Mr Minister, some facts and figures

To recap 8212; the HRD Minister wants to slash the annual fees of the IIMs by 80 per cent from Rs 1.5 lakhs to Rs 30,000 to make management...

To recap 8212; the HRD Minister wants to slash the annual fees of the IIMs by 80 per cent from Rs 1.5 lakhs to Rs 30,000 to make management education within the reach of the poor school teacher whose youngest son just got admission into the IIM Ahmedabad. Truly noble intentions 8212; after all, so what if single-teacher primary schools in this country, supposedly banned since 1986, account for 31 per cent of all primary schools, where it8217;s not unusual for that single teacher to be absent? We must at least make an IIM degree accessible to every Indian youth.

There are approximately 23,00,000 college graduates that are pumped into the Indian economy every year. Most of them are looking for jobs and many for the kind of fancy pants management jobs with fat pay packets that an IIM education will get them. There are a total of six IIMs, all accounting for a grand total of 1300 seats which means 1300 jobs, since every IIM graduate gets offered at least one.

By dint of a nifty bit of math, that means that roughly 0.057 percent of those graduates are going to get those fancy jobs. Irrespective of whether that IIM education is going to cost Rs 1,50,000 or Rs 30,000 or even Rs 3000 a year. And you don8217;t have to be a management type to figure that 0.057 per cent is not a helluva lot.

Also, there is the pesky matter of the CAT exams, which determines your entry into an IIM. Last year 1.27 lakh sweaty-palmed hopefuls sat for the CAT exam, which makes it around 92 intrepid youngsters battling it out for one IIM seat. And the last time we checked, there were no grace marks for being the offspring of a poor paanwala or a public toilet attendant.

So, by slashing the fees down to Rs 30,000 what would we achieve? The 1.27 lakh sweaty palmed hopefuls will now go up to8230;say 5 lakhs? Or maybe even 12.7 lakhs? Why? Because so many more people can now afford to pay for an IIM education, so what if you are now competing with 10 times as many people for the same seat?

Ah-ha, we hear the Minister chortle triumphantly,just increase the number of seats in the IIMs. Right. But forgive us if we aren8217;t over the moon about this either. If you remember, we did exactly the same thing with engineers a few decades ago when there were just about 200 engineering colleges in the entire country. Not enough, everyone cried. We need engineers to build this nation. And so, engineering colleges were encouraged to sprout faster than mushrooms. Today, we have a glorious 1200 such institutions and more sprouting even as we speak, churning out an awesome 3,80,000 engineers every year. So, are all the engineers living happily ever after? 8217;Fraid not.

Underemployment is a big word. Underemployment is when your engineering graduate son or daughter settles for a job that pays Rs 3000 a month less than what the peon in your office makes. And that8217;s the lucky ones who get a job. Which brings us to the unemployment rate 8212; apparently in some disciplines it hovers around 15 -20 per cent.

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Increase the number of IIT seats? That won8217;t do the trick. An IIT education costs the student a whopping 2 lakhs. Not really something within arm8217;s length of desire of your maidservant, you8217;ll agree. Incidentally, there seems to be a strange echo-like effect between the two 8212; six IITs, six IIM8217;s; 2500 IIM seats, 1300 IIM seats. 2 lakhs a year, 1.5 lakhs a year.

So let8217;s slash the IIT fees as well. You could, you could. But, continuing in our role as the perennial party pooper, that8217;s slightly different from what Dr U R Rao recommends. He recommends that we slash8230;no,not the fees but the number of engineering college seats in India from 3,80,000 a year to 50,000.

Every year, millions of us shed but only those of us who can afford it, naturally! blood, sweat and tears to put our kids though what we were taught was a 8216;8216;decent8217;8217; education only to find that knowing how to make a decent paan has more worth today than a college degree in terms of the employment it gets you. Every time there is a 8216;8216;boom8217;8217; of jobs in one sector, the education system rushes towards it like headless chickens and soon turns that boom into doom.The boom for engineers is long over. The boom for software professionals may soon be over. According to the NASSCOM, the supply of IT professionals is likely to outstrip demand by 48,000 by the year 2008.

So what8217;s the to-do about these IIM seats? Let8217;s get real here. With the average entry level salary of Rs 60,000 a month which is known to go up to upwards of Rs 4 lakhs a month if it8217;s a foreign placement, it will take your bright young MBA less than a year to pay back those 3 lakhs.

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So, dear Minister, maybe you should look at doing other things. Make banks give loans for higher education at lower rates of interests. How about 0 per cent or tax deductions? Offer 20 per cent of the seats as merit scholarships and persuade Indian business to fund these. But more importantly, put jobs at the end of education. There are over 6 million unemployed youth in India, many of them armed with degrees that they spent 3 to 4 years of their lives and many thousands of their parents8217; ill-afforded rupees to get. Making 1300 IIM seats affordable isn8217;t going to help a great deal to defuse that time bomb of frustrated, bright young minds.

The writer is a freelance journalist