Time to welcome foreign universities

With only 9 percent of India’s youth in the 18-24 age group able to access tertiary education, and widespread protest in India Inc about the employability of India’s 2.5-3 million graduates per year, the best available option is to roll out the red carpet for foreign education providers. Dilip Thakore reports Even as somewhat belatedly the subject of developing contemporary India’s abundant human capital is beginning to creep higher up on the agenda of the Congress-led 17-party UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government, a not-so-silent war is being fought within the Congress party and between liberal and left ideologues within the Indian establishment over the issue of permitting foreign direct investment (FDI) in higher education. A draft Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry, Operation, Maintenance of Quality and Prevention of Commercialisation) Bill 2007 which could have thrown light on this contentious issue and scheduled to be presented in the prematurely concluded monsoon session of Parliament was scuttled at the last moment. The protagonists in this subterranean war, the outcome of which could change the destinies of over 90 million Indian youth aged between 18-24 who are currently denied tertiary education, are middle class establishment liberals who admit the glaring deficiencies of the higher education system on the one hand, and status quo leftists and left-influenced intelligentsia who dominate Indian academia on the other. While the growing number of liberals within the establishment are anxious to quickly augment capacity and raise teaching-learning standards in Indian academia to global norms, terrified by the prospect of western, especially American universities setting up teaching shops in India, the communist parties (whose support in Parliament is critical to the survival of the UPA government) have teamed up with leftists in the Congress party – notably Union human resource development minister Arjun Singh – to frustrate FDI in higher education. Inevitably the liberals within the Congress party are led by prime minister Manmohan Singh, the great reformer who as Union finance minister in 1991 introduced the liberalisation and deregulation legislation which unshackled industry from the socialist licence-permit-quota regime to spectacularly rocket the Indian economy into a 9 percent plus per year growth orbit. An Oxford-educated economist who has worked with the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and was governor of the Reserve Bank of India, the prime minister is painfully aware that an economy growing at 9 percent plus needs to produce more than the 750,000 employable and/or quickly trainable graduates it does currently. And that the quickest available option for a government running a massive fiscal deficit to augment higher education capacity is by way of encouraging FDI in this sector. Fortunately Manmohan Singh’s efforts to open up the higher education sector for foreign and indigenous private investment following the example of other Asian countries such as Malaysia, the Philippines and China, is supported by Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and Union commerce minister Kamal Nath. Nath who heads India’s delegation to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which is negotiating tricky issues such as reduction…