Dr Joshi's ideas

If Murli Manohar Joshi has his way, he will give away a whopping Rs 4,000 crore a year through concessions on education fees.

In the process, Dr Joshi will also get control of premier institutions like the institutes of technology and management, which have so far functioned with some degree of autonomy, and what he will then do with them can be easily assumed on the basis of his other actions.

After tightening its grip on the IIM's after the leak of the CAT exam paper, Dr Joshi's ministry has asked Delhi University's Faculty of Management Sciences (FMS) to cancel its February entrance examinations, and a fierce battle is under way, with the university refusing to oblige.

Sundry threats are being held out through the University Grants Commission, which also wants to slash the size of Delhi University's most sought-after colleges!

The IIMs meanwhile have been advised to reduce their fees from around Rs 1.5 lakh per annum to Rs 20,000, and the IITs to no more than Rs 6,000 "" measures that will make these centres of excellence dependent entirely on the ministry's hand-outs, which is what Dr Joshi wants.

Already, babus in the ministry sit in judgement on whether IIM directors should travel to a seminar or conference, and one of them famously questioned the decision on a few thousand rupees taken by an IIM board chaired by the Infosys chairman, N R Narayana Murthy.

Dr Joshi's proposals on the fees have been justified on the ground that lower fees are supposedly a recommendation of the U.R. Rao committee. But P.V. Indiresan, a former director of IIT, Madras, and a member of the Rao committee, has debunked Dr Joshi's thesis in a newspaper article.

Teaching a student at an IIT costs Rs 2 lakh annually, says Dr Indiresan, while smaller colleges manage to keep this down to Rs 50,000, given that they have lesser facilities and smaller faculty.

If you assume Rs 100,000 as the average annual cost of an engineering degree, and don't allow any college to charge more than Rs 6,000, that's an annual shortfall of over Rs 3,500 crore, given that around 380,000 students enrol for engineering degrees each year. If the government is to make up this shortfall, then it is a huge hole in the Budget.

Another Rs 500 crore can be added on account of the proposals on management schools. For, on average, the fees are Rs 60,000 a year (the IIMs charge Rs 1.5 lakh, which Dr Joshi wants reduced to Rs 20,000). India produces nearly a lakh MBAs each year, and so the shortfall that will have to be made up by the government is around Rs 400-500 crore.

While Dr Joshi's objective, presumably, is the laudable one of making top class education accessible to those who cannot afford it, there are cheaper ways to do this. One is a scholarship for economically weak students who qualify through the merit-tests at the IIMs/IITs, instead of giving a huge subsidy to everyone. But then these institutes would remain as autonomous as they are today!.

As it happens, Rs 4,000 crore a year towards the 'control-IIM/IIT' programme is just a fourth lower than the central budget for elementary education and literacy (Rs 4,904 crore), or the one for secondary and higher education (of the Rs 4,956 crore allocation, just Rs 664 crore are for IITs/IIMs currently).