Under The Table And Dreaming

MCI chief Dr Ketan Desai after his arrest

Experts also find fault with the investigation-based accreditation process to determine an institution’s accreditation-worthiness. In most cases, they point out, the inspection concentrates on the physical assets and buildings rather than the faculty and intellectual capital of the college. Barring the building, most facilities, like laboratories, are routinely “arranged for”. In some cases, colleges even resorted to hiring libraries, complete with books and technical journals, to window-dress the institution for accreditation inspection. The system has degenerated to such an extent that anyone with money can set up an educational institution in India.

Striking proof came earlier this year when the MCI chairman Ketan Desai was arrested on charges of demanding Rs 2 crore from a college to provide it recognition. Following the probe on Desai, the CBI raided two medical colleges—Rohilkhand Medical College & Hospital and Sri Ram Murti Smarak Institute of Medical Sciences in Bareilly—and found that these colleges were cleared without fulfilling even the compulsory criteria. Investigations are under way on other colleges as well. A CBI official who is part of the investigation says they “have received 164 complaints of corruption in medical colleges and are conducting investigations...we have gathered crucial information on many of them”. Sources say the CBI investigations could involve about 40 medical colleges in Chennai, Calcutta and Udaipur as well as in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Gurajat, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand.

The story with India’s other top accreditation body, AICTE, is equally bizarre. Last July, the CBI arrested AICTE’s member secretary K. Narayan Rao for bribery. Its chairman R.A. Yadav was also suspended pending investigation for corrupt practices. Last week itself, the HRD ministry is learnt to have cleared a CBI recommendation for penalty proceedings on Yadav—against whom around 40 cases are allegedly pending. The CBI has already lodged cases under the Prevention of Corruption Act against Yadav and three senior officials of AICTE, including a deputy director. The Pharmacy Council of India and the Nursing Council of India have similar stories, experts say. In Hyderabad, a nursing college was asked to pay to get its accreditation renewed.

This rush for setting up colleges also stems from the fact that many in India are ready to pay big money for a degree. A college is big business. As a result, colleges have mushroomed without any focus on quality—many do not even have the requisite size of faculty, leave alone meeting any quality standards for teachers. Says former IIT Roorkee director Prof Prem Vrat: “There is large-scale window-dressing in our new colleges. Most of them focus on physical assets and have wonderful buildings and huge campuses but no proper facilities or faculty or quality in education.” Many others spend crores of rupees on publicity without concentrating on creating intellectual assets, he says.

In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, there were only 12 engineering colleges till 1996. In the next 10 years, the state added hundreds more, mostly in the private sector. Enrolment of students also increased, from a few hundreds to almost 3 lakh now. In Chhattisgarh, over 100 private universities were created in a single year, only to be closed down soon. Says ex-Knowledge Commission member Pushpa M. Bhargava: “There are over 20,000 affiliated colleges in India and the amount of corruption in these accredited and affiliated colleges is phenomenal.”

Obviously, the students have also been at the receiving end as these colleges continue to admit students on their rolls. Already, the fate of students studying in the 44 deemed universities, which were derecognised by the government recently, is uncertain till the Supreme Court decides on the matter. The employability of students coming from such colleges is also in question, especially in specialised fields like engineering. A Nasscom study states that only 25 per cent of India’s engineering graduates were fit for employment—the rest lacked proper technical skills and even knowledge of the English language.

The government sought to address this problem by setting up the Yash Pal committee to look into the issue of higher education and accreditation of colleges. The committee, in its report released last year, had called for a unified national body for all streams of education. A task force set up by the government has prepared the draft bills for setting up the National Commission of Higher Education and Research (NCHER) but the structure and scope of the commission as proposed in the bill is quite different from what the Yash Pal committee had envisioned.

According to the draft bill, medical, legal and agricultural studies are to be kept out of the purview of the commission, which was supposed to be an overarching body to look at all streams of higher education. This, experts think, will only leave room for corruption and bureaucracy, which is exactly what the national body primarily wanted to do away with. As Bhargava says, “Instead of one, there are now four bills and all of them are going in different directions. This is opening up more avenues of corruption and will defeat the purpose of the commission.” He points out that one of the reasons for the corruption was that the councils were not accountable to anybody, a problem the new commission was expected to fix by setting up a whole line of accountability.

Obviously, the government and bureaucrats don’t see it that way as there is already a counter-move to set up a National Council for Human Resource in Health (NCHRH), a body parallel to the NCHER, directly under the control of the health ministry, to look exclusively at health education. While this will defeat the entire process of setting up a national body to look at affiliations, accreditation and approvals for all educational streams, it shows that various ministries—health in this case—are not ready to give up their fiefdoms. Needless to say, separate bodies will open room for further corruption as the now defunct MCI has shown. And students will continue to put their future at risk.