Futures on hold

To understand the rot in private medical and engineering colleges, imagine yourself as an 18-year-old aspirant. For a year and more, as your...

To understand the rot in private medical and engineering colleges, imagine yourself as an 18-year-old aspirant. For a year and more, as your classmates traipsed through more cheerful teenage pursuits, just one consolation kept you tethered to your textbooks. Just one hope kept you going: The chance to ace those entrance tests and earn placement in one of India8217;s best professional institutes. A chance was all it was going to be, you conceded, supply and demand being so sorely mismatched. But so be it, let the best boys and girls win. That was the hope 8212; now survey the reality as it sordidly unfolds. Gatekeepers of a private medical college are caught on candid camera auctioning away seats. Regulators, it emerges, are in fact running these schools of higher learning. You are stranded, clutching your marksheet. In the educational marketplace, it appears, money talks louder than marks. You watch fearfully as the educational mafia begins striking back, as it did at protesting students and the Express photographer at Pimpri8217;s D.Y. Patil Medical College on Friday. This newspaper refuses to be intimidated.

It has been just 10 days since The Indian Express exposed the manner in which private medical colleges are exploiting legal loopholes and flouting rules. But 10 days was all it took for the supposedly well-considered regulatory regime to fragment. State governments have already confessed to confusion; it turns out there is no coherence on the volume of management quotas they have fixed in these schools or on the criteria on which merit is to be assessed. Given this anarchy, we welcome the Supreme Court8217;s intervention to refine its October 2002 judgement allowing private college authorities flexibility in setting tuition fee and admission pre-requisites. Liberalisation in the education sector, it must be emphasised, is long overdue. Private enterprise in this sector is crucial. Unfortunately, in the absence of adequate regulation, colleges have taken this nod to the free market as a license for a free-for-all. This is totally unacceptable.

However, even as the apex court sets about detailing the limits to the management quota or the fee that can be charged, the judges too should imagine themselves as that hapless 18-year-old. With admission to countless colleges frozen, lakhs of students suddenly find their futures put on hold. For them speedy intervention is as critical as rationalised admission procedures.