Opinion No HR in HRD

The Tribunals Bill that was held up in Parliament is,in its current form,a terribly drafted piece of legislation and the standing committee was right to object to it. The objectives of the bill are promiscuously unclear: it gives the impression that the tribunal will adjudicate everything from affiliation related matters to service conditions and student grievances. A plausible case could be made for a limited dispute resolution mechanism. But that mechanism has to be placed in three contexts.

First,a tribunal makes sense only against the backdrop of a larger regulatory structure. It is not clear what that structure is going to be. The draft NCHER Bill gave it tribunal-like powers,raising fears of a mass of overlapping and ill-defined jurisdictions. Second,there has to be a clear articulation of the problem you are trying to fix. Student grievances of particular kinds require better in-house mechanisms and it is not advisable to legalise them in the same way you might want to legalise other forms of regulatory issues. Third,you have to show why the new system will be better than the old one. The standing committee was right in thinking that it is better to trust courts than to trust these tribunals. The composition of these tribunals is nothing but a vast contrivance to secure more sinecures for about-to-retire civil servants. Academics are under-represented,and even the norms of judicial representation violate Supreme Court norms for such tribunals. And what signals do you send about academic values,autonomy when you insist on stuffing education tribunals with IAS officers?

There are similar issues plaguing two other reform initiatives: the Foreign Education Institutions Bill and now the newly proposed innovation universities. The ministry has been naïve about what kinds of foreign institutions are likely to come to India. But the bill does not answer one fundamental objection: how can a democracy justify special privileges for foreign institutions,while it ties the hands of domestic ones? The early drafts of the “innovation” universities bill are promising in some respects: they seem to promise greater autonomy and experimentation. But there are problems. The first is simply fairness in regulation: how do you expect other institutions to compete and excel if they are not given the same regulatory freedoms as other institutions? The proposal almost seems to stigmatise existing institutions. Second,what is the mechanism by which these “special” institutions will be selected? Why will this mechanism have any more credibility than existing mechanisms,especially since silence on this topic suggests that government wants to control the process?

The list could go on. The UGC,with full knowledge of the HRD ministry,proposes a series of absurd guidelines of teacher recruitment and promotion; and now another committee is appointed to examine those guidelines. As far as public universities are concerned,still the mainstay of our system,the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. We make a song and dance about the absence of research in universities,yet all proposals still coming out of UGC are going to make the structural conditions for research more difficult,in terms of fewer sabbaticals,larger teaching loads,etc. Worse still,the focus of the ministry gives the impression that it wants to let the public system rot.

There is conflict in Delhi University over the semester system. It would be easy to present this as a conflict between a reform proposal and an obdurate union. A semester system is advisable on pedagogic grounds; but we have converted it into a formulaic calendar reform. Certainly the Delhi University Teachers Association has a history of massive obstructionism,combined with capitulation on the wrong issues. But it is raising pertinent questions about the semester system. Before we introduce reforms,have we ensured that the conditions necessary to make that reform work exist? The trouble is that no one in the education establishment wants to do the hard work that will be necessary to answer this question.

Why this arbitrary slash and burn approach to reform? Part of this is a problem of urgency. Urgency is admirable,but it should not be an unthinking haste,more intent on making a statement than solving a problem. Part of it is that the small existing network of bureaucrats and selected academics that seems to be shepherding this process cannot entirely shake off the legacy of their own past. What is remarkable about this supposedly reform-minded ministry is that exactly the same group of bureaucrats and academics who signed on the dotted line for Arjun Singh (and in some cases Murli Manohar Joshi),who created this badly regulated system in the first place,have again been pressed into service. They instinctively do not have the imaginative liberal disposition that reform needs. And the way in which they think of the relationship between education and the state subverts any reform. And their presence and actions are signalling that the ministry is not serious about reform. Finally,serious reform is not about ministerial enthusiasm; it is about the slow boring of hard boards.

The ministry’s reformist sheen is coming off very fast. Rather than blaming Parliament it needs to set its own house in order. Academics may let the minister get away with a demeanour that says,“minister knows best.” But it is a good thing Parliament didn’t.

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi express@expressindia.com