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Journalism of Courage
The Supreme Court judgment staying the government8217;s order imposing 27 per cent reservation in central universities may be seen as a triumph of those opposed to caste-based reservation. More accurately, it is a defeat for cynical politicians who tried to replace an essential service by unwarranted draconian regulation.
For decades, politicians have obfuscated the issue of social inequality by describing it as a caste divide. In truth, the divide is economic: whatever the caste, practically no family that can afford to send children to colleges fails to do so. Not merely the well-to-do, even the poor, have given up on government schools. In Chennai, which has had the longest and the most extensive system of caste-based reservation, municipal and government schools are not getting enough students although they offer education free and the population has increased ten-fold. Those schools do not get children, as they have virtually stopped teaching. It is at the school level that the rot starts.
In the prevailing euphoria of bringing an insincere government to book, we should not forget that a much larger task remains to be done. As the organisers of Youth for Equality have been at great pains to point out, their move is not against backward castes but in favour of meritorious students whatever be their caste and however poor they may be. They have got the Supreme Court to strike a blow in favour of merit, in favour of caste-free institutions, but they are yet to find a solution to making good education accessible to the deserving poor. Unfortunately, civil society can stop the government from doing something; it cannot make things happen. People can agitate and put a halt to a project like the one that was to come up in Nandigram, but they cannot create jobs, start new enterprises. Youth for Equality can delay, even halt caste-based reservations, but it cannot provide education to the deserving poor.
The UPA government has launched the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan which, by all accounts, is making halting progress. But this ambitious scheme suffers from a basic flaw: it incorrectly assumes that more money will guarantee good education. Only better management can mend matters, money alone will not achieve the objective.
Aggressive academics are to be blamed for the current mess, as much as the flawed government apparatus. Even those academics who claim to be liberal, believe in prescriptions, not in freedom. They insist on a prescribed syllabus, prescribed textbooks, prescribed examinations and in controlling everything. They don8217;t take into account local needs, individual tastes and talents. Their one-size-fits-all approach has ruined our education system as much as political interference has.
We have seen how competition has transformed the ground situation in telecommunication, in aviation, in the automobile industry. We have seen that even in a monopoly like the railways, how a transparent system of seat reservation has all but eliminated corruption and improved service. Education, too, needs transparent competition; it needs to be liberalised as much as industry has been.
Unfortunately, the powerful forces that control academics today are entirely opposed to transparency and the liberalisation of education. They do not accept that people need choice, that they deserve choice. If we accept that educational access is basically a problem of money and not caste, then education should ideally be free 8212; or at any rate made affordable to all. For instance, Harvard University boasts that no meritorious student is prevented from studying there for want of money. That is how Harvard justifies selection on merit. Similarly, we can justify selection on merit only when no meritorious student is prevented from studying where he or she likes for want of money.
Harvard manages to attract poor but meritorious students, because it has let rich students cross-subsidise the poor. We need a similar system: then, the court should only prescribe the average fee and not the individual fee. If only the Supreme Court would consent to this simple reform, the rich can be forced to subsidise the poor; the poor will get a better deal, and our education system will be transformed. The war against inequity is not over, it has just begun.
writer is a former director of IIT, Chennai
