The great education bazaar

Like expensive advertisements in glossy magazines for posh schools and "institutes" offering exotic courses like bio-informatics and nano-technology, this notice too speaks of the crass commercialisation of education.

We now have a veritable Education Bazaar, where admissions are bought, degrees traded and grades manufactured. Access is restricted largely to the affluent, at the expense of the underprivileged.

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Privatisation of education is far more advanced in India than the privatisation of any other public service barring healthcare. Today, lower-middle class households don't even think of sending their children to a government-run or village-panchayat school. They straightaway opt for private schools, of whatever quality, often at great cost to themselves.

It's only the very poor who admit their children to government-run schools, knowing well that they might never be regularly taught. This apartheid denies basic education to millions, undermines social cohesion, and promotes snobbery.

The results are horrifying. Surveys show that half the children in Class IV in government schools cannot do arithmetic calculations required of Class I. In tests, 18 percent of Classes II to V students in Andhra couldn't do single-digit additions. Only 12 percent managed single-digit subtractions. In a spot-the-object quiz, only 54 percent got the results right.

We're now also hurtling towards the wholesale commodification of tertiary education, just where it's closest to the professional employment market. That's the significance of the Supreme Court's August 12 verdict on admissions in private professional colleges. The seven-judge ruling was only meant to interpret the 2002 TMA Pai judgment by an 11-judge bench. But it virtually overturns that judgement and opens the privatisation floodgates.

Managements of commercially-oriented colleges and the corporate media have welcomed the judgement. Advocates of education-for-all and political parties have criticised it.

The verdict sharpens tensions between the higher judiciary and the executive-Parliament. It also raises crucial questions about equity in access to education.

The effects of the Court's ruling must be reversed through the passage of a Constitutional amendment after adequate consultations with the states.

Three reasons warrant this. First, the judgement alters one crucial aspect of the TMA Pai verdict. Their verdict mandated a combination of state-specified quotas and seats at the management's discretion. It prescribed that each state must fix quotas according to "local needs," and to "take care of poorer and backward sections."

The new verdict says the combination can continue only if private colleges "voluntarily" agree to seat-sharing, which they won't. In effect, this overturns the 11-judge ruling, which a seven-judge bench cannot do.

Second, the judgement asserts that most private institutions are run "by public-minded individuals," their basic objective isn't "commercial," but to provide education to "deserving candidates."

But even a glance at private colleges shows that most are money-making enterprises. They charge high capitation fees (Rs 3 to 10 lakhs) and tuition fees (Rs 70,000 to Rs 4 lakhs).

Sky-high fees exclude a huge number of "deserving candidates." This cannot be remedied by outlawing capitation fees, but only by taking a good chunk of seats out of private control.

At present, state governments control 50 percent of admissions to unaided colleges. Unaided seats account for 90 percent-plus of professional seats. With the new judgement, less than 10 percent of all seats will be available for government-fixed quotas. All reserved seats together will be a minuscule 2-2.5 percent of the total -- shamefully low in a hierarchical society marked by lack of social opportunity.

Most "unaided" colleges are in reality aided. They receive state support through zero income-taxation, low-cost land, or other subsidies. A report found that 21 out of 35 private colleges in Maharashtra received Rs 279-crores aid.

Third, the Supreme Court ignores that education is a public good and cannot be treated as a commodity saleable to the highest bidder. Access to education must be equitable and based on merit as well as quotas for Dalits, Adivasis, Other Backward Classes, and the physically disabled. Thus, while private promoters should have autonomy in the management of colleges, that cannot be at the expense of equity and fairness in admissions or fees.

Education must be open to all. The whole concept of a university militates against exclusion and discrimination. India has a situation of cascading inequalities. If you're born poor, you face discrimination in access even to primary education. This discrimination gets magnified at each step of the ladder and ultimately translates into low-quality jobs, meagre incomes and poor lifetime security.

This is unacceptable. No society has ever made progress except by fighting cascading discrimination. Even in the frankly capitalist United States, poverty is no ground for denying higher education to people.

Most societies recover less than 15 percent of the costs of education through tuition fees. They use freeships, scholarships, student loans, or quotas to help the underprivileged.

In India, we made two blunders. After Independence, we neglected primary education and didn't promote a common school system. We adopted the deeply class-ridden British system of "public" (read, elite private) schools rather than the continental European system, where a prince, a worker's son and a pauper's daughter go to the same neighbourhood school.

Even in the US, private schools account for under 10 percent of all students. In urban India, that percentage is over 50. This creates hierarchies and divisions instead of cohesion and common human bonds.

Our second mistake was to let the government withdraw substantially from professional education. The process got accelerated one and a half decades ago.

This is incompatible with the objective of creating a large pool of good-quality scientific, technological and medical personpower. The state must re-enter the field. In the meanwhile, it must not shirk the responsibility of regulating private institutions.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.