Punjab’s cash drain

All entrepreneurial communities down the centuries have been great travellers. Mobility is a civilisational prerequisite for modernity, to open the mind’s windows to the breeze of change, ideas, opportunities and success. After the colonial period of indentured labour, which was nothing but a euphemism for slavery, two or three communities exemplified the Indian enterprise by travelling far and wide to send money to make lives better back home. The Punjabi and Gujarati diaspora stand out in terms of their achievement, with these two linguistic groups even contributing world leaders from among immigrants — Rishi Sunak being the latest example.

In the case of medical education, the easiest way out is a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model that would let the government hand-hold private medical colleges.

Unfortunately, the trend of hardy Punjabis going out to capture the world to make their pind rich is getting reversed. Punjabis are selling off their lands, dipping into their savings, taking humongous loans and impoverishing themselves to pack off their children to foreign shores for an uncertain future. The 9 per cent unemployment rate in Punjab does not truly reflect the despondency of the state that is pushing its middle class to a perilous brink of indebtedness. The best example of this desperation is the story of the Punjabi students who have returned to Ukraine to complete their course in medicine.

Only about 20 per cent of all the students who have appeared for the Foreign Medical Graduates’ Screening Test have been successful in the last 12 years. Yet, parents take loans to send their children to war zones, betting against the law of averages. Only a fortnight ago, a worried parent told this newspaper that he had taken a loan of Rs 20 lakh to send his ward to Ukraine. Despite the war and even the threat of a dirty bomb, about 1,000 students are still stuck in Ukraine because they believe that is the only way to secure a medical degree. Risking their lives for a better life may sound strange but that is the logic that drives migration.

Yet, all this would have been needless had the state and the Central governments planned better to help private citizens better utilise their resources. Planning cannot entail just public resources, it should offer avenues and opportunities for private investment as well. Let us take the example of medical graduate degrees. The Rs 20 lakh loan for an even bigger investment by the Punjabi parent in Ukraine was made for want of opportunities to make a similar educational investment in Punjab. The new National Medical Commission rules insist that there should be a fully functional 300-bed hospital to start a private medical college. It has, however, scrapped the unrealistic requirement of 10 acres of land in big cities and 20 acres elsewhere for a private medical college to be approved. With such norms, many children have no option but to sneak into war zones for a decent degree.

The Punjab Government ought to think out of the box to provide better educational solutions for its students. In the case of medical education, the easiest way out is a Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) model that would let the government hand-hold private medical colleges by offering district and taluk government hospitals as teaching facilities. The private universities that wish to enter into a PPP agreement would obviously be expected to improve the infrastructure in these government hospitals in lieu of the facilities the hospitals offer them. Punjab has some reputed private universities and instead of the government insisting on 300-bed greenfield colleges, which has deterred many from entering the field, these universities should be encouraged to offer medical courses, making use of government hospitals.

Sure, the Centre has been planning to upgrade district hospitals to medical colleges for long. But with the PPP model in place, the state governments would not have to wait for the Centre’s grants to develop doorstep educational facilities in almost all districts. But unfortunately, state governments all over the country have consistently ignored the fact that education is a state subject and have relied on the Centre to increase capacities or to offer new schemes to increase student intake. The governments in our region can take the lead and turn the Ukrainian war into an opportunity to increase medical seats in the private sector.

At the same time, the students admitted to government medical colleges ought to understand the debt they owe to the community. They cannot be allowed to shun government bonds, as in the case of students admitted into Haryana’s government medical colleges. It is legitimate for a government, having spent the taxpayer’s money on their education, to demand the young doctors’ service in the rural sector for a certain number of years.

The cash drain is not confined to medical education. In fact, students of humanities are coughing up even bigger amounts for courses in economics, political science or commerce in various universities abroad, with no assurance of a white-collar job. A colleague has already spent Rs 75 lakh on his ward’s education in the humanities stream in Canada, with the youngster still not sure about where he is headed. The market for foreign education has been left so completely unregulated that parents taking a Rs 50 lakh loan for meaningless courses for their children in the hope of permanent residency in Canada or elsewhere has become common in Punjab.

Children seeking degrees in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer sciences, biotechnology and other courses offering cutting-edge technology are actually pushing the frontiers for themselves and the nation. But those who spend half-a-crore of rupees to study commerce, political science, law or journalism can only become misfits when they are back in our milieu and forced to compete with street-smart local graduates. A vanity degree is fine for the rich, but the government should intervene to ensure that those who can’t afford such degrees are not allowed to take loans that would become bad debts and ruin lives.

The cash drain is also a one-way trap to menial jobs in the first world. After spending Rs 20-30 lakh, if the immigrants end up with jobs at petrol pumps and supermarkets, the money and lives of Punjab’s future generations would have been wasted. Punjab badly needs a migration policy for students.