2011: A year of stasis in indian education

The year 2011 was uneventful for Indian education. With the political and national discourse dominated by the India Against Corruption movement led by Gandhian social reformer Anna Hazare, and Team Anna’s demand for a strong and effective Lok Pal Bill, reform and upgradation of education was relegated to the near bottom of the national agenda. Even as the anti-corruption movement attracted unpreced- ented support from the public, media and middle class, both houses of Parliament were regularly disrupted over the 2G, Commonwealth Games scams, and foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail among other issues with unruly MPs making it impossible for any well-considered legislation to be tabled, discussed and passed. Regretably, the welfare of the world’s largest — and arguably most neglected — 450 million child population was ignored in this year of stasis in Indian education. Most of the reforms promised in 2009 by Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal to radically transform and upgrade Indian education, have yet to be translated into reality two years later. A total of 12 pending Bills including NCHER (National Commission for Higher Education and Research), Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations), National Accreditation Regulatory, Prevention of Malpractices, and Education Tribunals among other legislation for enacting overdue reforms in Indian education and higher education in particular, couldn’t be tabled in Parliament which was disrupted for 258 of its scheduled legislative 803 hours in 2011. Moreover with busybody HRD minister Kapil Sibal assuming additional charge of the Union telecom ministry and serving as a member of the Lok Pal Bill drafting committee, reform of the country’s crumbling primary, secondary and higher education systems received scant ministerial attention. The Congress-led UPA-II government’s much-trumpeted Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act), which completed its first anniversary on April 1 last year, has also proved to be a non-starter. In an official report released on the occasion (RTE Act: the 1st Year), the HRD ministry admitted that 8.1 million children in the age group six-14 remain out of school and there’s a shortage of 508,000 teachers countrywide, while only eight states and seven Union territories have notified Rules for implementing the Act — which makes it mandatory for the State (i.e Central, state and local governments) to provide free and compulsory education to every child between six-14 years — within their jurisdictions. Moreover the Supreme Court is dithering about pronouncing judgement on a clutch of writ petitions filed by private schools challenging the constitutional validity of several provi-sions of the Act, including the oblig-ation imposed upon them to provide highly subsidised primary education to “poor neighbourhood” children. In the higher education sector as well, 2011 provided little cheer. Delhi Univer-sity’s 77 affiliated colleges sparked off a national outcry by hiking admission cut-off averages to 90-100 percent; a HRD ministry report revealed that 383,868 faculty positions are vacant in higher education institutions country-wide; and not even one Indian university was ranked in the Top 200 in the QS World University Rankings…