Entry of foreign universities will do more harm than good.
The Foreign University Bill was approved by the Union cabinet in March 2010 and waiting to be discussed in parliament. There has been hardly any discussion on such an important bill in public forums or the media. Even when debates have been held, only narrow and divisive factors like ideology, caste, right versus left politics, national versus anti-national have taken the centre stage.
If the bill is legislated without alterations, it will give rise to even more commercialisation of the education sector.
From kindergarten to schools to colleges and universities, commercialisation has taken root. When Jamsetji Tata started the Indian Institute of Science or Madan Mohan Malavia started the Benaras Hindu University there was no profit motive behind such initiatives.
Today perhaps a handful of philanthropists think of starting educational institutions with an altruistic motive. Even swamijis and matadhipathis, who are involved in starting such institutions, look for profit. If this is the environment in India, will foreign universities be any different?
In the US, reputed universities are mostly private and often supported by their alumni.
These are Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Northwestern, University of Chicago, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, etc. If they were to come to India to start universities, we should welcome them. Unfortunately most of them are not interested. They already have access to Indian talents in terms of graduate students and well qualified faculty from India. Some of their business colleges have shown interest to open centres or join hands to offer executive or degree programmes. This is only to earn additional revenue or learn about an emerging market.
On the other hand, less reputed foreign universities which are prepared to bend rules can see enormous profit opportunities. The proposed bill has clauses banning transfer of profits. But creative accounting can always overcome such problems. With the entry of these commercially oriented foreign universities India will reach another sophisticated level of commercialisation which we cannot even imagine today. It has been argued that some of them are already doing that in an informal way and the bill is supposed to stop such exploitation by framing rules. If the bill can effectively result in stopping such exploitation, then it is a welcome reform.
Some protagonists of the English language and western culture may claim that but for western education we would have remained a backward country under the burden of caste, sati, ban on widow marriage, untouchability, etc. But a study of Indian history does show that there were leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Bala Gangadhar Tilak, Vallabhbai Patel, Raj Gopalachary, K M Munshi and others who were deep-rooted in Indian philosophy. Do we want to a repeat of history even when we recall the dreadful education system introduced by Macaulay and the terrible harm it has done to our education system?
Competition
The argument to support the bill is that foreign universities offer competition in the education sector. Though competition is always good under a commercial environment, it is not the case for the education sector. Also, the competition by the third-tier foreign universities is likely to be based more on an irrational desire to have ‘foreign degrees’ and less on the quality of education. We have seen how even the best managed government schools are suffering from the competition by third-rate ‘convent’ schools offering English medium.
Another argument to support foreign investment is that only 12 per cent of our school leavers go to college and the government wants to increase it to 30 per cent by 2020. This is because a large majority is unable to complete high school education. For example, many engineering colleges are not able to fill their seats while science colleges do not get enough candidates seeking admission.
We need to ask the question whether we need foreign investment in education at all. Is it because we do not have enough capital? Or is it because we do not know how to impart world class education? The answers to these two questions are in the negative.
By changing priorities, the government can find enough budget. India already has world class educational institutions like IITs, IIMs, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, etc.
It is argued that once foreign universities start their campuses in India, Indian students will not go abroad resulting in the saving of foreign exchange. One can’t agree with this argument. For many it is a way to go abroad seeking higher paying jobs and to migrate.
The lure of a better standard of living abroad, especially in western countries, is still there despite India shining.
We should certainly keep our doors open for well planned interaction with the leading universities in the world as we are already doing. One of the reasons for the phenomenal success of the IITs and the IIMs was the assistance they got from reputed foreign universities. But we should not expect that by adopting the present bill we will solve the basic problem of declining quality of higher education.
It is highly unlikely that any revolution which is larger than the one in the telecom sector, as predicted by human resource development minister Kapil Sibal, will happen as a result of this bill. Should any revolution take place its impact is likely to be more harmful than beneficial.
