‘Foreign Universities Will Give An Impetus To Existing Ones ...It’s Healthy Comp

An economist and educationist, Narendra Jadhav is currently helping craft crucial bills on higher education before Parliament. The former vice-chancellor of Pune University is member, Planning Commission, and also a member of the newly constituted National Advisory Council, often described as the “conscience-keeper” of the UPA government. In the backdrop of growing scepticism over the inclusiveness of the education policy that is the initiative of the Union HRD ministry, Jadhav talks to Anuradha Raman on how the proposed bills will change the face of higher education in the country.

Crucial bills on higher education—the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill, Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Technical and Medical Institutions Bill, Educational Tribunal Bill and the National Accreditation Authority Bill—largely deal with regulation of universities and colleges. The Knowledge Commission and the Yashpal Committee report have provided several roadmaps. How many of their suggestions have been incorporated in these bills?

A complete transformation is currently under way in the higher education sector. There are five major proposals under various stages of approval; none of these proposals has been passed by Parliament. In fact, the National Commission on Higher Education and Research (NCHER) proposal has not even been submitted to the cabinet as yet; it is expected that the relevant bill would be tabled in Parliament in its monsoon session. Bills relating to the other four proposals have been cleared by the cabinet and have been tabled in Parliament. The proposal for the establishment of NCHER emanates directly from the recommendations of the Yashpal Committee and the National Knowledge Commission, duly modified through nationwide consultations by the task force appointed for the purpose.

Let’s take the Foreign Education Institutions Bill. Academics believe it will enable the elitist class to buy its way to a higher education while leaving the rest to crowd other universities. What happens to inclusive education then?

Equity alone cannot be an overriding objective when we talk of education policies. Expansion and achievement of excellence too have to be factored in. How can we treat the foreign universities on a par with the rest? What we can do, however, and propose to do, is to have a licensing system for them and stringent conditions for their entry. Also, remember, when the Reserve Bank of India gave licences to private banks, there was a hue and cry that public sector banks will collapse. But the truth is they are doing very well now. We hope there will be a similar impact on our universities with the arrival of foreign universities.

In the last few years, several fly-by-night operators working for institutes abroad have set up shop in India and left many students in the lurch. Closer home, nearly 40 universities have been deemed illegal as they did not have the requisite wherewithal to provide education. How will the current bills check these unfair practices?

By regulating the commencement of operations by new universities under the proposed NCHER; enforcement of the proposed Prevention of Malpractices Act; mandatory accreditation of universities; and placing the relevant grading in the public domain so as to facilitate informed choice by students and parents.

There is also a concern among academics that the best foreign universities are not going to come to India.

It is not clear how many foreign universities would come in. The endeavour, of course, would be to keep second- or third-rate foreign universities out and encourage leading foreign universities to enter. It is expected that healthy competition from foreign universities would give an additional impetus to the existing ones here in terms of achievement of excellence.

Will the bills ease the pressure on higher education by getting it under a regulation structure?

The Indian higher education system is generally understood to be “over-regulated and under-governed”. Bringing higher education under an overarching apex body is expected to bring in greater cohesion and better governance with transparency and accountability. The mantra for higher education today is: expansion, excellence and inclusion.

There is an overwhelming emphasis on national universities. Why is there no mention of improving the quality of state universities in the country?

I find there is a caste system at work in the manner in which our state universities are treated. There are 10 state universities that are top-class and yet starved of money right now. Just to give you a picture of how skewed the budgetary allocation is, let me illustrate with an example. Can you believe that in a state like Tamil Nadu, all the state universities put together get Rs 15 crore while one central university in the state gets Rs 285 crore! I feel this needs to be reversed and funding has to be more equitable. Similarly, the iits and iims get a lot of money just like central universities and not all the central universities are uniformly good.

It is also not true that there is an overwhelming emphasis on national or central universities. In fact, the prevailing skewed pattern of funding in favour of the central universities is expected to become more broad-based with the introduction of ‘norms-based’ funding, from which the state universities are likely to benefit substantially. The norms-based funding will look at student enrolment too besides academic performance. This will be a more transparent system in that popular courses and the standard of teaching faculty will all be in the public domain.

There appears to be some turf problem too, in that legal institutes will be under the purview of the law ministry and not under the NCHER. Is there a battle on between the HRD ministry and the ministry of health and law?

The basic philosophy of the proposal for NCHER is to bring the ‘academic’ part of higher education under NCHER while leaving the ‘practice’ part under the relevant councils, such as the Bar Council, to be tackled by the respective bodies.