THE recent death of a student in Kolkata under police escort, while he was being transported to jail after courting arrest, has made national headlines. There is still no clarity as to the exact manner of his death. Sudipto Gupta’s party, the Students’ Federation of India, has accused the police of brutality, while the police and the government hastened to press with the claim that the death was an accident (in advance of the autopsy report). This may in fact be so, but there remains the uncomfortable question of police responsibility for his safety while he was technically in custody. Sudipto was protesting against the postponement of student elections in colleges and universities for the next six months in the wake of violence at Harimohan Ghosh College in Garden Reach, near Kolkata’s docklands. Congress and Trinamool thugs rioted over picking up nomination forms for students’ polls, a police officer was shot dead on duty, a youth was killed manufacturing bombs, and the Trinamool councillor and chief of the borough committee, Mohammad Iqbal, has finally been arrested after twelve days on the run.

Higher education in the state is thus palpably in crisis, but in fact the violence over student elections is only a small manifestation of a much deeper malaise. Education in West Bengal is deeply mired in uncertainty and neglect, and morale in educational institutions has rarely been so low. This is not entirely the fault of the present government, which inherited from its Left Front predecessors a thoroughly politicized and often corrupt system, but after two years of rule, it appears to have compounded the faults of the past with gross abuses of its own making. It is worth looking at some aspects of the current situation.

The state of higher education can scarcely be detached from that of education in general. The single most important piece of legislation enacted by the UPA government since it first came to power is the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, which became law in September 2009 and came into force for all states of the Indian Union excepting Jammu and Kashmir on 1 April 2010. ‘Force’ is a rather meaningless term here, since the enforceability of this act is precisely the issue that has divided Centre and states since it was passed. At a recent meeting of the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE), the Union Minister for Human Resource Development, M.M. Pallam Raju, warned that states that have not done enough in three years to implement the Right to Education Act might be punished. West Bengal would certainly fall into that category.

 

According to an MHRD Report on the implementation of the RTE Act, 2009,¹ total enrolment in the state is high at the primary level, but falls sharply from upper primary onwards. Scheduled Castes make up only 27% of the total enrolment, and Scheduled Tribes a measly 7%. The RTE provision of reserving 25% of seats in private schools for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds remains largely unimplemented. Despite NGO activism, half of Kolkata’s children do not go to school. A recent survey carried out in rural West Bengal by teams from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences suggests that linguistic and mathematical attainments among primary schoolchildren are extremely low.² The dropout rate is close to the national average.

 

Particularly lamentable is the actual state of most primary and secondary schools, many of them without proper buildings, toilets or playgrounds. In 2004 there were only 59 primary schools for each lakh of population, many without a schoolroom and with teachers who were absent most of the year. The situation has improved to some extent, but in the last years of Left Front rule, a huge crisis developed with respect to the supply of qualified teachers. Primary Teachers’ Training Institutes in the state had been offering one-year diplomas which were declared invalid by the National Council of Teacher Education. During a fruitless two-year stand off, nearly 40,000 posts of primary teachers remained unfilled, while the NCTE derecognized 138 Primary Teachers’ Training Institutes and put the future of their 75,000 students at risk. Subsequently, holders of PTTI diplomas were allowed to upgrade their qualifications by taking a one-year bridge course (about which there has been a great deal of confusion).

Meanwhile, the shortage of qualified teachers continued, and became one of the issues focused on by the new Trinamool government. The new government announced that it would fill 46,000 vacancies, reserving 10% of posts for PTTI candidates, but recruitment did not begin immediately. Two years later, on 31 March 2013, the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) for primary school teachers was held in West Bengal. It was a day of unprecedented chaos, with more than 45 lakh examinees struggling to get to their examination centres on time, and all kinds of infringements of examination regulations in allowing latecomers to start the test well after time. There is talk of a supplementary examination for those who were unable to reach test centres.

 

This unedifying tale of neglect, mismanagement and unpreparedness for change, further compounded by grand promises and anarchy on the ground, more or less sums up the recent history of education in West Bengal. In higher education, the symptoms are if anything more marked. Under Left Front rule, one signal manifestation of apathy was the complete failure of the academic community and of higher education policy-makers to respond to the massive changes proposed by several education bills pending before Parliament. Even with the RTE Act, reactions were tardy and uninformed.

Other decisions, such as the massive expenditure on new central universities and relative neglect of older state institutions, the encouragement of private and foreign universities to set up campuses in India, the creation of a new National Council of Higher Education and Research, a new assessment and accreditation body, and an Educational Tribunal, were met with indifference. Higher education institutions in the state, preoccupied with their own problems, appeared to be growing more distant from developments on the national stage.

Yet the situation was not all bad even in the last years of Left Front rule. In fact, the performance of several state universities and many colleges, by national parameters, was quite respectable, in some cases outstanding. While the state’s industrial decline and the lack of adequate planning for growth (in medical education, for example) obviously discouraged students, West Bengal did manage to preserve some traditional academic strengths. That this could happen in spite of a deliberate programme of political appointments and party bullying, especially in rural areas, says a great deal for the social value still attached to higher education and research, and for a long-term relationship between academics and left-wing politics in the state. In fact, many university departments and research institutes made good use of central funding schemes to improve their research profiles, and students were reasonably well-taught in all but the most understaffed colleges.

In terms of quality, the education provided by the state’s colleges and universities compared favourably with that in most other states, with the possible exception of Delhi. What one could point to, though, was a failure to plan ahead, even a complete absence of ideas that might revitalize relatively antiquated models of higher education and allow a more decisive engagement at national and international levels. At a time when the Centre was pouring funds and ideas into higher education, Bengal appeared content to protect petty state fiefdoms.

 

What has happened over the past two years under the Trinamool regime, however, has put paid even to a relative sense of institutional security and confidence. One of the first measures taken by the new Trinamool government when it came to power was to impose a moratorium on all university appointments, in advance of sweeping changes in the acts and statutes of all state universities. Ostensibly, this was intended to break the stranglehold the Left regime had placed on academic institutions by packing their elected bodies with its own sympathizers.

In effect, the moratorium created stagnation and despondency, with the real fear that many posts sanctioned under the XIth Plan would be lost, and damaging the sense of direction and resolve even in universities that had been doing well. No new appointments over a considerable period weakened university departments and led to a flight of talent to other states and even abroad. Meanwhile, universities were forced to function without deans and faculty councils, and often even executive bodies, until their acts could be changed. These measures, which the new government laughably touted as being in the interest of academic freedom and democracy, in fact placed academic institutions at the mercy of their administrative staff and of government nominated bodies, such as the Higher Education Council.

 

The previous regime had used – or misused – democratic institutions by ensuring a majority of its own sympathizers in most elected bodies. The present government, unwilling to risk electoral process in a left-leaning academia, has chosen to get rid of them altogether. In the first place this has bureaucratized the system, since it has given more power – at least in the short term – to administrative staff responsible for the day-to-day running of the university.

In the second place, where new acts and statutes have come into force, it is evident that the role of elected members on executive bodies of universities has been replaced by that of nominated members, members chosen by rotation from heads of departments, and members (such as Deans of Faculties) chosen by nominated ‘search’ committees. This is certainly not conducive to a spirit of academic freedom or open debate. In fact, the hand of the government is everywhere evident – from the choice of its own nominees to act as Vice Chancellors of state universities, to the appointment of its nominees to the executive bodies of those universities, and the control of colleges by nominating political toughs to chair their managing committees.

 

Most alarming is the role being played by the state Higher Education Council, a body of academicians chosen by the government to discharge what was traditionally understood as an advisory function in determining higher education policy. Though the remit of the HEC does not include interference in the administration or internal academic decisions of universities, unfortunately, the present HEC appears to conceive of its function very differently. Its members have repeatedly been shown to be ‘investigating’ the internal matters of universities, advising the Education Minister on specific administrative decisions, and sending notes to Vice Chancellors requesting information on, for example, appointments. Given that the HEC is entirely composed of government nominated members, its claim to be a watchdog of institutional freedom and academic excellence is deeply questionable.

In fact, the present government is quite open about what it sees as its mission of weeding out left-leaning academics from positions of influence, and marginalizing them in all executive bodies. That sense of mission reached its comic apotheosis in the Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee’s refusal to answer students from Jadavpur and Presidency Universities in a televised debate, branding them as leftists and Maoists and berating the organizers with the classic phrase: ‘You have collected only selected.’ This government is definitely committed to collecting only those whom it has pre-selected.

Of course, the Higher Education Council has always been a nominated body, and there should be no question about the value of such a group of academic advisors in setting the direction of future education policy and suggesting systemic reforms. If the present HEC were to confine itself to this role, it might indeed have a useful part to play. But its efforts in this direction have been sparse and infructuous. The most recent example of a policy directive issuing from the HEC was the decision to hold a single statewide examination for entrants to postgraduate programmes in the sciences and humanities, on the model of the GATE examination for engineering candidates.

 

This decision, arrived at without proper consultation with the universities (difficult in any case because state universities still lack faculty councils and deans), was touted as a means of ensuring free and open admission to postgraduate courses, and greater mobility of students. These are desirable goals. However, whether the proposed Common Entrance Test (CET), flagged as a computer-readable multiple choice examination, was the best way of reaching them is doubtful, as I wrote at the time.

‘One sign of the backwardness of educational policy in West Bengal is that, faced with very real problems of lack of faculty and infrastructure – scarcity of access to books, journals and laboratories, uneven teaching and learning levels, and asynchronous academic sessions – our planners are now proposing to level differences by introducing a new Common Entrance Test (CET) at the graduate level. It should be evident to all of us that quite apart from the unsatisfactoriness of standardized testing as a means of assessing academic potential, this test will impose a new burden upon an already overburdened system without actually redressing problems of quality and access.’³

In the event, universities failed to agree on the benefits of the CET as proposed, and although there was in fact a considerable body of opinion favouring opening up postgraduate admissions, there was resistance to allowing these to be determined by a single external examination. Presidency and Jadavpur Universities have both declared their intention of commencing integrated MA and MSc programmes, and the CET proposal has been shelved, at least for this year.

 

Again, consumed by their internal dissensions, academic institutions in Bengal have retreated from collective action, and this does not augur well for the future. The debate over the CET should in fact have focused attention on what actually needs reform. One major issue that was never addressed was how the opening up of postgraduate admissions was to be extended to entrants from other states, and how this would affect national education policy. The CET was never projected as anything but a statewide examination, unlike GATE or CAT which are all-India entrance tests. Under their old admissions policies, universities like Jadavpur were taking candidates from all over India and this in fact is part of the mandate of UGC assisted departments functioning as Centres of Advanced Study (of which Jadavpur has a large number).

How would such openness be ensured in future? Moreover, the need to synchronize academic sessions, to decide on a common examination system (semester or annual), and to agree on a minimum curriculum, all requiring attention before any decision on the CET, was ignored. Yet, even if agreement on the CET could not be reached, this was an opportunity for the HEC to initiate more discussion on educational systems and existing programmes. At a time when Delhi University is threatened by chaos and dissension on issues such as the implementation of the semester system and the four-year BA/BSc degree, it appears that Bengal has chosen to not even think about such matters.

 

Yet, this is scarcely a carefully worked out policy decision. Rather, educational advisors in West Bengal appear reluctant to examine the relation of their state to larger policy initiatives in higher education at the national or international levels. This is all the more regrettable since the state is possessed of individual scholars and educational administrators who could usefully have engaged with national policy. In fact, a few individuals have been invited to participate in such policy-building, though sporadically and without much institutional support.

Subsequent to the Trinamool government’s withdrawal from the UPA, the decision to turn a metaphorical back upon Delhi has only hardened. One institution through which this government clearly hopes to make an impact on the international – if not the national – scene is Presidency University, created by the former regime but enthusiastically taken up by the present one in pursuit of status and academic honours. Clearly, older institutions such as Calcutta and Jadavpur, both with proven records of excellence in many fields, were thought to be less malleable to the government’s will.

In effect, the decision has been to ignore and neglect the claims of these institutions – as also of other good state universities and of struggling new foundations in rural areas – for an exclusive focus on Presidency University as the vehicle of the new regime’s intellectual pretensions. One way of articulating these pretensions was through an emphasis upon achieving ‘world-class’ status by attracting faculty from abroad. The media was immediately taken with this plan, and huge attention has been given to new appointments from among Indians settled or qualified abroad.

There is something faintly comic about this, since other universities in the state also have faculty with foreign degrees. But there would be no harm in Presidency’s vigorous pursuit of qualified faculty were this accompanied by real measures to reform its internal systems and create better teaching and research programmes. Unfortunately, despite the much-touted research grants provided to all faculty, there is little evidence of good work being done, or of satisfactory teaching. Rather, the new university appears mired in a state of disarray, unable to dispense with the old ‘college’ faculty who are needed to actually teach the courses, strapped for cash despite the large promises made by the government, in need of infrastructural support and renovation of its existing premises, and lacking educational vision despite the pronouncements of its Mentor Group.

 

Yet this is in fact a small matter compared to the immensity of the state’s educational problems, and it would be unfair to focus attention on Presidency alone as a witness of success or otherwise. To do so would be to yield to the hugely disproportionate weight being given to this ‘prestige’ institution by the media and by the government itself. Much more alarming is the extent to which the new government has alienated its former sympathizers in academia and among intellectuals, and has failed to bring them on board in creating a more inclusive and effective educational policy, sensitive to far-reaching changes on the national and international planes.

 

In the first place, there is much work to be done in extending the benefits of higher education to all those future entrants empowered by the RTE Act. The state needs many more colleges and universities, and they need to be planned for and funded, not just announced as a sop to constituencies. Second, Bengal needs to form a policy in respect of private and foreign higher education providers (though the state’s industrial slump has ensured that there is little current interest from them). Third, universities in Bengal need to think closely about how they can contribute to national policy initiatives in respect of curricula, academic schedules, new types of degrees and courses, and innovation at all levels. Remarkably, over the last ten years of the Left Front regime, Jadavpur and Calcutta Universities, as well as several research institutes, had made a real mark nationally and internationally, and had gained recognition for excellence.

Yet today, it is in an isolated and unsupported way that some educational planners are discussing the ‘university of the future’, the ‘meta-university’, or the ‘innovation university’: all projects to which the best institutions in the state have major contributions to make. The government appears unaware of these initiatives and is certainly extending no help to them. Bengal, with its large number of good state universities, could have led a national debate on ‘state versus central’ in respect of the university system, at a time when the view from Delhi was that only central universities were worth discussing. Unfortunately, by the time we get around to this, our state universities may be past redemption.

 

Footnotes:

1. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Department of School Education and Literacy. [Report] The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009: the 2nd Year (March 2012). Accessed 7 April 2013 at http://www.rteforumindia.org/sites/default/files/MHRD_RTE_2nd%20Year% 20Status%20report.pdf

2. Jyotsna Jalan and Jharna Panda, Low Mean and High Variance: Quality of Primary Education in Rural West Bengal, accessed 7 April 2013 at http://www.cssscal.org/pdf/Education% 20Report%20CD.pdf

3. See Supriya Chaudhuri, ‘Entrances and Exits: Standardized Testing and the Question of Academic Freedom’, The Telegraph, Kolkata, 20 November 2012, accessed on 7 April 2013 at http://www.telegraphindia. com/1121120/jsp/opinion/story_16213003. jsp#. UWOGx6D2GD0