Free education from Govt’s shackles

No question of it when you consider that despite the best efforts of successive ‘‘socialist’’ governments our IITs and IIMs still manage to be counted among the finest institutes of higher learning in the world. So, why have we allowed other once fine universities to crumble and decay? Why are our best and brightest students forced to flee to obscure universities in places like Ohio and Idaho to get a college education? In one word: government.

This column has pointed out before that for our institutions of higher education to thrive and grow we need government to get out and whenever I have said this I have been inundated with angry letters.

But, I return to the subject because I believe it is important that the Indian public understand why we need not only to get government to withdraw totally from running our universities but also for private investment to be made easier.

It is not that private investment is not permitted but so many obstacles are placed in its way that only the very brave dare enter the arena. Talk to those who have dared and they will tell you tragic tales of how they are plagued on a daily basis by officials and politicians who use ‘‘socialist’’ laws and regulations as a means of constant harassment.

Interference is so pervasive that private colleges need government permission to make even the smallest changes. How can you create excellence in such an atmosphere? And, why should we believe that semi-literate politicians and usually corrupt officials know best when it comes to education?

There is so much that is wrong with Indian higher education that it is hard to know where to begin but the fact that universities have not been allowed to raise tuition fees in nearly fifty years is a good point. Indian college students pay less than Rs 2000 a year as tuition fees while the cheapest college education in America costs $15,000 a year, going up to more than $30,000 in an Ivy League college.

You cannot produce high standards without paying high salaries but in India we continue to believe we can, so our colleges and universities decay before our eyes.

How can you run universities without money? Whenever I have asked our ministers of Education (technically HRD) this question they argue that it is to help poor and needy students that tuition fees are kept low. Is this true? You only have to make a quick survey at a campus near you to find that taxpayers’ money is actually being wasted on subsidies for middle-class and rich students. The poor and needy remain poor and needy since most do not get within applying distance of universities in Mumbai and Delhi.

More than sixty-five per cent of college students in America also get subsidies but they tend to be distributed more rationally — and more specifically to the needy — because the disbursement of these subsidies is in the hands of college administrations and not officialdom. It is a better system. Just as it is a better system that in America it is colleges who decide courses and curriculum and not a bunch of officials sitting in some distant government office. In India we do not need proof that wherever the hand of government has reached it has degraded standards rather than raised them and yet (judging from your letters) we continue to have this touching faith in government when it comes to education. Why? How much more proof do we need that the American system works better than ours because it is totally devoid of official interference?

American colleges raise their own money through endowments and donations and there is no reason why this should not be possible in India if the government would just let go. But, it will not as long as public opinion remains on the side of state controlled higher education. It is time for us to look closely at our colleges and universities and examine if they have benefited from government interference or been gradually destroyed by it.

On my travels, this time, I happened to attend the commencement ceremony of a small Ivy League college. It was a solemn, dignified ceremony, held in the open on a campus that was built nearly 200 years ago.

As I watched the graduates in their caps and gowns stand to honour their teachers and as I listened to the college president urge his graduating students to always remember the importance of dissent which, he said, remained as important now as it had been in the time of Socrates, it came to me that I had never seen anything like this ceremony ever in India.

We may have had the oldest universities in the world in Taxila and Nalanda and we may continue to be the only civilisation that has a hymn to the Goddess of Learning but that is really all we have left — ancient myths and memories. To understand what it really means to honour Saraswati we have much to learn from America.

Write to tavleensingh@expressindia.com