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Correcting imbalances

Inaugurating a national conference of Vice Chancellors, Union Human Resources Minister Arjun Singh identified higher education as the “sick child” of education and indicted it for ceasing to serve the cause of youth. The question naturally arises: if higher education is the “sick child,” what can be said of school education, which is shamefully neglected in vast parts of India, above all its rural areas? But that question aside, there appears to be no dearth of institutions of higher learning and loads of talent among the country’s burgeoning student population. So what is the malady? The Minister has asked the Vice Chancellors to come up with a road map for higher education that balances the pursuit of excellence and quality with inclusiveness and access for all sections of society. This is the principal challenge before Indian universities as they prepare themselves for prospective competition from foreign universities that may soon be allowed to set up campuses in India, with some “safeguards” the Vice Chancellors want for protecting Indian universities “from unwarranted competition,” whatever that might mean.

In this context, it just won’t do to take a dismissive attitude towards the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institutes of Technology as ‘elitist.’ They are world class success stories in the field of higher learning and research, even if the numbers they enrol every year are quite small and their inclusiveness could be improved. Their exemplary academic practices and systems must be learnt from and, where appropriate, introduced in the wider field of university education. With high economic growth rates and healthy increase in tax revenues, funding should not be a problem — if there is political will. The phenomenon of uneven regional growth in professional education needs to be addressed. The southern States and, of course, Maharashtra have stolen a march over the rest of India when it comes to the number of professional colleges, the opening of new universities, encouragement to autonomous institutions, and the adoption of the semester system. Elsewhere, especially in Hindi-speaking India, the growth seen in metropolitan centres has not percolated to rural areas. The other side of the coin is that where professional education has proliferated, other fields of higher learning, above all the basic sciences starting with mathematics, have suffered. The UGC and the universities must work imaginatively to correct the balance in favour of the basic sciences and also ensure that the quality of education in the social sciences and humanities is raised appreciably.

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