A chargesheet by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) against a clutch of professors from Delhi University and the Jawaharlal Nehru University last month said they had abused their position as public servants to get clearance from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) for an engineering college in Rajasthan.
In the past, the AICTE, which is fairly flexible about recognising the colleges it wants to, has been subject to manipulation by politicians and “education consultants”. Now, professors have joined the business.
This licence quota raj in education is what Kapil Sibal was expected to demolish when he was appointed minister for human resource development (HRD). But having set a scorching pace in education reform, Sibal seems to have come up against barriers set up by existing market forces.
Take reform of the AICTE, the most important authority to certify technical education, engineering colleges representing the most lucrative part of the business of higher (technical) education. The Yashpal Committee recommended deep and wide reform earlier this year, but suggested replacing the AICTE with another regulatory body that would have even more powers than the the AICTE (in fact, the committee report said its members should be equivalent to the election commissioners).
The only person to differ significantly with this recommendation was Kaushik Basu, then a professor at Cornell and a member of the Yashpal Committee, now chief economic advisor in the finance ministry. Basu made a strong case for private sector money to come into higher education openly, perhaps through education companies listing on stock exchanges. He said private colleges should “allow the owners or the shareholders to openly keep the profits”. He was quoted as having said, “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.”
Sibal has avoided the road less travelled. To cite another cliché, he obviously believes it is better to be safe than sorry.
The same committee, in its report, had said that universities could not be established with a profit motive. Sounds good. But all — Yale, Cambridge and Oxford — want to make profits. Sibal has introduced legislation in Parliament to allow these universities to come to India, but on the condition that they should not make profits. Does that sound like clarity in thinking?
There’s no denying it’s complicated. Equally, Sibal is conscious of how much needs to be done to reform education and is going about his job earnestly. The Bill that restructures higher education is in the works, as is another to enable foreign education providers to come to India. A tribunal exclusively meant for settling disputes in the higher education scenario is also under consideration. Amendments in the Copyright Act are being proposed. Secondary school reforms are on. Primary school education — especially in private institutions — has been made more transparent. Sibal is doing what he knows to be right — liberal and inclusive education for everyone.
Then why such timorous moves in higher education? The only explanation could be that he thinks if you are too hurried in dislodging existing vested interests, the empire can strike back, destroying everything you’re trying to do.
In his political career too, Sibal has been a cautious radical. He took the administrative services examinations and was selected, but opted to follow his father in choosing law. He defended Justice V Ramaswamy when impeachment proceedings were started against him in the early 1990s and got the unprecedented opportunity to address Parliament without being an MP. After his performance, then Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao offered him a Congress party nomination from the Lok Sabha. Predictably, Sibal lost that election but by then, the politics bug had bitten. He was also Lalu Prasad’s lawyer in the fodder scam case, and when Prasad offered him support for a Rajya Sabha nomination, he accepted.
Then came the Lok Sabha election in 2004 when he contested from Chandni Chowk. He got 71 per cent of the vote, not the least because Shoaib Iqbal, the biggest contender in the constituency, opted out at the last minute. Iqbal’s brother and nephew became chairman and deputy, respectively, of an influential municipal committee subsequently, amid a swirl of rumours about a deal. But Sibal proved 2004 was no flash in the pan, when he won from Chandni Chowk again in 2009, now virtually unrecognisable because of delimitation.
So, he left the law for politics and now he’s getting his head around the politics of education. Is he brave? Yes, but conditions apply. Will he succeed? Yes, but conditions apply.
