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No Pied Piper, this
ANIL DHARKER
A.M. FARUQUI
Our education system needs a thorough overhaul ... facilities for learning are inadequate.
IS Murli Manohar Joshi the worst Education Minister in the history of independent India? Or is he the best Education Minister in the history of independent India?
The answer to both these extreme and contradicting questions is a definite "Yes" depending on your point of view. For unlike a lot of his predecessors, who have either done minor tinkering with the system or done nothing at all, Joshi has been an activist minister. A very active minister indeed.
So active, in fact, that the legacy he will leave behind will be lasting and have far-reaching consequences. In fact, his legacy will outlast that of most of the NDA council of ministers, including the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee himself. That's because Murli Manohar Joshi came to his ministry with a most definite agenda and has carried it out systematically. And that agenda was not of some miniscule adjustments to the system but its wholesale overhaul.
Heaven knows our educational system needs an overhaul desperately, a complete and thorough one, not just a superficial makeover. Its machinery is slow and cumbersome, the process of change is glacial and painful, curricula are outdated, textbooks out of sync with the times and, where revised, riddled with mistakes... Classrooms are overcrowded, with teacher-student ratios abysmal, teachers (especially at school level) are grossly underpaid, facilities for learning are inadequate...
Many of these problems stem from one single factor, which is that there isn't enough money to go around.
Each successive central budget accords education in the country a shamefully low priority, so that the allocation under this head remains pitifully low year after year. Even here, there is an imbalance with a disproportionate part of the annual budget going to higher education as compared to primary. And even in this share of higher education, a very larger part going to specialised institutions like institutes of technology and management.
But our thorough and systematic minister of education has attacked none of these things; his agenda has been purely ideological. In that area, his attention has been total. He has undertaken a complete change in our syllabi so that the emphasis is now on tradition rather than modernity, with a language like Sanskrit being given great importance; he has institutionalised the teaching of subjects like astrology. More than that, he has set into motion long lasting changes in school texts, for example what our children are taught in history, with a saffron colouring added to almost everything.
Joshi has gone even further: ever since Rajiv Gandhi introduced the Ministry of Human Resource Development and included Education as part of it, the role of the Minister has increased substantially. Murli Manohar Joshi has taken full advantage of this and ensured that every institution, which comes under the HRD ministry umbrella will have a saffron-waving CEO who will introduce saffron ideology into the field. That's why even if Joshi were to move from the HRD ministry tomorrow, his influence will be felt in the whole of India for decades to come.
Has Murli Manohar Joshi done anything, which is non-ideological? Yes, recently. And the action he has ordered is as disastrous as you can imagine. This has to do with the way foreign donations to educational institutions are routed.
As it happens, the practice of endowments to our educational institutions is a fairly new phenomenon and it came about for the same reason as our country's economic liberalisation: there was no option. The Indian Institute of Technologies, India's blue chip institutions, which first felt the pinch. To start with, the Government decided to freeze their funding to the 1992 level, which meant that every subsequent year the funds in effect reduced. So the IITs actually had to seek money from other sources.
Simultaneously, the age of the IITs was beginning to show on the IIT's infrastructure, and alumni used to the sparkle of American universities found the peeling walls of IITs a sorry spectacle. Soon after, the real windfall happened and the IT boom began; suddenly IIT alumni were not only doing well overseas, they had become very, very rich. Thus Desh Despande gave an annual endowment of $5 million to IIT, Chennai (in addition to setting up a lab for fibre optics); Vinod Khosla has offered $5million to set up a School of Information Technology at IIT, Delhi; Vinod Gupta gave $2 million to start a Business School at IIT Kharagpur ...
These were just some of the alumni who came forward to fund their alma mater in the well established American tradition. So what does Murli Manohar Joshi do? He wants to change it to Ye Olde Indian Tradition.
Which is to bring in the Government. "No more direct funding," the ministry's edict has gone out.
"Henceforth, all donations will go into a general fund called the Bharat Shiksha Kosh, and the government will decide how much money goes where."
If you were a Desh Deshpande or a Vinod Khosla or a Vinod Gupta, would you be pleased? Would you not like to decide exactly where your money goes and for what specific purpose? Would you be happy if that money were to go instead into a Government administered fund whose destination you didn't know and whose administration you would be highly suspicious about? What would you do in that case? Sit tight, I imagine, and zip up your wallet.
Yes, Murli Manohar Joshi has played his flute once again. And the tone that's come out is no Pied Piper tune, which will lead all NRIs into a long money-donating line. This Murli's discordant tune will make all of them line up. Facing the other way instead.
Anil Dharker is a noted journalist and media critic.
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