Kapil Sibal started of with a missionaries zeal when he took over as the Cabinet Minister for Human Resource Development which handles Education in India. But two years into the job, nothing has happened and the rotten system remains the same. With Sibal more interested in protecting the corrupt like Raja, and throwing mud on anti-corruption activists, at Sonia Gandhis behest, the status quo is mainitained in the Education sector and last heard the minister was talking about "political parties, civil society and media must reach a consensus for formulation of policies to take forward higher education in the country", which actually means he has no clue as to what is to be done, and he has no intention of doing anything. Some of his comments yesterday(with my thoughts on it in brackets) are given below,
"Our country cannot make progress without providing education to its youths, particularly at the university level and for this political parties, civil society and the media need to rise beyond 'politics' for formulation of the national higher education policy" ( The biggest stumbling block to progress in education is the Congress party itself. It has ruled the country for nearly 80% of the time since independence, and year after year, it has taken care to starve the sector of adequate funds. Also, it has packed the policy making academicia with left leaning pseudo secular 'so called liberals', who have blindly aped the Western Education system without even adapting it to Indian situation and have totally ignored the tremendous wealth of knowledge in our Vedas and upanishads. In fact some of the modern scientific concepts were in existence centuries ago in India)
"There was a serious need to promote higher education in the country given the fact that the Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) in the universities in the country stood at only 14 per cent as against a minimum of 50 per cent GER in the developed countries" (This malady is known to all decades ago. Our higher education is in shambles with hardly any emphasis on quality. What prevents the Ministry from setting up exclusive higher education oriented quality Universities that concentrates only on PG and Doctoral programs?)
"It was only by ensuring improvement in the GER in the universities that a country can produce intellectual property and generate the real wealth" (Why the GER is low is because of the reasons mentioned above. The higher education scenario in India is not intellectually stimulating and the top Indian students had been migrating to US for decades now, with Government turning a blind eye to this)
The country needs 40,000 to 45,000 colleges in 2020 as against 26,000 colleges at present and 1000 universities by 2020 against 700 universities at present if it wants to treble the GER from the present figure of 15 million to 45 million by that period (What we need is not quantity, but quality. We made a mess of our education system by stressing on quantity over quality in the UG level to such an extend that most Engineers are unemployable, skillwise)
He said it was not possible on the part of the Centre to fund the required infrastructure for higher education given the resources at its disposal, Sibal also advocated public-private partnership in this sector (Government does not have money for Education alone!! Recover some of the loot, repatriate the money stashed in Swiss Banks and you will have enough to fund the infrastructure development ten times over. Also the private sector teachers, lecturers are paid poorly, and the teaching profession do not attract talent. What prevents the Government from linking major projects given to industrialists with a rider to start a world class university as a pre condition for getting the contract?)
He expressed concern at the shortage of teaching staff in the universities and colleges and said the varsities should run post-graduate and doctoral courses to produce teachers (See comment above. Pay pittance and you get trash. Pay well and you get the best. Simple philosophy)
Sibal was also concerned with lack of quality education in certain universities and colleges in the country and said in order to address the issue, the HRD ministry has created a National Knowledge Network (NKN) under which the students of a particular university can attend classes in another university or college on the internet. (Does it exist? What is the % of utilization? I bet it is not even 1%. 99% of our colleges dont even have projectors nor do they use slides. Then where is the question of attending classes on the net?)
