Higher education: Panel blasts HRD for the rot

By Shalini Verma

It Hauls Up Ministry For Mindless Expansion; Wants An End To Deemed Varsities

The Union HRD ministry may have downgraded the status of the 27-member Yash Pal Committee to an advisory body, but the panel has lashed out at the ministry on more than a dozen fronts in its final report.

It has slammed the ministry for its “nervous and hurried response in starting new central universities’’, permitting “chaotic expansion in higher education’’, allowing undergraduate education to rot and swallowing autonomy through “intrusive bureaucracy and mindless regulation’’.

The report has attacked the private and public higher education space of the country, which neither “excites students’’ nor “equips graduates for the real world’’. Naturally then, the scathing report has not enthused the HRD ministry, and in turn, it has asked committee members to “generate public opinion by holding discussions on reforming higher education across the country’’. Early last month, the committee was informed that the ministry had whittled down its position to an advisory body, but members stuck to their recommendations and the original terms of reference. The 27-member panel was constituted in February last year and has drawn up 14 recommendations in critical areas. When the octogenarian educationist personally handed over a copy of the report to HRD minister Arjun Singh, sources said, he was told that the election code of conduct had set in and he could take his report and hold discussions on it across the country.

A copy of the final report with this paper vilifies all regulatory inspectors and notes that poor reforms have been the main culprit of several wrong goings in higher education. While traditional universities, the panel notes did not “create public confidence’’, private institutes have been reduced to “commercial entities of very low quality’’. Expansion in higher education, the report says, has not looked at the “impoverished undergraduate education’’ that caters to 6 million students who pass through a system which has “not renewed itself and has not provided opportunities to students’’.

This is what the Yash Pal committee had to tell the ministry for the latest kids on the block — 15 central universities: “The fear of loss of agency of the university and the pressures of the ever-expanding demand for quality education have been met with a nervous and hurried response. Creation of a few institutions of excellence and some central universities, without addressing the issue of deprivation that the state-funded universities are suffering from, would only sharpen the existing inequalities. Mere numerical expansion, without an understanding of the symptoms of poor education would also not help.’’

What makes the panel report all the more controversial is its recommendation of not just doing away with deemed universities, but also downing shutters of existing low-grade ones. “Practice of according status of deemed university be stopped forthwith. It would be mandatory for all existing deemed universities to submit to the new accreditation norms within three years failing which the status of university should be withdrawn,’’ the report states.