This week’s column makes an argument that can best be understood in three parts.
glacial pace towards equality
This author was a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University when in 2006, in what is now known as Mandal 2.0, Arjun Singh, the then education (or human resource development) minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, announced the extension of reservation for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in all centrally funded higher educational institutions. Till now these benefits were available only in government jobs.
Now, there are adequate legal/constitutional provisions to debate the issue of reservation for OBCs. The fact that it is being linked with a “creamy layer” segment and now likely to be sub-stratified to differentiate between ‘more OBCs’ from ‘lesser OBCs’ – it is believed that bodies like the Justice Rohini Commission have recommended this – is a clear indication that this is far from a black and white question.
But none of this should fool you into believing that reservation in India is a purely legal or academic debate. This was seen by the students of my generation and those who were in higher education institutions at the time of Mandal 1.0 under the VP Singh government in the 1990s and saw it for the first time on our campuses. Opposition to reservation in universities was blatantly reactionary in practice, even reaching the extent of violence. It was BR Ambedkar’s political popularity among Dalits that led to the signing of the Poona Pact, which paved the way for reservations for Dalits and tribals before independence. It is the sheer democratic weight of the OBCs that has ensured that the executive and legislature threw their weight behind it despite judicial reservations after independence.
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After Mandal 2.0 there has been a change in the character of elite universities and other such educational institutions. They have a lot more OBC students now. Many, if not most, of them are much less privileged than the group of students who studied at these places before the policy came into existence. One can clearly argue that our publicly funded higher education institutions are now more socially representative than before 2006. This is us, as a society, slowly but steadily, reducing a portion of the historical burden of social inequality. This should be celebrated. It should not surprise anyone that with the increasing numbers, Indian higher educational institutions have also seen an increase in subaltern or Bahujan political activism or advocacy.
However, equality in representation alone is not a guarantee of the equality of opportunity that education is expected to produce. The wave of affirmative action that followed Mandal 2.0 faced two major adversities.
The first was a lack of sensitivity about educational methods not (even if unintentionally) being changed sufficiently to meet the needs of a large group who did not bring with them the large “merit” talent of privileged students. Someone sitting in a postgraduate political economy lecture at JNU and being asked to read a text by Maurice Dobb will act very differently, depending on whether they have studied at an elite college in Delhi University or at a university in a third-tier city in Bihar or Andhra Pradesh and have never taught in English, let alone been exposed to such demanding texts. Mandal 2.0 shifted the balance of the student body towards the latter.
Second, there was the sheer inability to cope with the teaching workload in terms of volume. Mandal 2.0 also saw a 54% seat increase and a significant decline in the workload per teacher in most centrally funded universities. This has severely hampered teachers’ ability to connect personally with students. One of my teachers who taught me in my undergraduate economics course, and is largely responsible for my widespread interest in the subject, which required him to devote personal time to me, told me about this a few years ago. “When you were a student, the class was small enough that I could give individual attention to interested students. Now, if I even tried to do that, I would go crazy because the class size has now increased more than three-four times.”
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These two factors, combined, have blinded the system at large to the needs of those who deserve it most. Now, bring up the systemic bias and caste-based retaliation that is rampant in our educational institutions; And things can get significantly worse at higher academic levels, as a supervisor enjoys hierarchical powers compared to the student. In all this you have an objective basis for universities becoming ticking time bombs of latent discrimination waiting to explode. Given the hierarchy, this often ends up destroying the student rather than the system. Those stories about student suicides in institutions of higher education represent this at its most horrifying.
When seen in this larger context, it would be difficult for any rational mind to disagree with the larger intent of the widely debated UGC recommendations, which were recently put on hold by the Supreme Court. Whether these recommendations see the light of day with the same legislative/executive support as was seen in the case of reservations or whether they are allowed to be weakened or even derailed under judicial cover remains to be seen. In a way, it will also test the strength of larger subaltern politics in India whether its effectiveness is limited to just winning representation or equality after representation.
Lack of any framework for quality
However, the debate does not end here. India’s ability, or lack thereof, to exploit its demographic dividend will not be determined by the outcome of this vitally important fight (even if) for equality of representation and opportunity in education. Here’s why.
Last week, the Financial Times published a long story on China’s Genius program, which has served as a key driver of its advance into the cutting-edge field of artificial intelligence. To cut a long story short, the Chinese state identifies exceptionally talented students at an early stage, tests them through internationally recognized competitions like Science Olympiad, selects the best among them and then ensures that they get admission in the best institutions for higher education. One of the biggest incentives for a student to pursue this field is that they have to waive China’s Gaokao, a notoriously difficult university entrance exam. These talents are expected to have completed college level courses in their high school. This program has now formed a tight neck loop with China’s broader economic power.
“I have seen firsthand how China has gone from having zero AI talent 20 years ago to mass-producing them,” he (Dai Wenyuan, a Chinese tech billionaire who was also a Genius Class graduate) said. “Some of our most cutting-edge work is now done by fresh graduates. The real talents changing the world may soon be among them”, he is quoted as saying in the FT story.
China’s rapid progress in producing such talents has its roots in the Maoist era’s insistence on furthering the productive forces in the country. It started with the promotion of school education on a large scale.
India, too, took the right steps in its formative years, building institutions like the IITs and even punching well above its weight in things like space technology. But it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Indian state never really achieved the Chinese zeal for identifying, shaping and grooming talents for its national economic progress like its Chinese counterpart.
The three major factors that can be listed for this failure are, a completely indifferent approach towards the quality of primary education even though some progress has been made on the quantity front, much of the educational employment being seen as a political patronage distribution exercise (even if sometimes driven correctly by notions of equity) and, on a larger scale, a complete lack of interest by domestic capital in creating a pool of super-talented students. Although there are critical voices that lament the lack of such things, it has never really even made an honest attempt to change things. There is no indication that things will change in the near future.
Dialectics with Vanishing Synthesis:
This is the classic problem of asymmetry of incentives.
Socially discriminated against, who have recently been allowed substantial entry into elite educational institutions, are still concerned about equality. It is difficult to find fault in their concerns.
The cronies of the current regime are busy clearing out the mostly imaginary left-liberal ghosts in higher educational institutions. This purification is often culminating in the institutionalization of right-wing zeal to project political hegemony. Remember the intermittent reports of absolutely ridiculous conferences and research events linking things like cancer research to cow urine?
Capital, big and small, has realized that it is not worth trying to compete with anything like its Chinese counterpart and is adjusting to a situation where returns are not necessarily tied to excellence and instead have to operate in captive markets, arbitrage or, even better, political patronage. Indian capital is happy to be at base camp at the summit rather than trying to climb the summit.
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As is clear, the first two aspects mentioned above are the main contradictions in India’s educational debates: caste and communalism. The third is the central contradiction facing India’s larger economic fortunes.
Political correctness has so far prevented the first and second strands from actually interacting with the third. Unless this wall of China is broken, India will continue to lag behind China despite lakhs of rebellions and retaliatory actions.
Maybe, this problem lies in our historical development. Unlike China, we did not abolish feudal privileges. The post-colonial Indian state may have achieved peace by avoiding violent revolution, but the incentives created in society as a result of the conflict between capital and democracy put it in danger of losing in an international war for dominance. The greatest indictment of all the good that democracy has done to us is that no one with a strong stake in democratic competition is interested in winning this war.
(Roshan Kishore, HT’s data and political economy editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout, and vice versa)
