TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan: Accountability for professors?

LINE & LENGTH

The roll call should be taken for college teachers, not students. Or perhaps a writ of Mandamus should be issued to them.

Manish Sabharwal is the CMD of TeamLease Services, which, according to its website, is "India's leading staffing company and provides a range of Temporary and Permanent manpower solutions to over 500 clients". In other words, just as other companies provide machines, money and materials, TeamLease provides employees.

Mr Sabharwal thus has a very good idea of the labour market which India's recent growth has generated, and of the kind of people he is supplying. And he believes that while it is all very well to take advantage of low interest rates and high valuations, companies are hiring without paying much attention to the quality of the people they are employing. "Exploding demand and the skill crisis may be understandable reasons for the devaluation but the so far ignored productivity implications are starting to show now."

He is not alone in his pessimism. Ask any member of the UPSC boards that interview candidates for the civil services and you will get a tale of woe that sends shivers down your spine. One of them was almost in tears when he said, "Will these chaps become Secretaries to the Government of India 30 years from now?"

In other words, the pool from which India is recruiting consists of mostly third- and second-rate graduates. Post-graduates are not much better, either, and many of the Ph Ds you see make you wonder about what's going on. In many states it seems it is possible to actually buy a Ph D degree. The rate varies from Rs 50,000 to Rs 2 lakh, depending on the subject.

But in our pusillanimous collective wisdom we tend to blame the students alone. The truth, however, is that the blame lies almost entirely with the so-called "professors". (In India, merely being employed in a college entitles you to use the title of professor.)

Such is the impairment of our vision""the Dronacharya-Ekalavya syndrome""that even as we endlessly debate reservations and supply-side solutions, we refuse even to think about the quality of, shall we say, our teaching stock. We do this by not paying any attention at all to the accountability of those who teach in our few thousand colleges.

Think about it. We want politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen, courts, policemen, doctors, engineers""and horror of horrors, even the media""to be accountable. But when was the last time you saw someone demanding accountability from the vast army of mediocres who teach in our universities and do pretty much as they please, including ruining the quality of human resources available to the country?

After all, it is they who are responsible for the abysmal quality of graduates we are producing. Indeed, India's colleges have become to our education system what the SSIs are to manufacturing""vast employment but very low quality of output.

The failure to do their duty is on a scale that makes even our municipalities look like paragons of efficiency and virtue. Yet, we have been focusing purely on primary school teachers. That is fine, but what about college teachers? You don't employ primary school kids, do you, unless you are a carpet manufacturer??

There are three aspects to the problem of the quality of the teaching stock. One, our college teachers don't teach enough; two, when they teach they don't teach properly; and three, they don't examine properly because the system permits them to be completely arbitrary.

There is thus simply no accountability at all in college education in India. There may be a few exceptions but I think you'd have to be a very cussed person to deny that this is the norm.

Accountability has to be enforced at both levels but at which level do we start""with the teaching or the examining?

Those who teach in universities abroad say that arbitrariness in grading is a problem all over the world and no one has been able to solve it fully. All that could be done was to minimise it, and this was done by averaging""everyone gets marks within a range. Outliers on the high side rejoice and on the low side curse their luck, but that is about all.

However, as far as teaching enough and teaching properly are concerned, it is entirely a matter of teacher attendance and teacher commitment. If you don't come to class or when you do come, you come late and leave early, is there anyone to question the practice?

In other countries, you can't get away with this. In India it is the norm. Aah, says the argumentative Indian, you can take the teacher to the class, but can you make him teach?

Of course you can""provided you can sack him or her. Can that be done in India? Not at present. Should it be done? Of course it should. Instead, what have we gone and done? Raised the retirement age to 65 so that the same people can go on for a little while more.

Wonderful, isn't it?