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Mid-course correction
Testing teachers
The Greek crisis |
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The party begins at 90
To Pakistan and back
The great
cut-off controversy
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Mid-course correction IT is heartening that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has chosen to speak to some distinguished newspaper editors to set the record straight on issues on which his handling of the government has been under public and media scrutiny. Dr Singh’s earnestness never fails to impress but with the spate of recent corruption scandals sullying his government’s image, the Prime Minister would be watched not so much by what he professes but what he achieves on the ground. Hemmed in by the increasing perception that there is a governance deficit, Dr Singh was at pains to dispel that impression. By declaring that the succession issue was not on the party leadership’s table, and reiterating that he had Mrs Sonia Gandhi’s full backing, the Prime Minister has sought to control the damage caused by Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh’s recent remark that time was ripe for the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, Rahul Gandhi, to take over the reins of the country. Prime Minister Singh’s message to civil society was polite yet firm. While agreeing that the Lokpal Bill was an essential and desirable legislation and tackling corruption was a priority area, he made it clear, justifiably, that no group, howsoever important, could insist that its views were the last word on what the people needed. The Prime Minister was forthright in rueing that the civil society activists (Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev) had not played by the rules. With three years left in the UPA’s second term in office, the coalition indeed has much to accomplish if it is to go back to the electorate with confidence. There is a dire need for a mid-course correction. While corruption needs to be reined in and accountability sharpened at various levels, the economic reforms require a much-needed impetus. The Manmohan Singh government must not only articulate its vision but also act on the pending pieces of legislation like the right to food for India’s poor, overhaul of archaic mining laws and revamping land acquisition to make sure that the government stays out of the messy business of buying land for private projects. The impending Cabinet reshuffle would be a test of the government’s intent.
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Testing teachers
Unemployment
has seldom been an issue in Punjab. It is only when unemployed youth protest, climb on water tanks, threatening suicide, that newspapers take notice. If after investing heavily in education youngsters fail to get jobs, their anger is understandable. For the police it is a law and order problem. Given their training and working conditions, policemen do not show the required sensitivity to the jobless protesters. Teachers too are not blameless as they often block roads, inconveniencing ordinary people. They broke the rules of peaceful protest at Bathinda on Tuesday. The unemployed youth oppose the teachers’ eligibility test, which is mandatory for securing a government job. There appears nothing wrong with a test to pick up the most suitable candidates. In recent years private teacher training institutions have been opened by politicians and businessmen. Some treat education as a commercial activity and resort to unethical tactics to make money. The quality of teachers, infrastructure and education is less than adequate. To separate grains from the chaff, a test becomes necessary and the government’s decision is quite logical. The protesting teachers claim they had got admissions to B. Ed colleges on merit and another test to check their job worthiness is uncalled for. Education is a key to personal and national growth. The future of children cannot be left in undeserving hands. Hence, the effort to improve quality should be appreciated. What needs to be opposed is the mis-spending of limited resources, which hinders economic growth and the creation of jobs. Education is not a priority with most states. The state expenditure on education needs to be raised to at least 6 per cent of the GDP from the present levels of 2-3 per cent. To make the Right to Education a reality, the country needs good educational institutions, both private and public.
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The Greek crisis
People
in Greece are up in arms against an austerity measure the government has sought to adopt through Parliament so that it is able to meet its international debt obligations. The austerity measure will help the government generate $40 billion by imposing taxes even on minimum wage earners, struggling to survive. And only then will Greece be in a position to fulfil the condition to get bailout funds from European Union banks and the IMF to save it from becoming the first Eurozone country to default on its loan repayments. Greece has to honour its loan repayment obligations by mid-July. If Greece fails, the fear is that the contagion will spread to many other EU members like Ireland, Portugal and Spain, ultimately affecting adversely the EU banking system itself. French and German banks too may suffer, as they are largely the holders of the Greek debt instruments. The ordinary Greeks, however, refuse to believe what the ruling politicians say. They consider the entire political class as “thugs”, who are mainly interested in their own welfare. A recent study by Transparency International brought out the fact that an overwhelming number of Greeks (80 per cent) are of the view that their Parliament has lost credibility. That is why any measure that the government announces is viewed with suspicion. The people are right when they want to know what sacrifices the political class is making for protecting the interests of their country. The image of politicians has suffered considerably after a large number of New Democracy Party and Socialist Party members have been found involved in corruption cases. The people’s anger has got aggravated with the fact that legislators have immunity from prosecution unless Parliament votes for it. The widespread public anger has led to Prime Minister George Papandreou announcing that he will constitute a committee to find out if the number of Parliament members can be reduced. He has also promised to get the immunity for legislators from prosecution removed. These will be major achievements for him if he succeeds.
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We should give meaning to life, not wait for life to give us meaning. — Stacy
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The party begins at 90 WHEN someone turns 90 years old and is still going strong, the natural question that begs a retrospective reflection is, “What is the secret of such longevity”? In the case of institutions that last generations, it requires a deeper reflection how they behaved at historical points and avoided the fate of their peers who became
passé. July 1 is the 90th anniversary day of the most powerful political institution Asia has seen over the last half a century — the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As celebrations unfold across China to commemorate this extraordinary milestone, it occasions an understanding of what makes the party tick at the helm of affairs while most other communist parties have faded or
disappeared. Like the communist parties that emerged from the class divisions fomented by the industrial revolution in Europe, the early CCP adopted a combination of brutality and ideological indoctrination of society against feudalism, Western imperialism and capitalism. Influenced by the October Revolution in Russia, the CCP’s pre-Maoist intellectual leaders saw the same revolutionary potential in the urban industrial proletariat and unions as Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin did. But the rise of Mao Zedong to prominence in the party redirected the vision towards agrarian peasantry as the vehicle for achieving a classless society. It was the first critical adjustment of lenses which proved to be a winning bet. The schism between the Mao-led CCP and the Moscow-backed Kuomintang on ideological and tactical grounds in the 1930s revealed that the CCP was a different beast. The party’s eternal mistrust of Moscow’s intentions would come back to haunt the worldwide communist movement in the 1960s and reshape world order. As is the norm in revolutionary parties, the CCP demanded loyalty unto death for its cadres and they fought the Japanese occupiers with courage and conviction during World War II. The hardscrabble means and desperate measures adopted by CCP guerrillas against the Japanese occupation are now the stuff of legend, but they formed a memory base of sacrifice and suffering which carried forward into the “party-state” that triumphed and rode to power in 1949. The corruption and incompetence of the Kuomintang was in sharp contrast to the CCP’s orderly and upright conduct during and after World War II. This legacy also ensured that the party maintained an idealist reputation soon after it became the sovereign over the whole of mainland China. Mao’s reign (of which the present-day CCP accepts only 30 per cent was “wrong”) as an absolutist dictatorship for 28 years had costly repercussions for Chinese society even as it cemented the party-state’s base. The great helmsman performed numerous recalibrations and juggling acts as per evolving domestic and international developments, displaying the flexibility of a guerrilla warfare specialist. The Sino-Soviet split and the subsequent “tripolarisation” of the world — wherein Mao cozied up to the United States in the 1970s and established China as a distinct third pole which could sleep with the capitalist enemy to counter-balance a pesky communist rival — were masterstrokes of contemporary diplomacy that did not enjoy universal consent within the CCP’s factions and ranks of that time. Yet, by innovating in foreign policy (while sticking to a staunch anti-market stance at home), the Mao-era party once again showed its congenital quality of reinventing itself at opportune moments. After Mao exited the stage and a brief power struggle concluded, pragmatism on the domestic economy began flowing freely under Deng Xiaoping. His economic reforms agenda of gradual privatisation with heavy state stewardship coincided with the rise of Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the West. While the CCP of the last two decades has criticised the process of globalisation, it has also harnessed its opportunities to move China from an industrial laggard into an exporting powerhouse and the “factory of the world.” The party-state embraced aspects of liberal capitalism and imbued it with Chinese characteristics, just as its CCP ancestors carved out “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Had the CCP not converted to a “cadre-capitalist” model of suppressing wages and attracting record foreign investment, it might have decayed and fallen long ago into what Leon Trotsky labelled as the “dustbin of history”. Mao may turn in his grave as Chinese entrepreneurs get rich and over-represent the list of the world’s billionaires, but the party lives on in a new avatar. As is the wont of long-entrenched institutions in power, the CCP has developed cracks in its edifice that will take some weeding out. Provincial party elites are at serious odds with the goals of the CCP’s high command in Beijing. Corruption has permeated the party cancerously and so has a culture of unaccountability, threats and arbitrary violence against citizens and neighbouring countries. State-sponsored hyper-nationalism dates back to Maoist roots and even to the Sino-centrism of the imperial past, but it poses a graver danger now because China has never been as consequential as it is today in world affairs. In Napoleon’s famous oracle, China would “shake the world when she wakes up”. The CCP has brandished the formula of a “peaceful rise” for China, but the party-state’s reputation for legalised suppression of Chinese society (especially of minorities like the Tibetans and Uyghurs) and its determination to dominate Asia and other developing regions of the world leave a trail of insecurity and fear. In the digital age, can the 90-year-old CCP’s “Great Firewall” to curb free information flows succeed in keeping the lid on the pressure cooker? Keeping in view the West Asian uprisings this year, the answer is a clear “No”, and the next generation of Deng Xiaopings who will steer China in the 21st century has to devise new permutations and combinations of compromise-cum-obstinacy to stay afloat. The party has just
begun.
The writer is Professor and Vice-Dean, Jindal School of International Affairs, Sonipat, Haryana.
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To Pakistan and back EVERY time I travel to Pakistan, my family looks worried. As soon as I board the aircraft, they start praying for my safe return. All my efforts to convince them to give up their apprehensions about Pakistan have been exercises in futility. I still remember when I went to Pakistan in November 1988 for the first time to cover the elections there for the news agency I used to work for those days. I had got married just 10 days back when this all-important assignment came my way. I cut short my honeymoon in Shimla to go to Islamabad. My wife and even my mother came to the airport to see me off. My wife would not say anything and just kept looking at me, perhaps wondering whether she would ever see me again. Since then I have travelled to many countries and visited Pakistan too on several occasions. My visits anywhere else in the world, however, do not matter much to my family. It’s only when I have to visit Pakistan that they are curious to know where I am going to stay and when I am returning. This time around when I was going to Islamabad to cover the Foreign Secretary-level talks between India and Pakistan, both my wife and son, now an adult, dissuaded me from going there. “Almost everyday there are bomb blasts or other such incidents. Why do you want to go to Pakistan?” wondered my son as I quietly packed my suitcase for the visit. There were clear instructions from wife too: stay in a safe hotel, don’t move out, and if at all you go out, be in safe company. Now, how can I tell her that it is difficult for a journalist to perform his job until he moves out of the safety of his hotel room? I wish I could explain to my family how an ordinary Pakistani yearns for peace and also wants his country to progress like India. I have now decided that I will take my family on a trip to Pakistan, provided they get visa. And I would certainly like to travel to Dera Ismail Khan (Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa province), where my ancestors came from. I hope the Pakistanis are generous enough to give visa to my family
members.
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The great
cut-off controversy
Misplaced anxiety
That’s not to say high cut offs are not exerting pressure on the system. The higher the cut offs, the greater the pressure on colleges such as ours where non-commerce streams were required to have 100 per cent marks this year. For the record, cut offs for B.Com (Hons) increased marginally by 0.75 per cent over the last year’s. But because there were several students who scored above the cut off level, the pressure on the college was high. As against 252 seats in B.Com (Hons), we had 413 students qualifying this year. It’s not a happy situation for us either because we have to give admission to everyone who scores above the cut off level whereas we have limited infrastructure and limited faculty. The session starts on July 21 and we are still calculating how many more teachers we would require to handle the enhanced admission rush this year. As per UGC faculty norms, each teacher is required to put in 18 hours of teaching per week. If we have to meet this standard, we need more teachers and we are in need of help from the UGC for approvals which do not come easily in an overregulated education sector such as ours. To come back to the problem of high cut offs and resultant pressure on students seeking entry to good colleges – the solution really lies not in debating why the cut offs are rising but in building a nationwide network of excellent institutions that would ease the pressure on select colleges. Gone are the days when seven IITs would suffice for the whole of India. We now need an IIT, an IIM and a Central University in every state and even more in the larger states where the number of higher education seekers is high. The Government must be lauded for setting ambitious goals like the achievement of 30 per cent Gross Enrollment Ratio in higher education up to 2020. Right now that ratio is around 12.4 per cent. But the question is – are we creating enough centres of learning to help us achieve this mighty goal? Over the next decade, the Right to Education will further add to the pool of students seeking to enter colleges. Are we prepared to absorb that rush? The solution lies in creating more institutes of excellence and redefining excellence. The Government must gradually move towards de-regulating the higher education sector, granting good colleges the freedom to experiment and innovate with course design, the freedom to recruit teachers, to alter pedagogy, to evolve their own examination policy. Functional and financial autonomy will boost excellence and merit. That’s not to suggest every institute be allowed autonomy in one go. The Government can begin by allowing freedom to colleges which have a history of academic excellence. That will set an example for other institutes to do well and we would then be debating which course to join, instead of which college to join. P.C. Jain Principal, Sri Ram College of Commerce, university of delhi
Re-design exams
We do, however, need to revisit the formula we have been using to calculate the cut offs and evolve a more comprehensive, rational system of admission to colleges. At present, we depend on the marks of school leaving exams, mainly Class XII of the CBSE. But I have a problem with the CBSE’s structure of liberal marking. We all know that school teachers are invariably under pressure to give more marks to students. This is a very good, liberal view but unfortunately it does not work in a country such as ours where there is lack of uniformity in education. Liberal marking is essentially a western model. My view is that we can’t be trying to pass everyone. Look at the IITs, for instance. They are the best institutes in our country and they follow a very rigorous system of selection through the Joint Entrance Examination which is considered a very high difficulty level test. The CBSE would do well to set papers in a format that is designed to test everything. You can’t have only easy questions. You need a combination of the easy, the moderate and the difficult ones so that you can grade the students accordingly. There is a proposal to have a common national level test for entry to all higher education institutes. I don’t think dependence on one exam is a good idea. A better formula for cut off determination would be to look at the scores of Classes X, XI and XII along with the scores of students in the proposed common entrance test whose structure is currently being designed. I am also not comfortable with the idea of optional class X CBSE boards. Common sense tells me that this system won’t help. Our students have to take the Class XII CBSE exams anyway. Abolition of compulsory boards in Class X will put them out of practice. The CBSE needs to put its systems in place and redesign test papers to solve the problem of exceptionally high cut offs. It would also have to discuss this matter with the state level boards so as to have a consensus on the issue. We have to remember that education is a concurrent list subject. Prof Deepak Pental, Former
Vice-Chancellor, Delhi University
Marks can’t be the only criterion
The enigmatic “cut-off” is based on a perceptual model that takes into account semi-quantitative analysis of current board results, distribution of marks of the previous batches, previous and leaked cut-offs of other institutions. It is also coloured by notions of brand image, the pecking order, societal trends and other opportunities across the country. Despite raising our cut-off by a whopping 10% in Physics and Chemistry in the last two years, we have ended up taking double the number of sanctioned students in these years. What we failed to anticipate is the sudden spurt of eligible students from across the country, especially from the neighbouring states of Haryana and UP, brought closer to Delhi by the metro. This year, we have logged nearly 60% outstation students and admitted more students than sanctioned seats in most courses. With pressure on the school system to deliver, the examining boards are awarding liberally. Although recognised to be equivalent, national and state boards differ wildly in quality. As students from across boards transcend carefully tuned cut-offs, it is no longer a tenable criteria for eligibility. The obvious solution is to do away with declaration of cut-offs, leveraging technology to offer placements strictly on the basis of sanctioned seats in order of merit, accounting for individual preference of college and course. Successful examples of centralised admissions abound across the country. What works well for courses with Entrance Tests can work equally well for Entrance on Board Results. Score-based admission, literally and metaphorically, symbolises all that is wrong with our education system with its undue emphasis on absolute marks and cut throat competition. It is well known that end of the year exams do not provide a reliable or valid measure of scholastic competence. We need to learn to fairly assess qualitatively the multifaceted portfolio of achievements and the statement of purpose of an aspiring student. Often augmented by a highly standardised scholastic aptitude test on critical skills, this is the praxis in many parts of the world. Dr Pratibha Jolly,
Principal, Miranda House, DU
Clear pending Bills
We are aware that a majority of India’s population is between 15 to 64 years, resulting in a low dependency ratio and a substantial working population unlike in the developed countries. However, in the absence of appropriate education and training, India would lose out on the demographic dividend. A FICCI World Bank employer Satisfaction Survey in 2009 and FICCI Voters Survey in 2010 showed that about 60-65 per cent of the employers were only somewhat satisfied with the current engineering and general graduates’ skills. In the last decade or so the poor quality of our higher education has fuelled the “graduate unemployment” phenomenon, which paints a grim scenario. I suggest an early passage of the four pending higher education reform bills on accreditation of institutions, entry of foreign education providers into India; prohibition of malpractices and establishment of education tribunal to adjudicate on education matters. The proposed National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill 2010 which seeks to replace and subsume the UGC, AICTE and MCI must also see light of the day. Further, expansion of higher education is taking place at a frenetic pace. The current quality assurance framework is unable to meet the challenges of expansion and has led to the mushrooming of substandard institutions. In a country of 500 plus universities and 25000 colleges, only 40 pc institutions are accredited. It is extremely crucial to accord high priority to the implementation of the National Accreditation Regulatory Authority for Higher Educational Institutions Bill, 2010. Also, as per the WTO norms, foreign providers are free to come into India through automatic routes. About 165 foreign higher education providers are already in the Indian higher education market and many of them unaccredited in their own countries. As per the existing norms, a foreign provider can’t provide degrees in India. This deters good foreign institutions from coming. We therefore need to expedite the passing of Foreign Education Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations) Bill 2010. Once the structures are in place, quality of institutions will improve, allowing students more choice. They would then not have to flock to a few top colleges for admissions. Rajeev Kumar, Secretary General, The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI)
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The recent expression of anxiety around high cut offs in certain colleges of Delhi University is unfounded. We must remember that the number of students entering higher education is increasing and so are the levels of students’ performance. That’s pushing up cut offs in colleges which are the most sought after. Higher cut offs are thus a reflection of students’ enhanced performance and by criticising the trend, we are only demoralising our students and castigating them for scoring well. 
There is nothing wrong with high cut offs per se because if the brighter students have to make it to the few good institutes that we have, cut off is the only system available to us. We have traditionally depended on marks as the yardstick for admission to higher education institutes. 
Indian Railways stands reinvented. It manages with admirable efficiency a complex network of routes and plethora of user choices exerted by a population of overwhelming diversity. Why can’t entry to our erudite institutions of higher learning emulate the best of Indian Railways instead of perpetuating the jostle of yester years?
The recent developments regarding 100 per cent cut off for undergraduate admission to commerce stream in Sri Ram College of Commerce (Delhi University) is an indication of dearth of quality higher education institutions in the country.