First, a confession. I regret that I have not written earlier about the rot in higher education that has been revealed in shameful detail in recent days. I should have done so because I believe deeply that the reforms most urgently needed are those in higher education. In school education as well. But that is a whole other story. It disappoints me that the Prime Minister has not done anything by way of real education reforms in the past ten years. My disappointment began when he made Smriti Irani his first education minister. I had hoped he would find a minister with some understanding of academia. But I went anyway to meet her and suggested that the best thing she could do for higher education was to disband the University Grants Commission (UGC), and allow colleges and universities full autonomy to govern themselves. She paid no attention. She was more interested in trying to sack the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, who was showing signs of independence and imagination. The liberation of higher education from the clutches of officials and politicians is a cause I have been passionately interested in almost since I first started writing this column nearly forty years ago. This was a cause inspired by observing how almost every major political leader tried to start his own private college. Not out of altruism. But for power, patronage and land-grabbing. I also know from non-political friends who run fine colleges and universities about how much interference they face from politicians who try their best to grab these institutions for themselves. If they succeed, they sell off the land to make a fortune from the real estate business. The Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan, showed contrition at his press conference last week and accepted responsibility for the catastrophic way the National Testing Agency has been functioning. He promised action against those who have been responsible for the horrific corruption in the NEET entrance exam. This has ruined the lives and dreams of hundreds of thousands of young people. Will the Minister arrange to compensate them for destroying their dream of becoming doctors? Will he consider real reforms in higher education? Real reforms will mean giving full autonomy to our colleges and universities. The United States is today the country with the best universities in the world and the reason for this is that the government does not meddle at all in their functioning. Not even the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test), that students need to score well in to get into the best universities, is a government test. There is no such thing as a National Testing Agency in the United States. And officials do not poke their noses even into state-run universities and colleges. In India, officials interfere to an extent that is almost farcical. They decide which professors should be hired and what their salaries should be and interfere in which courses should be taught and how. Is it any wonder that Indian universities have gone from bad to worse over the years? Rahul Gandhi is currently making a huge noise about how higher education has been destroyed in the past ten years because of meddling by the RSS. This is not the whole truth. He appears not to remember that in the old days there was just as much interference by a powerful Leftist lobby that wanted total control of academia. It was lies told by Marxist historians that have inspired RSS-minded academics to try rewriting history textbooks. Their aim is mostly to put on record that Islamic invaders destroyed temples, libraries and universities like Nalanda. Higher education in those early years of Independence was so controlled by Marxists and semi-Marxists that some of our best and brightest teachers and thinkers fled to the west. Most of them never came back. The Prime Minister was in Nalanda last week to inaugurate a new campus and he made an excellent speech about how his ‘mission’ was to make India again the fount of learning that it once was. This is unlikely to happen until scholars, academics, writers, poets, historians and researchers are given full freedom to think, speak and write. Sadly, this will not happen since his government routinely kicks out foreign correspondents who take an unfriendly view. So how is his ‘mission’ ever going to be fulfilled? There can be no excellence in our colleges and universities if officials and politicians act like vigilant and brutal thought policemen. Meanwhile, the rot that is tumbling out daily from our National Testing Agency can be turned into an opportunity if Modi seriously wants India to become the centre of learning that it was in ancient times. When the Minister of Education has finished dealing with the corruption that we have seen in the national examination system, he should seriously consider the possibility of allowing our institutions of higher learning the autonomy that they deserve. Tragically, the rot in our education system begins in kindergarten. Anyone who has visited a rural government school can confirm this. It is hard to understand why Modi, with his ‘mission’ to make India a Vishvaguru again, has done so little to urge his chief ministers to improve government schools in BJP states. Most of them are so bad that even the poorest parents try to send their children to private schools in the desperate hope that they will at least learn to count and read.
