Opinion Hard lessons

Smriti Irani was inducted into the Narendra Modi cabinet as human resource development minister under a cloud of controversy. Her appointment was greeted with sniggers and condescension on account of her past career as a TV soap actor and her failure to have finished college. If that opprobrium was unwarranted, particularly when she had only just taken charge of a notoriously unproductive ministry, critics have been vindicated by her performance in the last five months. Now, the report that Irani appears to have rewarded sycophantic behaviour from a self-proclaimed “RSS person” with the chair of a national institute of technology in Nagpur caps a ministerial tenure characterised by questionable policy choices.

Irani made an inauspicious beginning, assuming office just when a spat between the University Grants Commission (UGC) and Delhi University over the latter’s four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) metastasised into a game of brinkmanship. The UGC’s writ prevailed and the country’s premier central university for liberal arts and sciences was denied its attempt to head off in a radical direction that could have set a template for other institutions. But this was the same regulator that, during the UPA years, had tacitly endorsed the FYUP. With the UGC’s abrupt reversal came the whiff of suspicion that the HRD ministry was pulling strings, given that the new dispensation had committed to rolling back the FYUP in its party manifesto. An emboldened UGC has directed its attention to the IITs, over whose degrees it now claims jurisdiction. This does not augur well for academic freedom, and concerns over this would only have been exacerbated by Irani’s meeting last month with leaders of the RSS and its education wings.

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Education reform remained stillborn in the UPA years. Legislation to address the quality deficits in higher education gathered dust in Parliament. Independent testing has revealed the dire state of learning among primary schoolchildren. But, instead of grappling with the real and urgent task of overhauling our educational system, the HRD ministry under Irani has suggested, trivially, that the IITs explore the possibility of separating their vegetarian and non-vegetarian canteens. Over half of India’s population is under 25, and skilling and educating them is among Modi’s primary promises. To keep it, the HRD minister cannot afford to waste time in embarking on reform.