Yashpal panel education reform is radical and very urgently needed step

Dr.Kaushik Basu’s dissenting note is a very practical and needs implementation
But then education is becoming more and more commercial and profit-driven!
Education corruption, as a pardigm, follows political corruption!

In education, academicians might talk; talk rather wishfully or wistfully even!
But it is politicians who have the last laugh, so to say! Why?

In states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, may be even in a sensitive city like Delhi, everybody knows it is the politicians who are minting money in education. While TN politicians have no peers in large-scale corruption in education, more so in engineering and medical education, their counterparts in Karnataka are real kings. Every leading public figure in the state has an engineering college. The bigger sharks, the more veterans in the corruption game own a medical college.
Yes, if you own a medical college, then, you are the modern equivalent of a maharaja!

In Delhi, the education scandals are kept as the best (or worst?)kept high level political secret.

Here in Delhi, you make money, you indulge in education corruption and yet you are also a leader or a player in the corridors of power.

So, education in India is becoming a big field for certain undesirable trends.
Yes, in Australia they attack Indian students. But then only now news started percolating there in Australia it is the misuse of student visas to migrate for unskilled and skilled labour!

In the UK, it is racist prejudice. In the USA too it is becoming clear that after the economic recession life is not so rosy for many Indian students and households. So there is a reverse journey over there.

But then we all live in a highly mobile world, where large scale migration is taking place everywhere.

So, once you open up the education sector for foreign direct investments, as Dr.Basu urges, in order to attract the US students even, as Dr.Basu wishes for large scale foreign exchange earning, then you in India too will face the same problems, racist prejudices and what not.

Already there is debate in India about whether Indians are not racist either!
So, from caste prejudices India would be opening up its gates for foreign students to flood in into the new private universities that are sought to be set up and then India too would have to face certain undesirable problems.
These are in the future.

Now, the Prime Minister has opened up new central universities in borrowed premises, it seems.

So, how long it will take for these central universities to become respectable?
There is no point in shedding tears for too long!

We have written in the pages of this journal, more than once, about the state of some much-admired universities, namely, Visva Bharati founded by Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhigram, founded by a dedicated Gandhian couple.

Both had fallen on bad days. For both the universities the Prime Minister and the Vice-President are the Chancellors, respectively.

We have also written and dispatched copies to the then President, the much admired and much talking Abdul Kalam and also to Honble Hamind Ansari.Alas!
They, including the Prime Minister, didn’t care even to acknowledge, except one, Kalam in a routine and mechanical way!

Now, what do you draw as your conclusions?
Real action on Yashpal Panel or Dr.Basu’s note?

Very, very unlikely, given the very nature of the government we have now.
A very artificially constituted government, men and women are chosen more for their loyalty, more for their dependability in time s of any challenge, rather than for their individual merits.

So, Kapil Sibal, the much smart among the set, has already run afoul of the state education ministers whom he didn’t care to consult on school exams or Moily who announced bravely something on gay laws and suddenly withdrew his moves!
You see, education is a very serious business.

Education defines and decides the long-term character of a people and a nation.
USA produces more Nobel Prizes. There must be some reasons.

UK still, in spite of the very bad state of children living in poverty (we read as many as 2.5 million in families under poverty line, high divorce rates, high birth of children outside marriages, shockingly more homeless people, again a very highly unacceptable levels and so on) and yet the UK, France and Germany and the Swedish nations have a high degree of public culture.

It is the public culture we find missing or lacking in some solidity.

Luckily, we have some very dedicated educationists, individuals with moral strength and institutions who are behind us in this hard task.

So, we remain confident that whatever happens or not, Indian education would grow distinctly as an Indian contribution to world culture.

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