Beyond the IIMs

After the mess created by Murli Manohar Joshi, it's only natural that the new education minister Arjun Singh should focus on the fee structure at the Indian institutes of management.

But the mess in India's education sector goes well beyond the scraps that Dr Joshi had with the IIMs and IITs. Indeed, the primary issue is not even the saffronisation of education that the Common Minimum Programme has promised to reverse.

In the case of business schools, as the U R Rao committee (whose report provided intellectual support to Dr Joshi) apparently points out, if you leave out the IIMs, the other 920-odd schools have an average of four teachers each!

Indeed, for the entire universe of management schools, there are 32 students per teacher, against the desired norm of 20. In the case of the engineering institutions, the Rao report points out there is a 60-80 per cent shortfall in the number of qualified teachers.

In terms of professional qualifications, these institutions require 26,130 teachers with Ph Ds and 34,840 M Techs. What's available, however, are 5,862 Ph Ds and 11,035 M Techs. The shortfall of Ph Ds went up from 33 per cent in 1990 to 55 per cent in 2000, and stands at around 70 per cent today.

In fact, according to a vision document prepared by IIT Delhi, while the institute has 15 teachers below the age of 35, it has 115 who are over 55 years old.

And, while over 200,000 people sit for the IITs joint entrance examination, for 2,500 seats, IIT Delhi got just four applications when it applied for a faculty position some years ago. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in the quality of teaching and teachers.

In 1996-97, for instance, while MIT got 102 patents, the average IIT got between three and six. And between 1993 and 1998, the average number of citations a typical IIT professor got in technical papers was between two and three, compared to 52 for MIT and Stanford. MIT produces 200 Ph Ds in engineering every year, compared to a fourth for IIT Delhi and Mumbai. The list goes on.

At the school level, while there is no doubt that the country has made great progress in terms of getting boys and girls to school, the drop-out rate in primary schools remains an appalling 40 per cent, climbing to around 70 per cent at the secondary school level.

A recent study by an NGO found that 80 per cent of those who have passed Class V from corporation-run schools in Delhi could not read or write their names.

In fact, an all-India survey by the Bangalore-based Public Affairs Centre found that just 8 per cent of those using government education in 22 states were happy with its quality.

What compounds the problem, of course, is the fact that the government spends more per student than what some top private schools do, and barring exceptions like the Kendriya Vidyalayas, the results in government-run schools are very poor in comparison. Throwing money at these problems, through expanded budgets, is not going to yield solutions.