 In a new move, the government has granted full autonomy to 52 universities and 8 colleges. This has been widely opposed by a wide section of teachers and students. To discuss the issue and its implications, we are joined by Saikat Ghosh who is an academic council member of the Delhi University and is also one among the leading activists of the teachers movement in the country. Welcome to NewsClick Saikat. So let's start with this granting autonomy that the government has said. What does this mean, granting full autonomy to 52 universities and 8 colleges? Can it be seen as a part of growing attack on the entire education sector? Yes, but to begin with, it's not full autonomy. What the government has in its agenda right now is graded autonomy and it has basically followed a tired system of distinguishing between different institutions. So that tired system was determined on the basis of the results of the NAC assessment and the NIRF, the ranking, the national level ranking that was done by this government. And so the institutions after the ranking and the assessment, the ones that have gotten A grade, okay, now they are getting the maximum sort of autonomy and the first leg of announcements pertain to the A grade institutions. And this autonomy, I want to tell you of viewers, has nothing to do with the freedom of teaching, learning and ideas, okay. The government might claim otherwise, but really the autonomy pertains to giving managerial and financial autonomy to managing trusts of colleges, to university administrations and why? Because the government wants to very rapidly now withdraw from public funding of higher education. So the resources that need to be generated in order to run the system, those resources now have to be generated by the university administrations themselves, the managing trusts and the governing bodies of colleges. And therefore this autonomy the government feels is necessary to allow them to take decisions on their own, to mobilize funds like by hiking student fees at will, by making teachers do corporate consultancy, by signing MOUs with corporations, by tailor making their courses in a manner that there is a direct connection between the curriculum and the market. So through all these means the government expects, now whether it will happen or not is a different story. But the government expects that this is how it will facilitate these institutions to generate money on their own and run this education system. So let's also trace the history of this entire thing. Is it something new that the government has come up with right now or is there a history of it like we can also go to the WTO negotiations? Of course. You see the story actually begins in 2005 in the Doha round of the WTO, the then government committed higher education as a tradable service to GATs. You know GATs is the general agreement in trade and services. Now of course we have a completely, teachers have and many students have a completely contrarian view that education cannot be treated as a commercial service. It's a public good. It is meant at least in the context of our country. It remains one of the very few actually and critical means to progressive social transformation to addressing inequality in the long run. But the government did not think so under the dictates of the WTO and the World Bank. It decided to pawn away higher education. Then there were movements, several sporadic movements against this. We tried to create some sort of an environment in which the government would be forced to rethink its position before the 2017 Nairobi round of the WTO. And we wanted the government to really pull back, withdraw its commitment to WTO on higher education. But it did not happen that way. We learned that in the Nairobi round the government ended up reiterating that commitment. And you see the principle clause of GATS says that there has to be a level playing field which means right now we have a public sector higher education system, public funded universities and colleges and a private sector higher education system. Now according to the GATS there cannot be any difference between the two. So there won't be any public sector. There won't be any government subsidy or public money subsidy on the system. That subsidy will be withdrawn and everything will be thrown into the open market and the competition of the open market. So I guess even the government has said that these universities and colleges can open new courses, offer new programs, open skill centers till the time they don't ask for funds from the government and the UDC. So what impact is it going to have on this entire, on these universities and on the students because I guess it will all go into the self-financing mode? See the main policy recommendations that the government is now following and creating a roadmap on the basis of is the Niti Aayog Action Agenda. Okay, the Niti Aayog as everybody knows is headed by Arvind Pangaria and they brought out a document outlining what are the desirable changes according to the government that are necessary in various fields, including higher education. So they said that, well, one is that government has to now withdraw funding and it has to also create a situation in which universities and colleges are forced to reorient their curriculum in a manner that there is a direct pathway from the classroom into the corporate sector. So only those courses are going to survive that have a direct market value. Okay, now everybody knows that a proper comprehensive education needs to cater to humanities, social sciences, philosophy, languages, the basic sciences and which don't have a direct sort of value in the market. Students end up getting very good jobs, even students who graduate from these disciplines, but there is no direct correlation. These disciplines actually create citizenry, the citizenry that is considered ideal for a democratic nation. So in a way, these disciplines are critical disciplines in the making of the democratic nation. And we have seen in nation after nation in recent times, how democracy can be very easily undermined. Okay, when there is a deficit in the number of educated citizens. Okay, so the government has taken a very narrow view, I would say the Niti Aayog has taken a very narrow view of this. And they have created this situation wherein self-financed courses, because who will sort of enroll themselves in these self-financed courses which are going to cost, I mean, the student fees is going to be exorbitant. So unless the student is assured of a job, and most likely you see, apart from the wealthy classes in India, the middle classes and the students coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds will be compelled to take loans. So it is also a way of enabling the expansion of the financial sector into higher education. But the repayment of the loans will be predicated on the kind of courses that the institutions will be able to offer, whether that those courses are going to help the students get jobs and quickly repay their loans or not. So this is the main agenda. But self-financing also means that teachers are going to be employed on contract. We already see that there is a huge crisis in Delhi University and many other universities, public funded universities, on permanent appointments. Most of our faculty are now working on guest and ad hoc basis. And they are brilliant students with very high qualifications and research degrees. But they are not getting any increments. They have no retirement benefits, no health benefits. They have no maternity leave. You know, if somebody can't even plan a family while working in the education sector, because of these kind of contractual jobs, which can be ended in a day. So now contractualization is going to become a norm with this government, because in self-financed courses, the government is not going to sanction posts. When it is not going to fund these courses, it means that it is not going to sanction posts. So it is going to institutionalize contractualization in a big way. Teachers are not going to get appointed. Teachers are already not getting pensions. And therefore, the teaching profession is going to become very unattractive. Teachers are going to go for those university jobs where the salaries are exponentially high. Or they are going to try and seek jobs abroad. And if jobs are not in the offing, then they will have to seek other professions. But that goes for the academic community. Students are, you know, a large number of students from the marginalized sections of society are going to be excluded from the ambit of higher education altogether. So these are the main implications of this kind of thing. Apart from the fact that it is going to become very difficult for traditional disciplines in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences to survive. So also, I mean, when they're talking about these things, research centers, incubation centers, university society linkages, they're also saying that you should either do it either in the self-financing mode or do a public-private partnership. So it's actually a move towards privatization if I'm not wrong. And we are also seeing, like, a lot of universities in the country coming up with this model. One example is Ambedkar University, where the free structures, even for basic humanity, courses are quite high. So I mean, what does it imply? Well, as I told you, it implies that large sections of the Indian populace is going to be disenfranchised in terms of their right to an access to a quality education that's going to be cut off completely. And this entire fund of affirmative action when it comes to the marginalized section, it goes in the backbench, right? It goes in the backbench. There is no clarity on reservation policy in these kind of autonomous organizations. We already know that there is no reservation that exists in the private sector. Now the government, in giving autonomy to even public run institutions, is not compelling them to follow any regulations. I mean, autonomy basically here means autonomy from public accountability. There are no input insistences. So the government is not interested in finding out whether you have adequate classrooms, labs, whether your library is well-equipped or not. There are certain concrete outcomes. For instance, your institution will be seen in terms of the kind of placement profile it has, what kind of companies are recruiting your students. That is one basic direct thing. But what we were looking at last year when this entire we got wind that the government is going to do this because last year we had an office memorandum delivered to all the central universities that the government is now it came from the Department of Expenditure Finance Ministry that the government is willing to fund only 70% of the revised estimates as per the Seventh Way Commission. And a couple of months later the government tried to tamper with the workload of the teachers in order to ensure that a large number of the working teachers at that point of time would lose their jobs. So we were out on the streets during the hot months of May and June last year. And we finally managed to save that workload for teachers and save jobs. But we realized that this government basically wants to completely dismantle the education system as it has existed and allow the private sector to run it in their own way and generate profits in their own way. So none of the established principles, the founding principles of our education system, equity, access and quality, none of these principles are being insisted upon. All of them are being thrown out of the window. So is it something to do only with this government or the Congress regime was no different? Because if I remember the first movement, the massive movement that DU had seen was again semistralization, and then FYUP. So what was Congress's position on this entire issue? Congress's position was pretty much the same. I told you about 2005 Doha around that time. Congress was in power. The UPA was in power rather. And the BJP has, while in terms of its rhetoric, its peaks of a Congress, Mukth Bharat or whatever, and it has tried to project itself as a party that is different from the Congress, but in terms of policies, not only in the field of higher education, but in other critical fields like health, for instance. I mean, all fields that pertain to the collective interests of the masses, it has continued to implement Congress policies. And of course, with a greater degree of aggression and a greater degree of they are more anxious to sort of complete particular sort of target of reforms in a shorter span of time, I feel. But it's the same. And this is the neoliberal model. And it's not just confined to India. If you see university unrest, student strikes, teachers going on strike, this is happening all over the world. If you follow the Guardian in the last week, in the United Kingdom, students are on strike. Teachers are on strike for the fourth week, fifth week now. It's happening in America. Adjunct faculty there are having to their compel to work in strip clubs at night in order to actually make their two ends meet. They're academicians who are working in strip clubs. I mean, the dignity of labor, the dignity of intellectual labor, that myth of dignity has been completely demolished. So there's also this clause which talks about the foreign students in this entire autonomy granted to the institutions. Can you throw some light on it also? Because when we talk about infrastructure as you raised that point, if we see, for example, Delhi University, 27% reservation for OBCs, but still there was no preparation for it that went into it for providing infrastructure and basic necessities which should be there in academic institutions. So I mean, what this entire foreign student thing is about? So well, I mean, you see, Indian government has also been insisting on the heavy use, intensive use of digital information technology. And through massive online courses, you can actually virtually increase the enrollment of students without having to augment physical infrastructure. Now, the whole question of foreign students, actually, it's a very interesting backstory. In the United States, in developed countries, the cost of education has been rising. Now, mainly the education sector is funded and run by the private sector. And students over there were being forced to take humongous loans to fund their education. And the 2008 crisis, which was actually the culmination of a debt crisis, the dominant component of that debt crisis was student loans. Students were unable to pay back the loans that they had taken. Now, a large number of students are now wary of taking loans. So in the advanced countries, also you have this problem of their own populations not being able to access quality education. The NRI communities also there, they are putting pressure on the government through the WTO and the GATS that some way of accommodating them, because Indian education still continues to be cheap compared to the cost of education in these advanced countries. So some way of accommodating this section of the people who are not getting access to higher education over there. So the government is saying that these A-grade universities, autonomous universities and colleges will have the freedom to appoint up to 20% foreign faculty on a variable pay scale. But they will have to generate the money on their own. The government is not going to give them a single NIA paisa. They can incentivize and whatever, but all the fund has to be generated on their own. And up to 20% of the seats for students has to be reserved. Now we are looking at a scenario where there has been a massive seat cut in terms of research seats primarily. Our nation's critical research and development infrastructure is also getting dismantled and destroyed by this government. They have drastically reduced research seats in universities. We see that in places like JNU, which used to attract the best research talent, now in many disciplines they are not having admission interviews, because they say that we already have enough people and we are not going to admit any more people in this next academic session. So at this point of time for the government to insist upon institutions being forced to take in 20% foreign students is, I think, clearly against the interests of the nation. And that is what your viewers must realize, that this government will keep on harping on its own nationalist credentials precisely because its policy thrust is anti-national. Anti-national in the sense that it goes against the interests of the larger collective of the national population. So that is why rhetorically and in terms of their hyper-propaganda, they will continue harping on nationalism because they're doing exactly the opposite. So Sikath, this would be my last question. The DUTA has been leading various struggles since last few years. And recently also there was a five day program. How does DUTA and other such organizations, even at the local level and at national level, plan to resist it? Well, we've had a very long history of resisting this. When Vajpayee was the prime minister, in the previous NDA government they tried to bring in a similar kind of a change through the Birla Ambani Model Act. And we successfully fought it off because the governments at that time were not as insulated from democratic pressure as they seem to be today. So the changing political scenario makes our task even more difficult. But we must also understand that the teachers are, of course, an important stakeholder in the system but not the only stakeholder. A much larger stakeholder in the system are the students themselves. Their parents, the people who are paying the money to get an education, they are the bigger stakeholders. So we need a movement where teachers and students come together, where parents come, where there is a greater public awareness. Now, the challenge is that in India there is the consciousness about the quality and the right to education is not very high, precisely because traditionally the largest sections of the masses have been cut off from access to education. But now that the access had started increasing in recent decades, that access and the aspiration is there now in a big way. People from poorer families, rural families and urban poor, want to send their kids to colleges and universities because they have sort of instinctively realized the value of education now, much more than before. But still they don't understand the quality of education, how the system is running, what are the stakes and that they need to be made aware. That is why the duta is spreading out into the public. We are going for a full-fledged public campaign. But the teachers' activists are few in numbers, so we need the help of our students. We need the help of parents. They have to become activists. They have to join the movement. And it is only through democratic pressure. We've seen this in the past also, that when elections come and parties have to actually turn their faces towards the public because they now have to seek votes. So for the first time, they start registering public concerns. That is when the public has to put pressure on the government. I think that message needs to go out from the public in a loud and clear manner. And for that, we need all the stakeholders of the system to come together and build up a unified movement. So that's a very powerful note to end on that, if you don't mend your ways, you'll not be required. That's all the time we have for today's cycle, and as these things proceed, we'll be coming back to you again on such issues. Thanks a lot. So the teaching community and the students have given a warning that the government should immediately roll back these steps, otherwise there will be a massive resistance that they'll have to face. Thank you for watching NewsClick.