NET for Teachers

G Krishnakumar (EPW, July 1) wants to treat the terribly diseased higher education system of the country by creating further obstacles in the path of the few who are committed enough to want to be an academic in the current situation.

Let me begin by stating the basic facts of the pathology. In many Indian universities and colleges, there are professors of history, economics, politics – these are subjects with which I have had to deal in various professional capacities – who are totally incompetent to teach their subjects. Because of the proliferation of universities in a society deeply divided by caste and class, and with only slowly expanding avenues of employment in the private sector, the ‘dvijas’ and the well-born have tried to acquire degrees just as the dvijas had acquired the ‘upaveet’, even though they might be totally illiterate and unable to read any of the ‘shastras’. Since degrees are the main criteria for employment, therefore a market, and a black market at that, grew up for purchase and sale of degrees. A class of teachers provided the means for marketing them: notebooks, tutorial classes, tutorial colleges proliferated. A nexus was established between the paper-setters, examiners, and the controllers of the tutorial classes, or providers of answer scripts smuggled into examination halls. In the process all over the country, with a few honourable exceptions, the whole system was polluted, and very often, students genuinely thirsting for knowledge were penalised.