The burgeoning demand for graduates as economic growth accelerates has been encouraging Minister for Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal to examine more innovative ways of involving the private sector, especially in higher and technical education. This is sensible in as much as the government lacks the financial wherewithal to focus on this sector when the claims from primary education are much more pressing. So his latest suggestion that the government could amend Section 25 of the Companies Act to allow corporations and industry associations to set up universities should be applauded.
Currently, corporations can set up educational institutions only through trusts, which means they have to re-invest the profits and come under the purview of the Charity Commissioner. Section 25 of the Companies Act does not differ significantly from the trust system. Institutions set up under this Act, too, can only reinvest profits but they will come under the scrutiny of the Central Board of Direct Taxes. But the big difference is that the Section 25 institutions will now be eligible for University Grants Commission (UGC) approval.
In a sense, Mr Sibal is pushing at an open door. For one, government investment in higher education has been declining since the nineties even as enrolment numbers have zoomed, suggesting that the private sector is playing a bigger role here than before. For another, the private sector has been openly thirsting for a bigger piece of the higher and technical education action. But meeting numerical targets is one thing — indeed, it is worth considering that India has the largest higher education system in the world after China and the United States. The bigger issue that Mr Sibal will have to address is the quality of the universities that come up.
It is no revelation that the rise in the number of institutions of higher learning in the nineties and 2000s has not seen a commensurate rise in quality. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh admitted in a lecture at his alma mater, Panjab University, last week, “A major problem that we face is in the quality of higher education that our institutions impart. Unfortunately, most of them produce pass-outs who are nowhere near international standards.” Partly because a graduate degree has been the minimum qualification for any white collar job, most universities, whether publicly or privately funded, remain inefficient teaching shops innocent of the rigours of seminal research or innovations that form the foundation of a robust higher education system.
Considering that the private sector already delivers more than half the education services in India — in medical and engineering, the proportion crosses 80 per cent — it is clear that it has not been a notable contributor to quality, so amending Section 25 is unlikely to fix this issue. The urgent problem that Mr Sibal needs to address, therefore, is a regulatory one. Questions need to be raised about UGC’s role as a watchdog that promotes academic rigour rather than a dispenser of approvals that hark back to the licence raj. So far, it’s been a system that indirectly encourages all manner of dodgy practices from capitation fees to fake degrees from fly-by-night private institutions cashing in on exploding demand. Reforming the regulatory system will undoubtedly be harder than opening the floodgates to private investment in education. But if Mr Sibal wants to find durable solutions to India’s education system, he needs to fix what’s broken first.
