People's Democracy

(Weekly Organ of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)

Vol. XXIX

No. 17

April 24, 2005

18th Congress Resolution On Education

 

The 18th congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) views with great concern the deplorable condition of education in the country, even after 57 years of independence. India, is today as one of the most educationally backward countries of the world. India, with 17 per cent of the global population, has 34 per cent of the illiterate adult population of the world. Out of the 11 crores of children who are illiterate in the age group of 6 to 10 years in the world, 4 crores are in India. According to the latest report of UNESCO, India stands at 127th position among the 177 countries in Educational Development Index. The enrolment figures in the relevant age group for secondary education are 64 per cent worldwide, but in India, it is only 49 per cent.

 

India has one of the poorest records for enrolment in institutes of higher education. The percentage of students in the age group of 17 to 23 years enrolling in higher education has remained stagnant at 6.4 per cent compared to the average in developing countries in Asia of 9.7 per cent and 52 per cent for countries such as South Korea. With increasing privatisation, less and less students in India will be able to study in colleges and universities, and the most affected will be the poor, women, dalits and tribals, and students from rural areas.

 

Education was placed in the concurrent list of the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution during the Emergency. However, the central government spends only 10 per cent of the total expenditure on education and the states account for the remaining 90 per cent. For the current financial year, only 3.57 per cent of the total budgetary provision of the union government has been earmarked for education. This may be compared to the average of 10.5 per cent of the central government allocation for education of all the countries of the world. In average, 6 per cent of gross domestic product is invested in education by all the countries of the world; in India, it is only 4.18 per cent. The assurance given in the National Common Minimum Programme of the UPA government to allocate 6 per cent of GDP for education in phases is yet to be implemented.

 

The percentage of total government expenditure of both central and states spent on education is 16 per cent in the world, 14 per cent in the developing countries and 12.7 per cent in India. The NDA government under the leadership of the BJP not only did not take any step towards expanding the scope of education, but in fact, it speeded up the process of the government abdicating its responsibility in providing education for all. In its Free and Compulsory Education For Children Act 2003, children below 6 years and above 14 years have been excluded from the definitions of a "child" and "school age." A child above14 years old but who has never been to a school, is now not entitled to education under the Act denying education to crores of children. The Act provides for two types of schools — formal and non-formal. Non-formal schools will function without any basic facilities, and with the service of an unqualified teacher, called a para-teacher. This will become a ploy to deny the poor education by herding them into non-formal schools and denying them minimum facilities.

 

Apart from this, the BJP led NDA government unleashed an attack on the democratic, secular, and scientific character of the education system in India. It communalised the entire educational scenario: history was distorted, curriculum, syllabus, textbooks were sought to be communalised. The Central Advisory Board of Education, which has been functioning since 1935 was suspended. All the national institutions such as NCERT, NIPEA, Indian Council of Historical Research, Indian Council of Social Science Research, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Indira Gandhi Institute of Culture, etc., were all placed in the hands of hard-core RSS ideologues. Astrology, Vastushastra and Pourahitya were declared sciences and sought to be introduced in colleges.

 

Along with saffronisation, another agenda pursued by the NDA government has been to completely commercialise and privatise education. In order to encourage private universities, the NDA government tried to enact the Model University Act, which sought to emphasise distance rather than classroom education, make universities financially "self-sufficient" by corporatising them and bar all political and trade union activity. In the last two years of the NDA regime, 170 private universities were set up through the backdoor by amending the UGC Act. The government support for higher education was reduced and universities asked to generate its own resources by raising fees. The effect of the consequent steep and continuing increase in fees saw the annual growth of students’ enrolment in higher education decline from 6.1 per cent in 1997-98 to 4.3 per cent in 2000-01.

 

India, in the General Agreement of Trade in Services (GATS), is offering higher education to be opened to global capital. This Congress demands that the government should provide public resources to expand higher education and notes that in today’s knowledge based world, development of scientific and technological capabilities is the basis of economic development. If higher education is commercialised, only those who have money can have access to higher education and the best minds of the country will be prevented from doing so.

 

The last decade has seen the mushrooming of private colleges, institutions and now, private universities. The private professional colleges (the so-called ‘self-financing’ institutions) must be brought under social control with regards to fee structure admissions and syllabus. The move to establish private universities must be opposed. Foreign universities may cooperate with existing Indian universities.

 

The UPA government has revived the Central Advisory Board of Education, withdrawn the Model University’s Act, took some initial steps towards detoxification of education, and has withdrawn some of the more communal textbooks. Much more remains to be done. The drive towards commercialisation of education still continues.

 

UPA government passed an Act for setting up of National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions. A review of this Act is necessary and necessary amendments may need to be incorporated for safeguarding the interests of the minority.

 

The 18th congress of the CPI(M) resolves to rally all Left, democratic, and secular forces to undo the damage done to the secular fabric of our educational system and stop the drive towards commercialisation and privatisation. This Congress, therefore, demands: