Education News

Delhi Belated awakening A round of vice-chancellors’ conferences held this year in Mumbai, Kolkata and Hyderabad to celebrate 150 years of the establishment of India’s first modern universities in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras (aka Chennai) in 1857, culminated in a harsh indictment of higher education in India. In an extraordinary outburst on October 10, the usually circumspect septuagenarian Union human resource development minister Arjun Singh described tertiary education as the “sick child of Indian education”. This harsh verdict has caused considerable anguish and heart-burn within the community of vice-chancellors who had presented detailed papers and suggestions to the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC), which funds and regulates universities across the country. Based on the papers and recommendations subm-itted by vice-chancellors over the past six months, UGC has readied a compre-hensive (yet unpublished) report to reform the higher education system. The report attempts to influence programmes and targets of the Eleventh Plan (2007-12) and reportedly contains a blueprint for raising the standards of domestic universities to global levels, though the caste politics of Arjun Singh is its subtext. Noting the low tertiary gross enrollment ratio (GER) of 10 percent in the age cohort 18-23 compared to 25-60 percent in the OECD countries and the requirement of 20-25 percent for sustainable economic growth, the report recommends a GER target of 15 percent by 2012. Other major recommendations of the UGC report pertain to inclusiveness and equality, quality and excellence, academic and administrative reforms, financing and role of private education providers. “The enhancement in enrollment to the extent of 15 percent will have to come from increase in enrollment from those districts and social groups whose enrollment is less as compared with others,” says the document while calling upon the teachers’ community to become more sensitive to affirmative action and reservation. Moreover with the quality of education being dispensed by India’s 352 universities and 18,000 colleges under heavy criticism, the report calls for massive upgradation of infrastru-cture, revision of curriculum, reducing the student-teacher ratio to 10:1 and mandatory assessment by NAAC (National Assessment & Accreditation Council) of all educational institutions. The detailed UGC report on reforms in higher education is being interpreted in academic circles as an attempt by the commission to reassert its role and relevance. The primacy of UGC as the regulator of all colleges and universities — Central, state, deemed, private, foreign — is being questioned by the recently established National Knowledge Commission which is in favour of an independent regulator for all institutions of higher education. A committee of secretaries has reportedly been constituted to suggest a model for regulating bodies like Medical Council of India, UGC, AICTE and NAAC etc amid speculation that the Union government may set up an SEZ (special economic zone) for higher and vocational education on trial basis in the near future to encourage foreign education providers who would not be subject to UGC, AICTE regulation. So in that light the Union government’s response to the UGC report assumes considerable significance. “From 1949, we’ve been talking…