Here are the salient points of the article below: The Government has indirectly contributed to increased expensive private education, thus making it available only to the wealthy by underfunding public education. The bureaucracy in education has increased with setting up of various useless schemes and strategies and expanding ‘reservations’. Govt funding is focused on ‘hard to get in’ exclusive institutions like IITs and IIMs. Poor students are effective shut off from quality education. Schooling will even more than before become divisive between the few rich and the vast poor. You will in the coming years see more and more Indian students fleeing to colleges and universities abroad. From the Indian Express Tertiary education is in growing disarray. Expanded schooling and greater reservations have redefined the student composition of public universities. By a reaction among the privileged, private universities have grown incrementally: They account for two-thirds of all enrolment today. The NEP ignored this factor beyond a pious declaration of the government’s primary role. Instead, it mooted another division between institutions by pre-set levels of teaching and research. Here, it followed the government’s lead, reflected in an operational shift from the UGC to the ministry’s direct control. Research is regimented through schemes like IMPRESS and IMPRINT, and institutions brought to heel through codes of conduct, imposed curricular and recruitment protocols, or even legislation. Funding is increasingly focused on a handful of institutions, through what may be called the ranking syndrome. Allocations for IITs, IIMs, IISERs grow unimpeded, while the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) for general university funding is down by a third. “Institutes of eminence” are nurtured by vagaries of funding and proprietorship —Centre versus states, public versus private. Most state governments are equally culpable. Perennially impoverished state universities are further hamstrung by political and bureaucratic over-lordship. The upshot is a centrifugal order with no clear thrust or coordinated deliverables. Public universities are in foster care while more and more space is afforded to private institutions. The equation between the two sectors now replicates the long-standing pattern of school education. Hence, poor students have markedly less access to quality higher education. The quota for the Economically Weaker Section will be infructuous if the income ceiling remains this high — genuinely poor students will lose out. Moreover, the pandemic has affected public universities vastly more than private ones, owing to the former’s greater sprawl and the average economic condition of their students. What scenario emerges on pooling all these factors? Schooling will grow still more divisive than before, reversing whatever progress government schools had made. The likely results range from a higher dropout rate to a resurgence of illiteracy. Some understated hints in the NEP grow sinister in this light: The stress on vocational training and apprenticeships, the explicit sanction of under-resourced schools and, outrageously, of children out of school. The public university system will continue to decline. A few central and still fewer state universities might hold out, who knows how long. Alongside a plethora of overpriced teaching shops, a sprinkling of reputable private universities might provide meaningful education to a small section. Neither the state schooling system nor people’s fee-paying capacity will allow their numbers to reach the critical mass required for a vibrant knowledge order. Research will suffer badly. All this will ensure an outflow of academic talent to institutions abroad. The process is already underway. Besides the horrendous human toll, such squandering of human resources (with consequent social unrest) is bound to frustrate economic growth. In that milieu, no one could buy or manipulate a radiant future for their own children. There could be no future for anyone in such a land. Sent from Mail for Windows
