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Fight neo-liberal education policies, SFI told

— Photo: S. Mahinsha

Left view: West Bengal Higher Education Minister Sudarshan Roy Choudhury inaugurating the 29th State conference of the Students Federation of India in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday.

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The student community at large and the Students Federation of India in particular should come forward to launch a struggle against the neo-liberal education policies of the UPA government, West Bengal Minister for Higher Education Sudarshan Roy Choudhury has said.

He was inaugurating the 29th State conference of the SFI here on Friday.

The Left had been demanding for long that the allocation for education should amount to 10 per cent of the total budgetary allocation and 6 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product, Mr. Choudhury said. Even after this budget, these figures had come to only 5.15 per cent and 3.7 per cent respectively. Private initiative had always been present in the services sector and in education. But the neo-liberal policies of the Centre demand that the government withdraw from education even if it had the necessary resources to fund this sector. This withdrawal was also accompanied by a de-democratisation of the education system. The model Act for universities proposed by the University Grants Commission speaks of universities raising internal resources.

Translated, this meant that the burden on the students would go up. National-level institutions such as the AICTE and the NCTE were also promoting policies that would only help private players in the education sector.

“In the ultimate analysis, there is no difference between the education policies of the NDA and those of the UPA. Though the UPA did some promising things in the beginning, the process of de-saffronisation of the education institutions was never completed,” he said.

The Left governments had to show an alternative to all this. Educational institutions had to be geared up to allow greater access. Somehow, there was a line of thought in some sectors that access was inimical to quality; it was not. In West Bengal, the government had sought to set an example by not giving in to the demands of the self-financing professional college lobby for separate entrance examinations, total control over the admission procedure and fees. SFI State president Sindhu Joy presided over the inaugural ceremony. Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac, CPI(M) Central Committee member E.P. Jayarajan, SFI president Arun Kumar, secretary K.K. Ragesh, and State secretary M. Swaraj, were among those who participated.

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