INDIA is on the verge of becoming a bustling education market, regrettably because the present HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, is pushing for allowing foreign universities to set up shops here. We call it shops, because the foreign universities look at India as a huge market for free trade in education.
While Sibal’s recent impulse on the issue was cheered by a small section of the articulate middle class, majority of educationists, policy planners, social organisations and concerned citizens view it with skepticism, understandably.
Education is still revered in India. The introduction of alphabets to children (vidyarambham) is done with a lot of ritual in several parts of the country. Children are taken in procession with drums and bugle to initiate schooling. Vidyarambham, the starting of school is a serious ceremony, so much so that even the Church in Kerala has adopted it.
The governments at both the central and state levels run universities to ensure that equal opportunities are available for at least a large section of the population. The fees in these varsities are subsidised. There is reservation for the backward sections.
Allowing foreign universities into India, who mostly operate on the motive of profit, would divide the youth further vertically into those who can afford foreign degrees and those who cannot and needless to add that those with foreign degrees would get preference in the job market.
International education now provides a significant source of revenues for companies better known for other activities. A recent book ‘The Great Brain Race: How Global Universities Are Reshaping the World’ by Ben Wildavsky discussing the higher education scenario describes it as “the rise of a new kind of free trade: free trade in minds.” The book has given several examples like Kaplan (parent firm Washington Post), Apollo (parent firm of University of Phoenix) and Whitney International, created by a Texas entrepreneur. Several of these for-profits universities have attempted to enter India.
The book laments that “In many nations there has been considerable resistance to for-profits, partly on philosophical grounds-some critics view education as a purely public good-and also because of concern that for profits quality is uneven and that tighter regulation is needed.”
India falls in the first category. There are 348 universities in India. It is a fact that none of them figure in the list of top 200 universities in the world. But then, if our universities are so bad, how come so many thousands get admissions into higher education in these “listed” universities?
In most Asian countries, parents sponsor the education of children right up to higher education and professional courses. Whereas in the West, most students go to the universities on the strength of loans and a few on scholarships. It would not be an exaggeration to suggest that these universities depend on the flux of foreign students to keep running a business. Today, over three million students study in countries other than their place of origin and a majority of them come from the five Asian countries-China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
India sends the second largest number of students abroad, next to China. In several destinations, like UK and Australia, Indian numbers beat the Chinese. There is a section in India which believes that by allowing foreign universities here, a lot of foreign exchange could be saved and the Indian universities would be on their toes, maintaining standards for survival. We have heard similar arguments before on allowing foreign business into India. And see what happened, in the consumer sector, be it the soft drinks, the detergents or toothpaste. The Indian companies have been nearly wiped off.
As such, the government has privatised large sections of education in India, with the result that there is an enormous difference in the quality of education at the primary and secondary level. In the higher education level also, private, profit-motivated colleges are run, which give a raw deal to the students. The multiple levels monitoring system of the government has not been effective in checking the standards of these institutions, largely due to corruption.
In a scenario like this, how does the government propose to vet, verify and allow foreign universities to open centres in India? While making such major policy decisions, is it not morally binding on the government to discuss the matter threadbare in various public forums?
