INDIA: Gov’t Backs Business Schools More than Primary Education

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Feb 25 2004 (IPS) - India’s lopsided policy of supporting higher education with public money while grossly neglecting primary schools is now being reinforced by recent moves by the central government, led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Students entering the autonomously-run Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) this year will pay 80 percent less fees than the outgoing batch, thanks to an order issued on Feb. 5 by the Union Minister for Human Resources Development Murli Manohar Joshi, ostensibly to help poorer students.

”Talent is not the monopoly of a small section of society and we feel that talent from deprived sections must also get an opportunity to study in these institutions which were created and funded by the government,” said Joshi.

But the move has brought on criticism from captains of industry, IIM faculty, opposition politicians and the students as an attempt to interfere in the autonomous functioning of the globally known institutions by first starving them of funds.

Other critics view this from a wider picture, saying the hefty cost of such education that the government takes on reflects lopsided priorities that put more importance on business schools rather than the basic need of primary education.

The government picks up 50 percent of the 10,000 U.S. dollars it costs annually to support an IIM student. While each of the 1,000-odd students in the Masters in Business Administration (MBA) programme pays 3,750 dollars in fees annually, students in the next batch starting August will pay just 750 dollars.

The famed Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) charge even less as annual fees at 700 dollars per annum. This has long been criticised as working out as a huge subsidy for industry in the United States and in the developed countries, which quickly snap up 75 percent of graduates.

Along with the six IITs, the IIMs are prime talent-hunting grounds for business names like Goldman Sachs, KPMG, Morgan Stanley and Merill Lynch and hold their own against privately-run business schools that charge 35,000 dollars or more as annual fees.

According to a survey carried out by the’Outlook’ weekly magazine six months ago, an IIM graduate can expect to earn, on average, a salary of 40,000 dollars per year if working in India – or 100,000 dollars if working in a western country. This means the students are in no great need of subsidies.

The worst criticism Joshi, a former professor of physics, now faces is the suggestion that if the government had the funds to subsidise IIMs, then it had better make them available to the grossly neglected area of primary education.

”To cut fees drastically against the backdrop of the huge subsidy that higher education already enjoys at the expense of primary education in this country is wrong,” said Jairam Ramesh, an economic analyst and member of the economic cell of the opposition Congress party.

Ramesh said while he agreed with Joshi that institutions of excellence nurtured by the government must accept social obligations, the answer did not lie in drastically cutting fees. ”The answer really lies in upgrading the quality of primary and secondary education.”

According to statistics by the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) based on 2000-2001, only half of the children who enter primary school in India reach class five mainly because of inadequate public funding. The dropout rate is 53 percent, the poorest in South and East Asia.

Primary school education is also beset with unabashedly elitist attitudes that allow a fine quality education in the so-called public schools (privately run) for the children of the well-to-do – which boast of air-conditioned classrooms and riding lessons – to exist side-by-side with government schools that so lack infrastructure that many function out of canvas tents.

Conscientious objectors to the unequal system include Azim Premji, chairman of the information technology major Wipro Ltd who believes that quality primary education must be get better priority on the national agenda and is too important to be left to private enterprise.

”Given the deep social impact of primary education and its long-term returns, a completely free market environment is neither desirable nor practical,” said Premji, now reckoned as the world’s third richest man and a major employer of IIM and IIT graduates.

Right now, privately-run school managements are busy finding ways to evade or mitigate a Jan. 20 order by the Delhi High Court requiring them to ”provide admission to students belonging to the weaker sections to the extent of 25 percent and grant free-ships to them”.

The school managements hope to pare down the prescribed quota to around 10 percent. ”Discussions are on with the school managements and the percentage will be fixed ….of course with the approval of the court,” Arvinder Singh Lovely, Delhi state’s minister for education, said last week.

”While the schools will waive fees for students entering under the quota, the government will consider funds for books and uniforms,” the minister added. The programme will involve 250 public schools grouped under the banner of the Unaided Schools Action Committee.

Arguments loudly aired by the principals of the public schools ranged from the possible trauma ‘normal’ paying students would have at the sight of underprivileged students within school premises, to a possible ”sense of alienation” that poor students might suffer in a public school.

According to Anil Sadgopal, professor of education at the University of Delhi, such arguments only betrayed the fact that private schools do not promote values of equality, social justice and human dignity. ”If inculcation of such values is not the goal of these schools, one wonders whether they are imparting education at all.”

What may compel the public schools to heed the High Court order is the fact that they are exempt from paying income tax while charging high fees from students, cornering subsidised training for their teachers and holding on to prime real estate allotted at concessional rates.

”These schools should return the land allotted to them with interest for breach of conditions and penalty for misuse of public property – surely this is in keeping with the ethics of the free market,” Sadgopal said.