Two days after submitting recommendations of his report on “Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education” to Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal, Professor Yash Pal (chairman of the 24-member committee) spoke to Kalpana Pathak from Kolkata. Edited excerpts:
What is the most important aspect of the report according to you?
Let us try to make our education such that it’s closely connected with outside universities (society) and inside the universities, people should be able to interact across disciplines. Our report should be seen as aspirational and one setting a direction for higher education.
How optimistic are you about your report being accepted in totality?
How can one be sure? We have looked at various eventualities while drafting the report. I just hope it is implemented in full.
Your suggestions to set up a National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) and abolish regulatory bodies like the UGC and AICTE have been widely acclaimed. But the NCHER can become another UGC or AICTE?
You can’t guarantee that. Nothing can be guaranteed. All I can say is that the idea of creating an NCHER is to have a regulatory body which would not be allowed to interfere with. If you make it a constitutional body, it’s partly insulated from the central and state government. It would aim at protecting the autonomy of universities and act as a catalyst for higher educational institutions.
(The NCHER, according to sources close to the development, will require anywhere over Rs 4,000 crore to be set up. It would comprise seven members: one from the industry, one from society and five academicians. It would be a body sans bureaucrats. The proposal is to make the Prime Minister, leader of Opposition and the Lok Sabha Speaker a part of the Commission. Also, if bodies like UGC and AICTE are abolished, their officials would need re-training to get inducted into the new body.)
Kaushik Basu, professor of economics at Cornell University and a member of your committee, has submitted a dissent note making a case for private sector money to come into higher education openly. Kindly comment.
We have accepted his dissent note but do not agree with his viewpoint. Having salary differentials in educational institutions, as suggested by Prof Basu, will be counter-productive. He also suggested that lucrative areas like finance, technology, management, medicine, engineering and law should be given to private sector universities while pure sciences, mathematics, literature and philosophy should be with public sector universities. We could not go along with the suggestions from our distinguished colleague on this.
But isn’t what Prof Basu suggested, happening already?
It might be happening already with a vast majority of private players in the sector opening institutions for profiteering. But that needs to be corrected. The committee members did not agree to the suggestion.
Then how can we talk about public-private partnership in the sector?
We need to find a way to have private participation in the sector. It has to come with a not-for-profit motive. We have to have people who are motivated to be in the education sector. It should have educationists and not businessmen. Similarly, the practice of conferring academic designations such as chancellor, vice-chancellor, and pro vice-chancellor on members of the family has to stop.
Why Prof Basu dissented
Professor of economics at Cornell University, Kaushik Basu’s was the lone dissenting voice of the 24-member Yash Pal Committee on reforming higher education in India.
While acknowledging that the broad ideas outlined in the main report of ‘The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education in India’ (known as the Yash Pal Committee report) — such as forming an apex body for managing India’s higher education sector, nurturing inter-disciplinary and extending university education to much larger and diverse segments of the population — are commendable, he expressed “apprehension that without more detailed plans of action and sharper targets, these broad aims will remain unfulfilled, like so many well-meaning previous pronouncements”.
“First, the main report speaks about the need for greater autonomy for colleges and universities. However, one stumbling block for this objective is the huge power vested in the University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). There is need for these organisations to divest themselves of some of this power. Just as India gave up on industrial licensing in the early nineties (and thereby unleashed growth), the reformed UGC and AICTE should give up on the licensing of higher education,” he stated.
He urged the committee to “...reconcile ourselves to the differential treatment of institutions and universities and also of individuals. This takes us to the touchy topic of salaries and research support. The old system of a flat scale, where every professor was supported in the same way across all the over-300 universities, was once an attractive idea. It is no longer feasible. On the one hand, most nations are switching over to the system of special salaries and research budgets for ‘star’ researchers and professors. This began with the US. Now other nations, including the UK and even China, have switched to this. On the other hand, corporate salaries have gone through the roof...Given these facts (about which there is little that we can do), if we want to attract top talent to research and teaching, we have to allow for pay differentials. The exact modality of this will entail discussion and debate”.
He suggested two ways of doing this -- first, designating, say, 20 universities, as centres of excellence and putting them on a higher funding scale. The list of top 20 should be evaluated and revised every three years so that all universities stand a chance of getting there. The second option is to select a small number of professors in each field from the entire country and place them on a higher salary and research support.
He was categorical that the government should allow private sector money to come into higher education. “...The purely-private colleges should of course not be subsidised by the state. They should be allowed to set college fees as high as they choose (as long as this is made transparent). It is true that such private colleges will end up teaching mainly commercially-viable subjects and cater to relatively rich students. There is no harm in this and some advantages, since the state will now be able to allocate more money to the colleges and universities under its charge and provide good education to the remainder at a lower cost.”
“...There is an additional question: Should we allow these private colleges to be profit-making organisations, that is, allow the owners or the shareholders to openly keep the profit to themselves? A common presumption is that, if someone is interested in profit, that person will not be interested in providing good education. This is a fallacy. It is like assuming that if Tata Motors is interested in making profit, it will not be interested in producing a good small car...”
(Edited excerpts from his dissent note)
