Our Achilles Heel
Page - 2
The Ministry of HRD and its
children, University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical
Education (AICTE) have a stranglehold. A college cannot decide what courses to
teach, what fees to charge and what salaries to pay its professors. How could
creativity emerge from this servitude? Creating new universities, as the PM
proposes, is not the answer unless you give them autonomy.
Forget creativity, Indian
companies are frightened by the shortage of basic skills which is currently
driving up salaries unhealthily. Of the 400,000 new engineers that graduate each
year, roughly 100,000 have the skills to enter the job market. It is tragic that
over 400,000 students strive for 6,000 IITs and IIMs seats annually.
The answer, of course, is to
increase the supply of good colleges. As it is, we lose 160,000 students to
foreign universities and parents pay $ 3 billion in fees and costs. Indian 'edupreneurs'
and foreign universities have repeatedly tried to start high quality campuses
but the HRD Ministry's 'Licence Raj' drives them away. AICTE even wants to close
down the prestigious private Indian School of Business (ISB) which offers a
better education than even an IIM. The draft foreign universities bill doesn't
provide autonomy either and ensures that no decent foreign university will enter
India.
Our education system is our
Achilles Heel, and we will not spawn Mark Bents until we do a 1991 on HRD and
unbind India's education. Meanwhile, I console myself in knowing that there are
individuals like my friend, N. S. Raghavan, who is using part of his Infosys
fortune to incubate entrepreneurs at the IIM Bangalore.
He will make a difference, and
modest breakthroughs like Mark Bent's will contribute more to human happiness
than either the massive aid programs of governments or the soul-killing
mediocrity of our universities.
