The Hindu : National : Higher education a sick child, says Arjun Singh

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 11, 2007
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National

Higher education a sick child, says Arjun Singh

Special Correspondent

Says it needs a new direction

NEW DELHI: Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh on Wednesday made a strong pitch for giving a new direction to higher education as the existing system had ceased to serve the cause of the youth.

Inaugurating a national conference of Vice-Chancellors on ‘Development of Higher Education: Expansion, Inclusion and Excellence’ here, the Minister lamented that higher education was always the sick child of education, either by design or default.

Urging the Vice-Chancellors to come to terms with the realities of the day and find a way out of the prevailing situation, Mr. Singh said allocation for education in the 11th Five Year Plan was likely to be enough to allow the academic world enough elbow room to experiment.

Seeks road map

While seeking a road map from the Vice-Chancellors on higher education, his only caveat was that it should be inclusive given the imbalances that existed till date.

Earlier, Member (Education) of Planning Commission Bhalchandra Mungekar held out the promise of India inching closer to the two-decade-old goal of education getting 6 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

According to him, education would get 5 per cent of the GDP by the end of the Plan as 19.7 per cent of the total Plan resources would be set aside for this sector.

Of the view that Indian higher education was divorced from reality, Mr. Mungekar called for drastically reorienting the entire curricula. Stating that the Indian system was not egalitarian, he made out a case for inclusive education. Also, he stressed the need to switch over to the semester system from the prevailing annual examination mode.

Summarising the recommendations of Vice-Chancellors at the regional conferences organised by the University Grants Commission (UGC) to elicit the views of the university community on the various reforms suggestions from various quarters, UGC chairman Sukhadeo Thorat said they were not averse to the entry of foreign universities into the country, provided necessary safeguards were built in to protect universities “from unwarranted competition.”

On public-private partnership in higher education, Professor Thorat said there was a realisation that it was inevitable. Under the circumstances, the best that the university community could do was to build in safeguards to prevent any dilution of quality. Given that the very purpose of the big push that the government planned to give to higher education in the Plan was to improve access, the Vice-Chancellors stressed the need to ensure that private participation did not lead to exclusion.

Besides calling for a strong and effective regulatory mechanism to monitor admission and fees in private institutions, the Vice-Chancellors recommended that governments provide land at subsidised cost for establishment of private universities with the condition that they should provide education free-of-cost to the marginalised social groups and economically backward.

The Vice-Chancellors said private investors should be nudged into setting up universities in rural, remote and underprivileged areas that have lower than the national Gross Enrolment Ratio due to lack of quality institutions. Further, private and deemed universities should be made to offer courses in the general stream in addition to high-demand market-oriented ones to provide for an all-round development of higher education.

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