 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Sanjay Bohedar, who is the former member of Academy Council and is currently teaching in Sriram College of Commerce. And we are going to be discussing about the current higher education system in India. So, to begin with, what are the changes that we have been witnessing in the higher education structure-wise? You see, what we have already seen is that since the 90s, higher education has become more and more private and marketized. And that is the case with most of the new institutions that came up. They came up in the private sector. And even in the government funded institutions, you have increasingly more students being admitted to what I call self-finance courses, which are in that sense marketization of education. So, more than 60% of students enrolled are at least in those kinds of education. And if you look at the present policy changes that are being sought to be introduced, various documents that you come across sketchily, and some things which look like to be completely unrelated, different steps that the government has been taking, institutions it has been creating, or rules it has been bringing about introducing into higher education. They seem to basically take that step of what has already happened forward and make education- and here not only higher education, mind you- school education too, completely market-based means access to education, content of education to be determined entirely by the market. That would affect, of course, how the governance of the institution is also managed because marketization would require a very different kind of governance structure than what we learnt through the 70s and 80s. And much of it, as I said, already happened. But right now, there is a concerted move to do it very fast, very quickly. Three things that I will just draw your attention to. Recently, in April this year, 2017, the NITI Iowa brought about a three-year draft action agenda for all sectors of the economy, including education. And it basically says school and higher education faces similar problem. And for the problem, according to it, is not that there is not enough input, in a sense number of teachers, infrastructure, playground, libraries, labs and so on and so forth. It does not even detail them. It simply claims that those are irrelevant. And argues for removing all norms about inputs. They are saying all these regulations should go. They should be diluted or removed. And instead, what you do is, you only major outcome, some way, how the student is performing. And introduce outcome-based penalty and rewards. Outcome-based rewards that they have suggested in one of the schemes that the NITI argues and the UGC has already started acting on it. They brought out a draft, which is called graded autonomy of universities. Depending on the ranking of the universities by the NAC, the Accreditation Council and by the MHRD through some NIRF, another framework, ranking framework. They are saying, well, they will get different amount of autonomy. And here, autonomy is not about academic autonomy. Autonomy is essentially financial autonomy. And what does the autonomy consist of? The best-ranked, the top-tier would get full freedom to engage in self-financed academic teaching and self-financed research. The middle one would be doing self-financed employment-oriented courses and their performance outcome would be measured continuously by their success on placement. If they don't perform, they will go down to the bottom. The bottom one describes as those who are academically poor, no research potential and not even the potential to teach employment-based courses or skill courses. They will teach whosoever wants education, which basically means you can go to dogs. But then, even that is not guaranteed. They said, unless they also maintain some standard, they face closure. So, essentially it's a model that is pushing completely towards the market. It's to the entire carrying out of what is taught, what kind of courses remain, what kinds of courses get closed down, which remains to be determined entirely based on market transaction. There have been some universities which have now turned into financially autonomous colleges' universities. So, what do we see from that? What is happening? First, they propose what they call autonomous colleges. The better of colleges become being autonomous. And by autonomous colleges, they basically meant that the management of the college would be given to freedom at least. The freedom to start new courses and the freedom to determine fees. The other part of self-financing is also reduced cost. So, if you see many of the autonomous institutions, one of the first states that went for is Tamil Nadu, and these are the major ones. Tamil Nadu even teachers pay have not gone up in tandem with the UCC pay scales in many of the institutions. They have two kinds of teachers. Teachers on the base of government aid are at fund, which are about half of them. And half the teachers are what called the management teachers, apart from having large number of teachers who have paid patents, something ranging from 8000 rupees to about 25000 to 302000 rupees, where teachers are teaching full time with those kinds of money. So, there are obviously two tremendous decline in quality of education. That is the experience that was recently reflected in a meeting that the UGC called in the scope building in Delhi to tell them what is good about the autonomous institution. The principals who came from the autonomous institutions basically said that their experience has been particularly negative. Now that the BJP is in power, has these kinds of attacks been taking place before such extensive attempt to privatize? Let us look at the last time the National Policy of Education from 1982. That was the time where liberalization was just about happening. WTO had also concluded a certain round of agreement. You were taken loan from the IMF. There was pressure to cut subsidy on higher education. And you saw similar thing. And similar idea, the autonomous college idea at that time was to move towards complete self-reliance, financial self-reliance argument. But they withdrew partly. They did not push it whole hog. And you see this happening again and again. That the Congress government often, and these government from one funding way or looking at the view to the market is not different. But the Congress government often did make, at least in the name of populism, something that did not destroy education completely. At least the core of public universities still remain. Public character of the university, both funding and the character, not private or marketized. Okay, we are not completely still destroyed. We still have that. It is still a proof that we have that. It is not gone. What is happening right now over the last two, three years, and we will talk about Nithya Ayur thing. It is given a framework for three years by 2019, starting this December. Whole lot of legislation are going to come one after the other, which are supposed to change the character of education to a completely market determined one. Okay, school of course they have to negotiate with states too. Okay, in a very quick time. So, and the arguments are completely argument which believes that education is a marketable service and would be most efficiently delivered if it is left more or less entirely to the market. This is a formulation that we still had not seen earlier. So, this is the strongest attack we are seeing on this aspect. The second aspect of, of course, under this government, there are sometimes contradictions with the particular commercialization aspect, but not always. It is something else, which is some other aspect we have not talked about. You know, after independent India with the Nehruvian planning, we had a secular education system that promoted scientific temper. That has been under attack. That has been under attack at three levels, on terms of what is taught. You have heard about various school thing, and it has also happened in the university. It has also happened last time BJP was in power when Murli Monodiosi was the minister. The UGC forced introduction and encouraged introduction of Vedic astrology of Karamkhand and numerology and similar courses in higher education. In school education, of course, tempering with history and other things has been on again and again. In the university now, they have also attacked the entire structure of governance. We never had vice-chancellors completely subservient to, almost become lackeys of the MHRD. That kind of control did not exist. I mean, maybe to an extent, towards the end of the last UPA regime, not of the kind that is there today. No VC today of any central university can standard to the government in terms of what they are doing to their academics, what they are doing to their appointments. There is a complete rigging of the entire apartment process to get in more and more people of particular kind of view and persuasion, closer to the sun. And we are seeing that even in terms of our own course framing, now the UGC has started framing syllabi for undergraduate courses. We are following the UGC syllabi. UGC does not have professors, teachers who have any expertise in this matter. So, they do it through select individuals, individuals that nominate. They are known by what kind of persuasion, their ideological, political persuasion. And these are not scrutinized by any larger body of academics. So, both in terms of quality and this land, we are facing a very different kind of attack on content, personal, what kind of personal man education and values that we espouse, which is imbued with extremely communal obscurantist and very narrowly and aggressively nationalistic views that will surely destroy higher education. Thank you for talking to us. As these things keep progressing, we will be coming back to you. Thank you. This is all the time we have for the news clip. Keep watching news clip.