Economic and Political Weekly September 29, 2007

fact, quite the contrary. It is, of course, a different matter altogether that an extreme version of the equality of outcomes was pursued, in the name of Marxism, by the ruling classes of the former Soviet Union. Suppose now that we were to shift to the terrain of the equality of opportunity as the proper interpretation of the goal of equity, we are on firmer ground, it would seem, but only relatively so. For after Isaiah Berlin and Amartya Sen we are aware that the equality of opportunity seen as a global absence of coercion cannot translate into a positive variant – being the only one worth pursuing – of opportunity when capabilities differ. To rescue the idea of equality of opportunity, transplanted in the sphere of education, we might then say that there is such equality when all those with similar potential are endowed with capabilities for learning.

Having steered toward what is at least a working definition of excellence and equity, I move to emphasise the essential complementarity of these two criteria in an educational arrangement. We can see that the two combine quite naturally as follows. An ideal arrangement for education would provide for its constituents the highest equal chances for attaining excellence. It follows, then given our context, to seek whether this is currently being achieved in India. But before doing so, it is my task to reject outright the sentimental view that excellence is an elitist goal. Oddly enough, considering that it is championed by self-conscious spokespersons for India’s poor, it is fundamentally status quoist. One need not subscribe, as I do nevertheless, to Foucault’s insight that knowledge is power to recognise that to stoutly resist a progress toward excellence for all is actually to ensure that the poor, who are ipso facto powerless, remain where they are. Arguably no sentiment has worked more towards keeping the poor of India where they are than the reactionary one that excellence is at best beyond their ken or at worst something hopelessly bourgeois. But worse than both is the delusion that the poor do not aspire for it or at least for their offspring.

We can now fully see the implication of viewing the pair excellence and equity as the principle priority of an educational arrangement. Indeed, we can see that equity – even of opportunity – a purely relational concept, is more or less worthless without excellence. Historically extreme versions of socialism have come close to this kind of arrangement. Equally, the feature of islands of excellence in a sea of squalor would, from a macro perspective, leave condemned educational arrangements that maintains this state of affairs. India, in the sphere of schooling, comes very close to allowing such a state to continue. The twinned criteria I have emphasised requires that all participants be able to access the current state of knowledge or push the frontier, as the case may be. It implies that any arrangement claiming to be egalitarian must atte mpt to always level up. The scenes of levelling down in David Lean’s lavishly constructed Zhivago is grist for the naive and sentimental alone.

Lessons from History

There has certainly been a spread of education in the country since 1947. For instance, the number of universities in 1947 was in the 1920s. By now it is more than 100. Such a clear enumeration is perhaps a little more difficult to maintain when it comes to recording the spread of schooling but here too the increase – in schools and in enrollment – is substantial. This expansion of education in India has been very largely state driven, at least in higher education, having been directed by the deliberate policy of the newly independent Indian state. Despite the apparent progress, the policy can hardly be termed a grand success. An early intimation of failure is the fact of barely 50 per cent female literacy. Indeed male literacy is not at an acceptable level either. Once we recognise the instrumental role of female literacy we also see the socio-economic consequences of neglect. Some crucial indicators of socio-economic development register a lower value in India when compared to sub-Saharan Africa [Dreze and Sen 1995].

In hindsight, the poor literacy figures, which in any case do not even begin to convey the backwardness of such educational arrangements that exist in the country, are not difficult to explain. It now clear that no serious effort has been made to eliminate illiteracy in India. In particular, the claim that faster progress in this direction was held back as India was poor is seen to hold no water once the Indian experience is studied in a comparative framework. Amartya Sen has repeatedly pointed out that the countries of east Asia were investing a larger share of their GDP in schooling at a time when they were no richer, in terms of per capita income, than India. We may take the 1960s as another example when Korea was about at par with India in terms of per capita income. Indeed, it is astounding that the unusual high-mindedness that had characterised so much of policymaking in the Nehru era did not extend to primary education. Of course, there is the historical feature that education was then a state responsibility, as opposed to a central one, subject to the constitutional division of powers in India (it is now on the concurrent list). But this recognition can only lead to a shift of our gaze to a lower, being the sub-national, level of the Indian state and only deepens the mystery of such a callous neglect. In light of the east Asian experience, clearly a noneconomic explanation is needed. Again, Amartya Sen has proposed one. He suggests that the elitist nature of Hinduism and its pyramidical social structure has come in the way of the wider spread of education. Surely, it is egregious to find such educational squalor, as we do in India, a society of highly-educated elites with one among the world’s oldest traditions of learning. The suggestion appears to come into its own when we recognise that Buddhism, with its egalitarian ideology, had cut a swathe through most of the East extending from Sri Lanka to Japan. While Sen’s argument goes some distance alright, we are yet left to account for the fact that in India, literacy levels are perhaps lowest and inequality is quite high among its Muslim citizens despite the strict egalitarianism demanded by canonical Islam.

Insight from Economic Theory

Much as one might point to the global experience of finding a diverse set of arrangements in the provision of education, there is undoubtedly a veering of opinion in favour of the market in India today. The reasons for this are not far to seek. Public education in India is not an uplifting spectacle. The confused student, demora lised teacher, rampant bureaucratisation, and decaying physical infrastructure all combine to present a picture of great distress and even less hope. But even as we recog nise this, we need to ask two questions. First, has this always been the state of public education in India? And, second, is the situation markedly superior in the private sector? The sweeping tide of ideo logy reversal globally has meant that these questions are never really raised, leave alone addressed satisfactorily. But it is important for future generations of Indians that they are.

As the current ideological shift in favour of private education really considers only the economic motive of private suppliers

Economic and Political Weekly September 29, 2007

Economic and Political Weekly September 29, 2007

close to a paved road and those that have been inspected relatively recently recorded lower levels of absenteeism. This suggests that working conditions do matter for productivity and employee attitudes more generally. We now come to a finding of this study that has some bearing on the issue of mode of provision. Private school teachers are found to be only “slightly less” likely to be absent than public school teachers in general, but are 8 per cent less likely to be absent in the same village. This, it is inferred, reflects the greater risk teachers in private schools face in being dismissed from service for absence. Finally, the study suggests that local communities could perhaps provide an alternative means of monitoring the situation. It is certainly the case that internationally the role of local communities in monitoring, leave alone providing, schooling is substantially greater than in India. The issue of teacher absenteeism has a direct bearing on the question of education reform. It simultaneously signals that a part of the Indian state’s budget is a sheer waste as salaries are often paid for zero return and that more resources are not the only ingredient of a credible programme of reform.

Much of what I have said so far pertains to school education. This is of course as it should be, not only in that schooling is the foundation of human capability but also keeping in mind the peculiar situation in India where literacy levels are barely greater than 50 per cent currently. However, the expansion of higher education has been a deliberate policy of the Indian state and public investment in higher education is not only substantial but also spread across disciplines and the subcontinent’s geo graphies. The success of this project not only from the point of view of its own goals – that of developing an advanced know ledge base in India – but also considering the large outlay has other potential uses in this country, not least in schooling.

It is widely accepted by now that the quality of higher education provided by the government in India has not kept pace with the quantitative expansion. This may be inferred from the fact that young Indians who are able to finance the move have now begun to leave the country soon after they finish school. One recalls the observation, about contemporary Britain by a British university administrator that while it does not matter for a country who makes the automobiles but when its elites consider that its universities are not good enough for their children, it matters to a great extent. Especially in the context of the Indian government’s entirely laudable objective to promote autonomous centres of knowledge development – supported by massive spending – in the country, the observation by Indian science writers that the distance in the practice of science between India and the West in the period before 1947 was less than it is today – and that that distance is widening – is worth reflecting upon. As evidence we are given the physicist Stephen Hawking’s observation that the problem the solution to which won S Chandrashekar the Nobel Prize close to 50 years later in 1983 had been solved by the 20 somethingyear-old “Chandra” on the boat from Madras to London. That was well before Chandrashekar had reached Cambridge, having only just finished his undergraduate studies at the Presidency College, Madras. This of course is an egre gious example. Anectodal evidence is, however, available to bolster it.

I am told that the head of every science department at Delhi University in the early 1970s was a Fellow of the Royal Society. I have not been able to verify this. However, I can say with confidence that at the Madras Christian College in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate, the head of almost every department held a doctorate from a leading international department in their own chosen field. Quite naturally, both the teachers of French had been to the Sorbonne. Interestingly, English language and literature were exceptions, and this was well before postcolonial theory suggesting that at least in some areas, we were ahead of the west! While, of course foreign qualifications are not by any account the only criterion by which one can judge the distance between Indian science and global practice, it is not clear whether using some more objective standards of comparison, such as publications in international professional journals, would alter the picture of decline greatly.

Indeed the exercise is very likely to throw up evidence of a large pool of under performing academics. This was perhaps less the case before the grand expansion of education in India. C V Raman’s Nobel Prize was won through experiments in the buildings of the Indian Association for the advancement of science on Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta in the 1920s. By contrast, none of the academics of Indian origin who have won the Nobel Prize since then have worked in India even though they have been educated here.

If it is the case that the practice of science in India leaves something to be desired what, it may be asked, is the state of the Arts (to use a simple dichotomy)? The reception of the Arts is, of course, mediated through culture and it would be considered entirely appropriate that after colonialism, a certain degree of distancing has taken place. But is what is desirable in philosophy and literature equally applicable to economics, for instance? My answer to this question would be an emphatic “no”. Nevertheless, apart from a handful of centres in the country, advances in the subject have largely bypassed India’s university departments of economics. This is a tragedy, for the subject, as it is practiced globally, has much to contribute towards raising the very low living conditions of millions of Indians. The distance is also ironic as the Indian case is often taken as a prototype in global discussions of the subject.

Will Six Per Cent Do It?

It is clear that the dwindling resource base of the Indian university system is unable to cope with the student numbers. This may be handled either by reducing numbers or by better provisioning. Actually, a combination of these methods may be best. Given the need to raise resources, the populist tendency to leave fees unchanged for long periods even as there is inflation in the system is destructive of the future of education as it undermines the resource base. Indeed, even apart from matching inflation, to reduce the regressive impact of subsidies, a substantial hike in fees may be absolutely necessary. Higher subsidy for university education implies, given total expenditure on education, lower subsidy for the school-going poor.

However, while resources are undoubtedly a part of the story, they are not the sole ingredient for improvement. It is clear that there is an issue of governance invo l ved if the Indian university system is to match global standards of instruction and research. While exceptions exist, India’s universities have more or less degenerated into degreeawarding bureaucracies. It is not clear how much learning occurs directly via this media. Though student apathy is widespread, it is reasonable to assume that at least some part of it is a symptom and not a cause of the deterioration of the system. After all, it must be accepted as axiomatic that the onus of inspiration lies not with the student but with the teacher. While teacher motivation is abysmally low we must not rush into translating this into a

Economic and Political Weekly September 29, 2007 case of failed agency in all cases. At least not fully. It is by now widely accepted via our knowledge of organisational behaviour and psychology that agents respond to the nature of their workplace. In the language of contemporary economics, then teacher performance is endogenous, and needs to be explained even before it is simply assumed. Rigidly regulated and bureau cratised work environments leave teachers in India with little freedom, sapping self-esteem. Quantitative targets without concern for quality yield poor results with respect to content and delivery. Putting into practice arrangements and enforcement mechanisms that will provide superior delivery of the subject matter, improve learning capability, and ensure objective assessment of this learning I term “gover nance” in the context of (higher) education. Nathan Rosenberg (2000), who has studied the history of technology, argues that what makes American universities world leaders is that they are responsive to the emerging needs of students, markets and society. Surely effective governance of educational institutions has a role in ensuring such responsiveness, and India’s hopes of becoming a “knowledge power” are dim unless this is first recognised.

It is clear that improved governance is at least as important as more resources in any drive to improve the functioning of the education system in India. If this is conceded, it has immediate implications for expressions of intent to raise the level of public expenditure to 6 per cent of the gross domestic product.2 It is clear that increa sing spending without serious changes to delivery and monitoring cannot bring about the necessary improvement in the quality of education. As resources have alternative uses we need to guard against the proverbial “throwing good money after bad”. In the face of such a reading of the situation, it might appear ludicrous to suggest that there is a substantial role for the state in education in India. My persistence with such a position, however, is based partly on what economic theory tells us and partly on the history of India itself. The argument from economic theory I have already discussed. It is that in the presence of externalities the good concerned will be under supplied by the profit-oriented private sector.

The historical evidence that the existence of a private sector in education has not ensured the elimination of illi teracy or the raising of educational standards across the board either in secondary or in higher education can be understood, at least partly, in light of this prediction of economic theory. Independently of such a reading of the evidence, the evidence per se tells us something of how much more we may reasonably expect of the private sector. For instance, as the level of affluence of the middle classes rises, as it is bound to, private provision of high quality schoo ling may well be expected.

On the other hand, a swift response of the private sector to the need for engineering graduates as an input into the information technology sector is already evident, though this is perhaps more noticeable in the southern states. About three decades ago, a similar wave was evident with respect to medical education in India. However, what distinguishes the current phase is the generally acceptable quality of engineering education, while the quality of medical education in the private medical schools of southern India has been judged to be disturbingly low in several cases. The play of the profit motive is clearly evident here. It follows that subjects that we may consider as having a high worth as knowledge but much less of a market value such as the arts, humanities and social sciences are less likely to be offered by the private sector. However, while the disappointment at the realisation that future generations of Indians may not be reading Virginia Woolf may be rightly dismissed as “mediated by culture”, the disturbing thought that many of the future children of India may be left to languish in poor quality schooling, if the state remains idle, cannot be so easily put out of mind.

It bears repeating that the state’s role in Indian education goes far beyond throwing money at the problem. First, it must initiate a reform of India’s vast network of govern ment institutions that are now seriously underperforming. This is a direct role for the state. Here, we may borrow from some of the thinking that has already gone into a review of the government machinery pertaining to the economy. In particular, some of the stasis generated by bureaucratic procedures in the running of our public institutions that contribute to neither equity or excellence in education must be junked forthwith. Secondly, it needs to act as a regulator of a private sector that has not only long existed in Indian education but is fast expanding without any concern for equity or excellence. This is the indirect role for the state. Both are equally important.

I conclude by pointing to the role of an audit agency for education in India. While valuable independent assessments, such as the The Public Report on Basic Education in India exist, we yet require a statutory body of largely independent persons including educationists – including ones selected globally – to review, in the form of an annual audit, the functioning of the Indian educational system. These reviews must be widely publicised and the reports made available to the public. Given the guiding role of the profit motive and of vested interests – note my early observation that “private” is a broad category encompassing interests ranging from corporate to religious – it is clear that the private sector does not have the incentive to reform itself. In a democracy the government can be forced to reform even when its functionaries do not have an incentive to do so. This recognition must tilt our focus, at least marginally, in the direction of drastically reforming existing public institutions and towards the task of setting up inde pendent bodies to regulate the private ones. No agency other than the state can do this.

EPW

Email: pbkrishnan@yahoo.com

Notes

[This paper has emerged from a retreat on ‘Education in India’ organised by the Seminar Research Foundation at Pataudi, Haryana in March 2006. A short earlier version has been published in the June 2006 issue of Seminar. I am indebted to the Foundation for the invitation to meet so varied and lively a group of activists, academics and educationists. Malavika and Tejbir Singh were the most generous hosts on that occasion. I thank without implication A R Vasavi for comments on an earlier draft.]

1 See Jayant (2006) for a report of the study, a

joint project of the World Bank and Harvard

University. 2 See Ministry of Human Resource Development

(2005).

References

Dreze, J and A Sen (1995): Economic Development

and Social Opportunity, Oxford University

Press, Delhi. Govinda, R (2005): ‘Building and Sustaining a

Quality Education System’, Annexure 3 in

Ministry of Human Resource Development. Jayant, V (2006): ‘The Case of the Missing

Teachers’, The Hindu, April 5. Ministry of Human Resource Development (2005):

‘Report of the Committee on National Com

mon Minimum Programme’s Commitment of

Six Per Cent of GDP to Education’, NIEPA,

New Delhi. Rosenberg, N (2000): ‘American Universities as

Endogenous Institutions’ in Schumpeter and the

Endogeneity of Technology: The Graz Schum

peter Lectures, Routledge, London.