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EDUCATION SCENARIO IN INDIA TODAY

Professor James Tooley of the Newcastle University has been studying the educational pattern in India for some time. He has an advice for his countrymen that India could teach a thing or two to Britons about educating their people in England. He also feels that the Indian experience could be very useful for many other developing countries. This might sound preposterous when most Indians would want to believe that Indian educational system needs to borrow ideas from the West. I was sorry to read a write up by an Indian writer in The Statesman the other day, wherein the person was pontificating on the virtues of govt. schools and colleges and was very critical of private initiative in education in this country.
I did reply to the editor explaining the other side of the coin. How I wish our writers really worked hard to get to the bottom of the problem before writing about any field that is new to them. I suppose the learned journalist did not see the brighter side of higher education in the private sector. Having been in this field of higher education for four decades, I feel that empirical experience (Anu dhooti) teaches many housekeeping details that one can not get from any amount of reading.

explanations are as follows:

  • Only in 53% of schools in the villages of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, UP and Rajasthan was there some kind of teaching going on.
  • Teachers were absent in one-third of the schools surveyed.
  • Many teachers had closed their schools and were running their shops in the buildings.
  • In some schools teachers were dead drunk; they even expected the pupils to get them their daily share of the heavenly liquid.(Diary)
  • Some teachers were asleep in the school most of the time as they were busy otherwise at other times of the day and night.
  • Some teachers engaged the pupils in their household chores.
  • Babysitting in the teachers’ houses was the commonest job the students had to do in many schools.
More and more parents, therefore, were turning towards private schools even in villages and wayside slums. The PROBE team discovered that private schools, even in remote villages, were very active in teaching and getting good results for their pupils. In the private schools the teachers did not have job security and consequently, their continuation depended on their performance, watched both by the owners who wanted a fair name for their schools and the parents, who could shop around for a school with a good name anyway. That motivates the teachers to work hard and put their heart and soul into teaching. Those village schools charged the very reasonable sum of 35-50 rupees per month; in the city slums, the going rate was 60-100 rupees per month.

This self-help idea was the one that prompted the first ever private medical college in India in Manipal by a thinking man, Late Dr. T. M. A. Pai, who wanted that the motivated students should be provided with an opportunity to pursue their interest, assisted by their parents chipping in their lot to sustain the institutions. The Manipal Academy of Higher Education, a Deemed to be University, is the result of his initial effort. Independent surveys have given us very high rating not only in India but abroad. We have students from thirty English-speaking countries. We have been assessed as one of top four colleges in medical education.
Institutions do not depend on for their growth on either the government or other owners. Educational institutions get their name and fame because of the men and women who struggle to keep up the highest academic standards as also the ethical values plus the facilities through which they promote themselves for admitting more and more students in spite the teaching faculty is not as per the standard. Our founder's motto was to nurture the best of teachers.  Universities should be proud of their faculty and not their brick and mortar or equipment as much. Our powers-that-be do not seem to realize this naked truth.

A banker, like Dr. TMA Pai, founded the University of Edinburgh, way back in the eighteenth century. That was the time of the Scottish enlightenment when Edinburgh was considered to be the Athens of the north. Except for the University of Georgia Medical School, most of the American medical institutions of repute are in the private sector. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and most of the others belong to that class. The Guy brothers, business tycoons of those days, founded the famous Guy's Hospital Medical School in London. They are not untouchables in their countries but are venerated very much as centers of excellence and repute.
This pioneering Mani-pal experiment, the first of its kind in India, unfortunately, has been badly replicated by many others to make it into a big "business" in higher education. This kind of unscrupulous(without any moral principles) methods are being abetted(implemented) and nurtured by politicians and their goons for their own benefit. That is no reason why the original idea of Dr. T.M.A.Pai should be found fault with by our thinkers. Many of the later institutions do not have even the bare minimum necessities, not to speak of the all-important faculty. It would be shocking to know that a sizable percentage of them thrive only on visiting faculty, who rarely visit. People in authority would overlook all these so long as their machinery is well oiled and greased! Thanks to the munificence of our greedy powers-that-be, such institutions thrive better in India. It is only the honest and the meritorious that suffer in this environment.
What is the need of the hour? Many of our journalists with the holier-than-though attitude towards private efforts at higher education and many of our armchair intellectuals who live in ivory towers, having no touch with reality and without any personal experience in the field, think that education, outside the government setting, is getting commercialized in India. They feel that this is the greatest sin and should be curbed at any cost. We would be happy to host them here to have first-hand knowledge of the trials and tribulations of running excellent educational institutions.

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