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 Yash Pal committee report were commendable, he expressed certain apprehensions too. In an email interview with LESLIE D’MONTE, he explains his stance on higher education. Edited excerpts:
What’s the major point of dissent to the Yashpal Committee recommendations?
The main report is so general that it is easy for the government to say that it agrees with it, make a few nice-sounding statements and some cosmetic changes and act as if it has reformed higher education. I believe that now is the time for some hard decisions and serious reforms because India is beginning to lose out on its historic advantage in higher education and research.
First, when it comes to higher education, we need to give up our licensing mentality and allow many more new colleges, deemed universities and universities to come up. We tried industrial licensing to manage our manufacturing sector and almost killed it. Second, we should aim to make India a hub of global education, a place where students come from Africa, Asia, Europe and the USA for university and technical education. This will need initial investment-good hostels, for one-but is feasible, given India’s already high reputation and advantage with the English. This can bring in huge amounts of revenue to India and enable us to extend university education to a much wider section of Indian citizens. This can also vastly raise India’s standing in the world.
Third, we have to recognise that no government can run close to 400 universities without going broke or committing the universities to mediocrity. It follows that we have to differentiate between good and not so good universities and provide special funds to the former. Also, it is time to let more private sector money into higher education.
But Chairman of the committee, Prof Yash Pal believes that having salary differentials in educational institutions, as suggested by you, will be counter-productive. And unlike you, he does believe 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. Your comments.
Professor Yash Pal is one of the most distinguished scientists and educators in the nation and I respect his views. But I think, in the end, they do not stand up to scrutiny. The world has moved on. Salary differentials are being used by the US, UK, China and many other nations to attract talent to frontline research. Moreover, corporate salaries have gone sky high. I personally think there is something wrong with this, but India is not yet a powerful enough nation to alter the rules of the game. So we have to be realistic and device new strategies to attract talent. I am not saying that different subjects should be allotted to the private and public sectors, but simply saying that we must not have government spend money on the commercially viable subjects. These can be left to the private colleges and then have the government use the saved money for funding the rest better.
You have asserted that profit-making private colleges can indeed provide quality education. Are there any good examples of these worldwide that India can use as a model?
On this, there are not too many examples. In the US, two prominent examples are the University of Phoenix and DeVries University. None of the world's top universities are for-profit. But that simply means we have to be careful with this strategy; it does not mean we should not consider the idea. India can play a pioneering role in this. I wanted to place this idea on the table for discussion. Even if a for-profit university is not top quality that does not mean it is not worth it.
A merit-based structure for salaries of professors could also be abused by favouritism unless the process is transparent. Are there any foreign university models to work on?
No doubt there is the risk of favouritism. But that is there in every walk of life. Even in the current system, who gets the professor’s job can be decided on the basis of nepotism and favouritism. So this risk must not be used as an alibi not to try this system. We just have to work hard to try to keep the system transparent and objective. As for examples, all leading American universities use this system. I am sure there is some abuse there, but for the most part it works excellently.
What kind of caveats should India build in when open education to foreign universities or inviting FDI in Indian education?
The question of FDI will come up only when we allow for-profit universities. What we can try to start right away is fund-raising from the private sector and from individuals. This has already begun in India but, judging by the American experience, we can do much more than we have managed thus far.
Are India’s IITs and IIMs not good enough to attract foreign students?
They are, and that is the reason we are being foolish not to utilise this great opportunity. To go this route, several complementary steps will have to be taken. We have to improve the hostel conditions, work out a different (and higher) fee structure for foreign students, we have to have a system of granting multiple year visas to foreign students. Some of our autonomous colleges-such as St. Xavier’s Kolkata-are already attracting foreign students. The opportunities on this dimension are simply huge and it is imperative for India to utilise them.
If regulatory bodies like the UGC & AICTE are replaced by a supra body (as suggested by the National Knowledge Commission too), do you believe it will still hinder granting autonomy to colleges and universities?
In itself this means very little. Everything will depend on how we specify the functions of this supra body. At one level this can be nothing but a change of names. At another, by creating such a powerful body, we can risk hurting the autonomy of colleges and universities. This we must guard against.
An accreditation body — NAAC — already exists. If the UGC, as you suggest, starts rating universities and institutes of higher learning, won’t it cause further confusion?
Ratings can be done by more than one organisation-corporations are rated by many rating agencies. Having said that, since NAAC was set up by UGC, I would not mind if the rating of universities was left to the NAAC. It is just that it has to do a very good job and let the ratings be better known. When applying to a college a student must automatically think of checking up on the NAAC rating of the college.
What kind of “severe punishment” do you recommend for colleges that play truant?
The details of this will have to be filled in by lawyers. We already have laws to protect consumers from producers disseminating false information. Maybe we can use these existing laws. Maybe we have to create new ones. I do not have the answer off-hand. The Yash Pal committee had the distinguished legal expert, Madhav Menon, on it. I am sure he can advise us on this.
