ONE of the less noticed characteristics of the current focus on higher education is the spate of reports that have been produced by a range of committees and commissions set up by the state. Despite being readily accessible to the public, and receiving some degree of media attention, they have stimulated neither a wide readership nor detailed debate. The present essay tries to correct for this public neglect by looking more closely at three of them. What can we learn from this peculiar genre of writing that can be both marginal and influential?

Few would remember that the NDA government (1999-2004) appointed Kumar Mangalam Birla and Mukesh Ambani as part of a special group looking into the prospects of financing education, health and rural development. The result was a Policy Framework (hereafter PF 2000) that unashamedly favoured private investment in higher education, and whose goals and purposes were to be radically reoriented to exclusively suit the demands of what was termed the ‘knowledge economy’.

After a quick, and damning, review of the current state of education generally and higher education in particular (with some vague references to the high quality of older Indian educational traditions), PF 2000 expressed unbounded optimism in privately run universities. It argued that existing institutions are ridden with problems and must be dispensed with, rather than strengthened. Global rather than national concerns come to the fore, and employability and ‘value addition’, rather than enriched or critical intellectual cultures, are the goals.

Despite at least two landmark judgments in which the Supreme Court clearly declared that the right to (higher) education is a fundamental right which cannot be denied to a student via higher fees (Mohini Jain vs State of Karnataka, 1992) and that education is a service to society, not a mere trade or business (P.A. Inamdar and Others vs State of Maharashtra and Others, 2005), PF 2000 proposed precisely the opposite. Reversing the general principle that private educational efforts should take up what the state has either incompletely accomplished or ignored, the report suggests a radical division of labour between publicly funded primary/elementary education and a higher education sector left exclusively to private investment and control.

 

None of these recommendations should surprise us. Throughout the 1990s, N.R. Narayanamurthy, then chief mentor of Infosys, championed compulsory primary education with English as the medium of instruction, and restricted state control confined to the rural sector. PF 2000 takes these suggestions forward, demanding a ‘revolution’ managed and produced by market forces, leaving the unencashable knowledges/rural areas to the vagaries of state support.

Weightless goods – with high knowledge content rather than material content – now account for some of the most dynamic sectors in several economies. The single largest export industry for the United States is neither aircraft nor automobiles, but entertainment. Education offers a fast track to knowledge-based growth. (1.7)

The only exceptions allowed are as follows:

At the same time, one must recognize that the market may not support education in such areas as oriental languages, archaeology, palaeontology, religion and philosophy. These educational programmes are important and necessary. It is here that the state will have to play an active role and support the pursuit of disciplines whose scholars do not command a market. (6.12)

Calling for a review of prevailing arts and science programmes, the university is reconceptualized in much narrower terms, as meeting the future needs of the technology, management and science sectors. Therefore, the demand is for legislation which will permit private universities for management, technology and finance (including foreign direct investment in education). By turning education into a facet of industry, its products (‘knowledge farmers’ and ‘knowledge workers’) are at one and the same time consumers (hence the proposal for a ‘rating’ of educational goods and teachers).

The freedom to innovate (and appoint people) is opposed to state intervention (and indeed state control of higher education is what is resented more than state funding). Innovation is equated with entrepreneurship, leading to the absurd demand that ‘all courses from the UG level should have a module on entrepreneurship.’ (4.4.2) On the other hand, the demand is made for the thorough ‘depoliticization’ of campuses.

 

How then is the student to cope within a new model which proposes to run universities as businesses? The PF 2000 proposes a wholly ‘user pays’ model of higher education, buttressed by student loans, which shifts the burden from state to family and within family from parents to children. The question of state subsidy for higher education, or a limit to the proportion of university funds to be generated by fees (recommended by the UGC appointed Punayya Committee Report in 1992-93 to be no more than 20%, without hindering access to higher education) is not raised, neither are there suggestions for large private endowments to existing universities.

This demand is far from unprecedented, though it is not sufficiently known that privatization has proceeded apace from the 1970s, especially in states like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. The outcome of the capitation fee phenomenon has been both low quality and a low commitment to equity. But PF 2000 is untroubled by such evidence of market failure. Indeed, overall, it appears to affirm and extend a process that was the trend, at least until the Eleventh Plan. As the Tilak-CABE Committee showed, the percentage spent on higher education compared with elementary and secondary education has been going down from 1.0 to 0.6 % GDP over the nine plans analyzed.

 

It is striking that PF 2000 relies on World Bank statistics and on ‘Reliance Research’, as well as data from the Institute of Applied Manpower Research and Planning, rather than the Census, National Sample Surveys, unemployment registers, state data on industries, or UGC data. Despite this, the report chooses to ignore the evidence it has marshalled. For instance, Table 7.9 Education Expenditure by Source of Funding: Levels of Education (combined) 1991, shows that apart from Haiti (with 80% private funding) and Uganda (57%), none of the other countries so admired by the committee rely principally on private funding. Of the examples which are considered at length: Sweden and China have higher educational systems fully funded by the state; the case studies of Singapore and Korea do not clearly mention sources of funding for higher education; Thailand boasts of a mixture of private and public funding.¹ 

The wish list includes some vague hopes that NRIs can be urged to come on sabbatical to India; while lamenting Indian society’s ‘material pursuits’ (which the new university system should otherwise encourage!) a system of value education is proposed (6.8) with the sole aim of keeping politics out of Indian campuses.

Perhaps the biggest problem with PF 2000, therefore, is that its market-driven ideological biases are so glaring and impoverished. But how different are the two subsequent reports on the future of higher education that have been produced under the UPA government, after 2004 – the Reports to the Nation by the National Knowledge Commission (hereafter NKC, set up in 2005 by the prime minister), and the Report of the ‘Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation in Higher Education’ (set up by the MHRD in 2008, better known by the name of its Chairperson Yash Pal; hereafter YCR)?

 

The NKC’s mission was to ‘link knowledge to the 21st century’, via access to education, described as follows in its final report 2009:

We are conscious that knowledge is about farmers having access to accurate information about water, land, weather and fertilizers; students having access to quality education and jobs; scientists having access to laboratories; industry having access to a skilled work force; and people feeling empowered with good governance in a vibrant democracy. (2009: ii)

The report extends from education, both primary and higher education, to include language, translation, libraries, ICT enabled national networks, health and agriculture. When the first set of NKC reports on education came out in 2006, some significant recommendations immediately found their way into the Eleventh Plan (2007-12) – e.g. expansion in higher education from a 7% enrolment ratio level to 15% by 2015.² Indeed, the fourfold increase in the Eleventh Plan allocation for education, including unprecedented hikes for both secondary and higher education, represent a major turnaround in government planning, with outlay for higher education now set at 1.5% GDP, even if total outlay in education of 6% GDP remains unrealized.

 

The NKCR begins with schooling, emphasizing the need for a firm commitment through law for a universal right to education, and recommending the universalization of secondary (and not just primary) education within a decade, universal early childhood education, and improved training of teachers. While its financial proposals demand considerably expanded public funding, the report believes that current requirements cannot be met by state resources alone. So, though the onus remains on the Centre and states, with an increased role for decentralized planning and community participation, private funding will have to be further enhanced (above the NUEPA current benchmark estimate of 15% private schooling).

The report not only named those groups that suffer discrimination and require special measures – girls, Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, seasonal migrants, labouring children, the physically disadvantaged and minorities – but emphasizes questions of access and inclusion through a focus on the universal introduction of English. However, a larger language policy for education remains unspecified.³

A very significant move on the part of the NKCR is to demand that vocational education be brought fully under the purview of the MHRD, and provided enhanced support, including skill training for workers in the unorganized sector. It remains to be seen in what ways the government will act to mainstream this long marginalized sector, indeed the outcaste of Indian education: we will return to this question in comparing the Yash Pal Committee’s recommendations.

 

The NKCR’s recommendations on higher education call for massive expansion, from the 2006 estimate of 350 universities to all of 1500, in order to attain 15% enrolment by 2015 (these exact figures are repeated in YCR). A combination of strengthening existing universities, upgrading autonomous colleges, clustering of colleges, and starting a slew of new institutions, should, says the report, enable any deserving student to access higher education. The state is explicitly faulted for its declining support in recent decades, for effectively ‘mortgaging the future’ of 350 million people below the age of 35. (NKCR 2009: 76)

But even with increased public outlays at 1.5% GDP, a major resource gap remains. Numerous suggestions follow to fill this: Public institutions could exploit a major untapped resource in the form of land; raise fees (currently averaging less than 10% of costs) to at least 20%; encourage philanthropy by changing tax and trust laws; tap alumni funds; increase private investment and the intake of international students (who pay enhanced fees). The report highlights what is lost when Indian students studying abroad spend upwards of Rs 18,400 crore a year on their education.

 

Another major thrust of the NKCR is on correcting ‘an over-regulated but under-governed system’, through an umbrella Independent Regulating Authority for Higher Education (IRAHE), which would reduce the role of the UGC to a disburser of grants, and limit the role of organizations such as the AICTE, MCI and so on to merely set standards for professional entry. Accreditation should be handed over to independent agencies, under IRAHE’s purview.

Major reforms in universities and professional education are proposed: The wish list includes smaller autonomous universities, an end to the system of affiliated colleges (to be replaced by a Central Board of Undergraduate Education), a VC who should have the powers of a ‘CEO’ and not be appointed by government, smaller and better functioning academic and executive councils. Procedures for appointment ‘need to be carefully crafted in order to ensure that institutions have the benefit of the widest inputs from academia and society.’ (NKCR 2009:86)

Before commenting on these NKCR proposals, it would be worth summarizing the Yashpal Committee’s Report of 2010 (YCR). This committee was entirely focused on higher education, and is acknowledged for its wide-ranging consultations across the country, with as many as one thousand VCs, principals of colleges and teachers.

The YCR is structured around three sections – the idea of the university; an account of current challenges; and finally, a set of recommendations. The first section offers a set of normative ideals around the ‘university’, where knowledge is, or rather should be, ‘one whole’. However, fragmentation and social isolation characterize the production of knowledge today. Autonomy, not just from government, but equally from the economic power of the market, is required. The idea of the holism of knowledge is not only illustrated via inter-disciplinarity and ‘problem solving’ pedagogies, but also by demanding that all professional schools such as the IITs and IIMs be part of universities, and fully include vocational training. Knowledge and skill are to be combined through connecting the university with the world of work.

 

The next section then offers the closest to a diagnosis of what ails higher education – fragmentation and specialization, the separation of teaching and research, deep hierarchies especially between undergraduate and postgraduate education, a disconnect with the outside world. Undergraduate education has arguably suffered the most neglect in higher education reform and policy, as fresh students never get a chance to experience the range of knowledge across disciplines nor to interact with senior faculty. The system of affiliated colleges comes in for the strongest criticism, which it shares with NKC.

The NKCR and YCR have often been contrasted with each other, at times unfairly so. For example, the former has been accused of promoting the new ‘knowledge economy’ that is allegedly more ‘neo-liberal’ than the ‘knowledge society’ advocated by the latter. However, a close reading reveals that both reports shun references to ‘knowledge economy’, while ‘knowledge society’ is also used by the World Bank (World Bank 2002). Terminological quibbles of this sort do not take us very far.

 

What, then, are the substantive issues? Where do these reports stand vis-à-vis each other and the earlier Birla-Ambani Report? It is important to note, first of all, that although all three are products of the same post-liberalization era – a period of unprecedented economic growth during which countries like India and China were transformed in the eyes of the world – neither NKCR nor YCR are simply aping global trends or pandering to industry. Unlike PF 2000, neither advocates the public schooling private higher education division; on the contrary, they share a vision demanding augmented roles for both state and private investment at all levels. However, it would have been helpful if they had engaged with earlier efforts of a similar nature, such as the Delhi University reports dealing with problems of finance and governance (University of Delhi 1993, 1994) or the UGC-appointed Punayya Committee’s recommendation that universities gradually increase non-state sources of funding to reach 25% in a decade. (UGC 1993)

Both NKCR and YCR have long (and predictable) lists of remedies for the current malaise of ‘rote learning’; they also look to a new regulatory structure centred on a small group at the helm. Indeed, YCR goes considerably further than NKCR in recommending the setting up of the National Commission of Higher Education and Research (NCHER) that would supplant the UGC altogether. While stating repeatedly that universities must be autonomous and self-regulating, YCR nevertheless allots a host of functions to the proposed NCHER in an elaborate list occupying several pages. A separate appendix revisits the responsibilities of this all-powerful apex body – which range from advising and enabling to providing norms and directions for research, structures of governance, accreditation management, and funding – that is somehow supposed to be ‘free of excessive centralization’! It is not surprising that this is among the most criticized aspects of the YCR.

Both reports are also very similar in what they leave unsaid, or where their analysis is clearly insufficient. Neither provides a satisfactory diagnosis of what has gone wrong with higher education and why – NKCR simply says that there is a ‘quiet crisis that runs deep’, while YCR decided to ignore its original mandate to review the functioning of the UGC. What magical immunity will protect the proposed new structures from the many diseases that infect existing institutions? After all, the ideals of autonomy, excellence and equity are many decades old.

 

Let us dwell more closely on knowledge itself, the special focus of YCR. Unlike NKCR whose proposals do not question existing disciplinary divides and separate professional streams, YCR believes that ‘knowledge should be one whole.’ Such a vision demands a detailed critique of existing institutional structures, especially those serving the mass of undergraduate students, and the hierarchies that have solidified and isolated various tiers while encouraging disciplines to compete for superiority. Besides helping to reproduce the caste system in a status obsessed society, higher education is itself a veritable caste system, with lower class vocational trainees as its stigmatized outcastes. Then there are the puzzles and anomalies: How, for example, does one explain the survival of the long outmoded undergraduate honours degree and its exclusive privileging of a single discipline? In short, the YCR offers too little of the detailed analysis of present problems and past errors that will help us face the future with confidence.

 

Finally, on the complex question of relating the university to the ‘real world’, NKCR offers some concrete suggestions – revamping public libraries, launching a massive translation mission, and making medical education more plural, rural and care-centric. The knowledge economy (here the term is fulsomely used) must respond to the crisis in agriculture by giving ‘the Indian farmer a competitive edge in the global market’ through enhanced agricultural research and extension that is community driven and farmer-led. For its part, YCR suggests a more radical (and socially responsible) role for the university vis-a-vis rural and urban economies and cultures: ‘Porous’ walls must link it to ‘the local knowledge base of the worker, the artisan and the peasant.’ Unfortunately, we are offered little more than this platitude, although YCR does call for serious introspection on the fact that our present predicament is due more to the academic community’s ‘willing abdication’ than to the evils of commercialization or politicization alone.

Considered collectively, these reports offer us an opportunity to reflect on a genre much maligned in recent times. From Mandal to Sachar, commission and committee reports have repeatedly refuted the popular proverb by breeding contempt without familiarity. Matters are hardly improved by the fact that sometimes praise is also provoked by ignorance – how many have read the revered Towards Equality: Report on the Status of Women in India? But this was not always so, and more importantly, need not continue to be so. Reports of this kind represent an important and potentially creative form of collective wisdom that can stimulate constructive debate and reorient state policy. However this is a genre where readers and critics are actually more important than authors – a report is only as good as the response it generates. NKCR and YCR – and their various predecessors – demand that we engage seriously with their vices and virtues, whether of omission or commission.

 

Footnotes:

1. According to a recent UNESCO report on the subject of private higher education, Western Europe and Australia have less than 10% private funding, China 15%, USA between 20-25%, and it is in ‘developing and post-socialist’ countries that the proportions are rising the most. (Bjarnason 2009: 11)

2. The NKCR’s figure of 7% GER in HEIs has been disputed by others, who believe that 10% may be the more accurate figure. However, in our view, a single indicator of this sort hides much more than it reveals; what is required is a more disaggregated picture across regions and social groups.

3. The absence of English in most schools is seen to be responsible for the effective exclusion of most children from social advancement, and the remedy proposed is to introduce English as early as Class I. Though the need for maintaining a ‘multilingual approach’ is mentioned, as also the kind of alienation suffered by children whose languages are not taught in the schools they are sent to, it appears that English is the more significant factor for which changes need to be made and requisite training of teachers undertaken. It is here that the shortcomings of a reporting style that does not draw upon existing debates or research, but simply proceeds in the mode of a series of disconnected recommendations, are particularly evident.

 

References:

Government of India, A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education. A report of the special subject group on ‘Policy Framework for Private Investment in Education, Health and Rural Development’, Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry, 2000.

Svava Bjarnason, et al., A New Dynamic: Private Higher Education. UNESCO, Geneva, 2009.

Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) Committee. Report on Autonomy of Higher Education Institutions, submitted to the Government of India, 2005.

Ministry of Human Resource Development, Report of the ‘Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education’. Government of India, New Delhi, (Yashpal Committee Report), 2010.

Planning Commission, Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007-12). Volumes I and II. Government of India, New Delhi, 2007.

National Knowledge Commission, Report to the Nation 2006-2009. NKC, Government of India, New Delhi, 2009.

University Grants Commission, Funding of Institutions of Higher Education (Punayya Committee Report), Delhi, 1993.

University of Delhi, The Gathering Storm: Resource Crisis for Universities. New Delhi, 1993.

University of Delhi, Governance and Accountability: Crisis and Opportunities. New Delhi, 1994.

World Bank, Knowledge Societies: New Challenges for Tertiary Education. The World Bank, Washington DC, 2002.