Imagining India

When the results were out, there were many people around the country who heaved a sigh of relief.

A few months before the elections, when I asked people I knew who was likely to win - the people I questioned included elected officials, writers, NGO workers, political scientists - a good majority of them were pessimistic about seeing a strong government in power, and especially a Congress or BJP-led one. ‘Our days are numbered’, is how one Congress worker put it. A large number of people suggested (and this was a popular expectation in our media) that caste-based and regional parties would have a bigger clout post-election. ‘The next government will be a hodge-podge, and they’ll move quite sharply to the left,’ one senior policy planner guessed.

The Congress’ win is forcing a re-evaluation. Were the compelling factors for the victory the Employment Guarantee Program, concern about defense, a desire for a more empowered government, or dynastic appeal? People seemed to have voted for stable, equitable development. Its been pointed out that the Congress and its allies did well in places where the NREG Program and the rural electrification scheme were implemented effectively. The win/loss pattern across states is also telling: the UPA did badly in states where the opposition governments have been effective in bringing about development and growth - this included Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat.

Does this mean that the hand-wringing over voters’ preferences for caste and regional alliances was misplaced? I think so.  The rise of markets means that there is much more at stake for voters today - good governance and better access to the economy can bring about substantial improvements in jobs, income, and education for children. This wasn’t the case pre-1980, when opportunities were much fewer.  Voters are therefore far more demanding of their leaders, and and a failure in governance makes them far less sympathetic to the fact that a certain party is supposed to represent their religion, or caste.

So what will the government do with its expanded mandate? Will we get to see a smart mix of reforms and welfare policy? Will the government finally, attempt to tackle our broken subsidy systems and education reform? The next few years are going to be very interesting.

A few years ago, I visited my alma mater IIT Bombay, my first visit in decades. I walked around the campus and was astonished and saddened by its collapse - the buildings were in disrepair, the hostels grimy and stained, the infrastructure was crumbling: the place, it seemed, was falling apart. 

This began my efforts to get the campus back to the green, beautiful, well-tended place I remembered, and I funded various initiatives, with the help of the incredibly engaged director, Dr. Ashok Misra. I funded the renovation of my old Hostel 8, the setting up of a school for IT and a new IT incubation lab. The IIT management and I also co-funded a brand new pair of hostels to expand the cramped residential spaces, and these were built in record time—in less than two years. 

The result? Annoyance in the HRD Ministry, and questions from the then HRD minister on why such ‘lavish’ buildings were built.  Our top colleges and universities suffer tremendously from this perpetual second-guessing from the government and the bureaucracy, which demand permissions for the most mundane operations. Dr. Nayyar, the former vice-chancellor of Delhi University, often bemoans the complete loss of independence for the faculty, deans and senior management at universities. ‘Their actions hang on the utterances of our politicians. Everything is political.’ And in the midst of all this, the very purpose of the university, educating the student, has been entirely forgotten.

In recent years, Indian universities have seen a growth of funds from budget allocations, but they need much more than that for things to change. Simply providing our universities with more money is rather like buying new furniture for a condemned building.  Unless the government takes to more serious reforms - appointing a super-regulator to replace the present, confusing array of bodies from the AICTE to the UGC, encouraging more private investment on colleges and loosening the red tape on their entry, bringing in more transparency to standards and college administration, and giving government-aided institutions much more independence - the decay will go on, without pause. 

In Cry for Freedom, former Wuhan University President Liu Daoyu is talking about the Chinese education system, but much of what he says about the early education crisis in China could have been said verbatim, for the present challenges in India’s higher education system. 

Particularly, this: 

“we must lift the screws on people’s minds and tap into their initiative and enthusiasm.”

Most of us have noticed the gradual politicisation of India’s colleges over the last few decades, but we rarely debate how insidious the effects of this are on innovation in higher education. The lack of independence for our vice-chancellors and deans, the politicisation of student unions, the dependence on the government for budget and spending approvals - all these make our universities risk-averse, dogmatic, and finally unable to fulfil their main function: equipping their students to function effectively, and productively, in the economy.

Consider how rigid our colleges are: in India, we have still not embraced the concept of cross-disciplines. An Indian student from year one in college, can either do an engineering or a commerce degree. In fact, he does not attend a university in the true sense; he has to function within the narrow confines of a specific department. Universities in Europe, US and increasingly in China on the other hand, allow students the flexibility to choose their subjects, even switch between majors if they find that their interests have shifted to say, marine biology rather than medicine by the second year. 

The rigid system that our colleges now use do students a disservice. How for example, can a student be certain that she wants to become a software engineer unless she first takes a few courses? Perhaps, the student might discover a bent for research, or for computer graphics. Its unreasonable to lock someone in at the age of eighteen, right out of school, onto a particular career path. 

(This is the first of some higher education posts. I’ll follow up with more thoughts.)