance exams. These talents are expected to complete college level courses in their high schools. This program has now created a powerful virtuous loop with China’s greater economic power.
“I have seen first-hand how China has grown from having zero AI talent 20 years ago to mass-producing them,” he (Dai Wenyuan, a Chinese tech billionaire who is also a genius class graduate) said. They may soon have the real talent to change the world”, the FT story told him.
China’s rapid progress in producing such talent goes back to the Maoist-era urge to advance the country’s productive forces. It started with a big push in school education.
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India also took the right steps in its formative years, building institutions like the IITs and even punching above its weight in things like space technology. But it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Indian state has not been as enthusiastic as its Chinese counterpart in identifying, shaping and harvesting talent for its national economic progress.
The three main reasons that can be listed for this failure include, a completely redundant approach to the quality of primary education, although there has been some progress in terms of quantity, the bulk of educational employment being seen as a political patronage distribution exercise (even if sometimes rightly driven by the notion of equality) and above all, the complete lack of interest of higher students to build household capital. While there are critical voices that lament the lack of such things, it has never really led to a sincere effort to change things. There is nothing to suggest that things will change in the near future.
Dialectic with Absent Synthesis:
This is the classic problem of asymmetry of incentives.
Socially discriminated against, those who have recently been granted adequate access to elite educational institutions are still concerned about equality. It is difficult to find fault with their concerns.
The fellow passengers of the current regime are mostly busy chasing imaginary left-liberal ghosts in higher education institutions. Purges often end up institutionalizing what can only be called right-wing initiatives to project political dominance. Remember the absolutely ridiculous conference and interim reports of research programs that link things like cancer research to cow urine?
Capital, large and small, has realized that it is not worth trying to compete with something like its Chinese counterpart and is faced with a situation where returns must not be tied to superiority and instead captive markets, arbitrariness or, better yet, political patronage, must do the job. The Indian capital is more than happy to try and scale the base camp of the summit.
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Clearly, the first two strands outlined above are central conflicts in India’s educational debate: caste and communalism. The third is India’s largest The central conflict facing your economic fate.
Political correctness has so far prevented the first and second strands from truly interacting with the third. Unless this wall of China is broken, India will remain behind China despite millions of revolts and counter-revolts.
Perhaps, the predicament is rooted in our historical evolution. Unlike China, we have not given up feudal privileges. The post-colonial Indian state may have won the peace by avoiding a violent revolution, but the incentives created in society by the conflict between capital and democracy put us at risk of losing the international battle for dominance. For all the good things democracy has done for us, the biggest complaint is that no one with the strongest interest in democratic competition is winning this battle.
(Rashan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout and vice versa)
