People's Democracy

 On Bogus Degrees And Funds For Temple

 Nalini Taneja

TWO recent but apparently disparate news items underline the rot that is inherent within our educational system and is growing with the commercialisation and communalisation of the educational process. According to an Indian Express report (November 4, 2003), the health minister, Sushma Swaraj, has herself proposed that doctors who have graduated from various medical colleges in the former Soviet republics be exempted from taking the mandatory screening test of the Medical Council of India (MCI). A Supreme Court ruling on March 8, 2002, had made the test compulsory after it was pointed out that the pass percentage for those with degrees from the erstwhile USSR is just 7.8 percent! Also, an MCI report submitted to the Health Ministry in 1998 had asked for de-recognition of these institutes from where the degrees were being obtained, calling them unfit to impart medical education. As the report pointed out, there were lacunae in course duration, curriculum, eligibility criteria and even immigration of students in these colleges. The seats go simply to the highest bidder!

These were good institutions during the Soviet period, and the arrangement had been made for Indian students to study there under a memorandum of understanding arrived at between MCI and the USSR on June 27, 1986. In 1997 these colleges turned autonomous, and since then standards have been falling. Yet, about 700 to 1,000 students pass out from them every year. The MCI has conducted the screening test thrice so far, according to the news report — in November 2002, March 2003, and July 2003, and their records show that of the 4,378 doctors who had studied in Russia till March 2000, 3,394 appeared in the screening test and only 374 cleared it. Of the 3,169 of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), only 249 passed. If Sushma Swaraj has her way, 7,000 ‘doctors’ who fail to satisfy the criteria laid down by the MCI would be treating thousands of people in this country.

THE MERIT ARGUMENT

We have recently had news of the Rs 28 lakh and Rs 32 lakh demanded for admission to private medical colleges in Bombay, and of the de-recognition of many such medical colleges in Tamilnadu.

One may also remember the noise made against reservation during the anti- Mandal agitations, after which reservation and affirmative action in favour of the disadvantaged began to be presented as decline in standards, and the most famous ‘argument’ was whether one would like to be treated by a doctor who had got in through reservation and not ‘merit’. This very ‘pro-merit’ state is now not only promoting a policy of reservation for those who can pay, but is adamant that they hold the highest and most lucrative jobs and positions in society and professional institutions even if they do not qualify, and the rest may as well suffer for all this government cares.

All this is an indication not just of the rot that has set into the educational process with the privatisation of education and the withdrawal of the state from education, but also of state abetment to this rot. Posts are not getting filled in most institutions of higher learning, teachers are being intimidated into working more than reasonable hours, and para teaching has become the norm in most state universities. Institutions are also being pressurised into becoming self-financing, thus almost eliminating the accessibility of meaningful education to lower middle class and poorer sections of society. This is one continuing story of government policy on education.

TEMPLE ON CAMPUS

Another story reflective of this government’s attitude towards universities is the decision of the vice chancellor of the Gujarat University to generate and use its funds for running a temple on the campus. According to a news report in The Indian Express (October 27, 2003), it was in 1998 that the then vice chancellor, S B Vora, installed a Hanuman idol in an illegally constructed temple opposite the GU women’s hostel. Since then the Grade III and Grade IV employees of the university have been taking care of it. Unhappy with merely this, the GU has decided to set up a trust and to formally take over its management. An eight-member team comprising the deans from the arts, commerce, medicine and law faculties, and four executive council members has already been formed for this purpose. The funds generated from this temple will, according to the VC, A U Patel, be used “only for religious activities within the campus.” Needless to say, the Gujarat University Act contains no clause that could possibly support such a move.

VINDICTIVE ACTION

The third story in universities is one of intimidation and victimisation of the democratic and secular voices on the campuses. The details of the repression and victimisation of teachers, along with other government employees in Tamilnadu, after the militant struggle against the state government’s failure to implement the agreed upon demands is only too well known, and has been widely covered in the national media. The Tamilnadu government was bent on dismissing from service altogether those hundreds of teachers, and thousands of other employees, merely exercising their legitimate democratic rights. Now at Rohtak in the Maharishi Dayanand University, Himmat Singh Ratnoo, secretary of the Teachers’ Association and a member of the MDU executive council, has been suspended from service and moves are on to arbitrarily manage his dismissal. This has been done to ‘punish’ him, and intimidate others, for having dared to debate and argue over issues concerning teachers at an Academic Council meeting on October 17, despite the VC’s disapproval that they be raised. Himmat Singh is of course a very enlightened and committed teacher activist, a brilliant and popular teacher and also an intellectual of great integrity.  The vice chancellor of the university, on his part, is a retired police officer and has been treating the campus as a military barrack

Teachers have struggled for decades for increased representation to these bodies as part of democratisation of campuses, so the matter pushing through an anti-teacher and an anti- student agenda by browbeating elected teacher and student members is neither an incidental nor an isolated case. The message being consistently sent out by this government is that teachers better keep quiet and leave the legitimate statutory bodies of the universities to the authorities to use them to legitimise whatever they want implemented on the campuses and to ignore what they like. Student protests against fee hikes and transformation of educational institutions into self-financing business enterprises has been met with extreme brutality not merely in BJP ruled states, but more so in Congress ruled Kerala and NCP-Congress alliance government in Maharashtra.

Privatisation, reversal of the democratic gains made by teachers and students on campuses, high-jacking of funds meant for education to fulfill a communal political agenda, and an assault on the teachers’ and students’ movements are all of a piece, and not unrelated. Liberalisation, supported by all bourgeois political groupings, the devaluation and concern with changing the content of social science education, particularly the school textbooks and introduction of bogus courses like astrology and karmakand in universities, the increased role of computer and other technical education implemented in a way as to reinforce and perpetuate all the existing inequalities and oppressions, and duplicating the new business set up of the liberalisation era within the universities by replacing qualified and permanent teachers with contractual arrangements in schools and universities, and coming down heavily on students and teachers as they are doing on the workers today is part of a well thought out right wing political agenda .

Further, this push towards liberalisation and depolitisation of the campuses and all other educational institutions is quite in harmony with the drive towards depoliticisation and liberalisation in the society as a whole under the present political leadership. Ultimately threat to education is a threat to democracy, and must be seen as such. Bogus degrees from bogus self-financing institutions and university created funds for temples on campuses to look after ‘the religious needs’ of students and teachers reflect this threat to democracy.