The massive reforms in the Education sector are awaiting for further action by governments, in states and at the centre. Starting from the fundamental Right to Education, moving towards consolidating the secondary education and towards creating more quality professional and research institutions is the top priority in education sector of the government. The debate about the actual target hovers around achieving 15 % enrolment in 12th plan and 20% enrolment up to 2020. Some experts in Planning Commission argue that focus should be on the absolute number of people to be brought in the education net rather than concentrating on the percentage of enrolment to be achieved. Real challenges ahead of Planning Commission are manifold when reforms in Education sector are discussed. Those are lack of inspirational incentive for the teacher training at primary and secondary education level. Huge paucity of infrastructure leading towards languishing of the funds and vice versa, great degree of vacuum in the monitoring of the quality and excellence, too many regulatory institutions making it impossible for smooth functioning of the institutions regulating and those of being regulated.
The reforms in the education sector are subjected to huge investment increase made by Planning Commission from 10th to 11th Plan. New Central Universities, Innovation Universities, Centers of Excellence, National Institutes of Technologies, IIITs, IITs, IISERs and many other premier higher education institutions are being proposed and being established. What is the matter of worry is speed with which these institutions are being established. Another important aspect of worry is the stagnated number of new institutions being proposed and limited intake capacity with limited disciplines having less scope for interdisciplinary professional courses and creating ambience to nurture interdisciplinary research fields.
The reforms in higher education will only succeed once we create the anticipatory mechanisms which will tap, trace and respond to the growing challenges of the economic growth and sustainable development. The needs of these two factors should drive the classification of the categories which will dominate the creation of quality benchmarks for excellence in human resource development policy aims at. The complacency on the front of human resource development will greatly cripple the India`s growth aspirations which ultimately are aimed at fulfilling the basic needs of the huge population of this country. Development of soft skills and technical skills which will help in strengthening the employability are surely the principal means to provide the equal opportunity to the oppressed classes in competitive environment of job market and also in the attainment of life having meaningful resources to live and nourishing the capability and culture to share, collaborate and plan for synergetic projects of entrepreneurship in any walks of life.
One of the great lacunas of planning in Higher Education sector is lack of imagination where this entire workforce will lead us to. The active collaboration with the industries so as to have meaningful utilization of those people coming out of the different institutions is very crucial. The huge untrained human resources can be big disaster when it comes to providing them efficient services. These human resources must be trained to promote self employment, to ignite the industrial ambitions and to nurture the culture of quality and excellence so as to respect the professional values. These professional ethics exposure are absent from training of today`s higher education system. When Planning Commission consistently talks about Inclusive Growth, it remains to be seen whether the process of inclusion will be cherished by government alone. Every member of civil society and in this narrow respect, higher education sector is equally responsible for creating the value chain which will respond positively to enhance the capacity of supply side and also build the capabilities of demand side in education so as to create equitable access with logical expansion without compromising quality and excellence.
Considering the huge sector of education, different bodies working on the problems of education and conducting research on education is deeply desirable and sought after aspiration. Opportune time has arrived when Planning Commission should push for creating more and more region specific and sector specific research institutes and developing the capabilities of the people already working in this area. Unless and until we have more mature understanding about the kind of agricultural/industrial/information society we need to have in our future we will not be able to justify the mere creation of massive number of huge knowledge institutions whose sole agenda would be to manufacture the professionals rather than cultivating the leaders in every walk of life who can solve the emerging, incidental problems at hand by complementing that knowledge by adding knowledge to understand the emerging scenarios in better ways.
India is the country which simultaneously lives from 17th to 21st century. The equal and opposite argument about India`s strength and weakness is equally true. The massive contradictions and subtle similarities of habits make it unique destination to preserve the unique heritage we have in terms of human resources. Creating modern educational infrastructure will greatly diminish the potential of this diversity India has by creating more homogeneous workforce by killing the diversity of thought present in different demographic groups in India. Notwithstanding the equality of opportunity inherent in the constitution, any policy aimed at creating more opportunities in primary, secondary and higher education also leaves huge space where exploitation of the people needing education happens all along. S
Sometimes, this exploitation happens through expensive cost of the education, sometimes through lack of information technology, sometimes due to lack of sufficient access to information resources which can transform the way we learn and sometimes the lack of access to quality resource persons which makes huge difference in terms of inspiration and standards. Still, people in India have tried hard, thrived in difficult circumstances and embarked on uphill tasks of creating and sustaining institutions and also in knowledge delivery practices. These people and institutions need to share their experiences in systematic manner so as to help Planning Commission to have better sense of dynamics of the economics of education and trends in quality delivery of education all over the world.
The role of leaders in the development of higher education cannot be underestimated. While the notion that only administrative leaders are responsible and capable of sustaining and innovating the progress in primary, secondary and higher education. We need to promote the leadership qualities at every level of the education; in teaching, research, administration, training, project development, collaboration, revenue generation, inclusive policies. Creating more and more leaders to ensure the huge demand to be met with quality and quantity will definitely compliment to the nation`s effort in the other sectors of development and economic progress.
The higher education and any education sector is increasingly being subjected to privatization and in recent days to Public Private Partnership initiatives. The strong opinion of many stalwarts in public policy hold the view that state should not abdicate the responsibility in all education areas. But looking at the challenges about access and maintenance of the quality, entry of the private institutions were inevitable. Planning commission is envisaging different experiment where PPP will be used to strengthen educational infrastructure. Apart from this proposed entry of foreign universities also tries to give this promise of quality and excellence.
While some of the qualitative aspects of the promises given about the entry of foreign educational institutions can be debated, the basic issue of state of the art and centers of excellence in our research institutions and universities cannot be wished away relying on or importing the readymade solution. We need to strive perseveringly for the establishment of the new institutions by rewarding all the people contributing to that process. Also, the gross ignorance about the incentives to the students at any level of education cannot be compromised. This is one area which greatly needs massive reforms. The prospects of quality research and development in public funded, autonomous and private research institutes greatly depend upon the kind of reward or incentives provided to the students irrespective of their economic, social status.
Bottom-line of education reforms in India lies in the fact that little negligence at this stage of history can ruin the prospects of returning to the normal development pace with average human development indicators. Cautious and attentive planning will certainly help to remove the stagnation and arrest the decline of employment unfriendly academic institutions, defeat the largely anti-research environment in Indian universities, demystifying massive confusion about what it means by ‘world class quality’ and off course to eradicate the pervert politics in education replacing it with potential policies in education so as to empower the masses with knowledge, professionalism and a purpose to utilize that knowledge for solving the problems of our daily lives.
The institutions like Planning Commission have always emerged to the scene. Regarding education, real changes started happening since completion of the 10th Plan. Whether the changes are driven by new terms being coined in terms of BRICS or ideas of knowledge superpower being tossed from here and there; the potential of education is one of the very few instruments which will make the Idea of sustainably developed India true in every sense. In stimulation and response there lies the choice. It was thought that after liberalization India chose to respond. Some people thought it in terms of outsourcing, demographic dividend and knowledge driven sustainable economic growth. Real stimulation lies not in the terms being appropriated from outside but it lies in deep felt agony of the daily problems faced by millions of Indian citizens across the length and breadth of the country. And the space created by this agony and pain is pushing Indian policymakers towards reforms in Indian education system. Within this pain and these upcoming policies, lie our ability to make choices. Choices for better life, choices for better tomorrow!
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