Starving for values

UGC’s Mulya Pravah for HEIs is at best a thoughtless attempt at virtue signalling.

India, the land of the Gita, Shanti Parva, Chanakya, Manu Smriti, and Kamasutra, is considered the cradle of all the values in the world and has seemingly preserved the ancient Indian ethos and values. However, the UGC begs to differ, believing that values and ethics are like camphor; they evaporate if not carefully preserved. It also holds that the invasions by the ‘barbaric’ Muslims and colonising Christians have left India’s moral fabric in tatters, which needs to be restored. The UGC recently released a policy document, Mulya Pravah 2.0: Inculcation of Human Values and Professional Ethics in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).

The document acknowledges that knowledge is power but implies that HEIs lack action-oriented implementation of human values and ethics due to their genesis in Macaulay-bred education policies. The document emphasises the need for thorough ‘Gurukulization’ of HEIs. It argues that values and ethics define a person, organisation, or society in a ‘civilised’ and ‘dignified’ manner, leaving the interpretations of these qualities open-ended.

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While the NEP 2020 selectively addresses certain values, it expresses disdain, albeit hidden, for the values of justice, equality, liberty, fraternity, and secularism by avoiding their mention in the document despite their significance in the preamble of the Indian Constitution. The document calls for fostering human values and professional ethics in HEIs with the aim of re-instating India’s rich cultural legacy and human values, of which ‘we’ are the custodians. Invoking Upnishadic knowledge of tena tyakten bhunjeetha of renunciation and detachment, the document wishes to instill in students the values of tyaga (renunciation), seva (service), satya (truth), prem (love), karuna (compassion), dharma (righteousness), tapas (austerity), damage (restrain), daya (mercy), dana (charity), and kshama (forgiveness). All these values are to be developed in ‘denizens’ of the 21st century who earn less than $6 a day, amidst growing economic disparities where the top 1% of the population holds 40% of India’s wealth and the bottom 50% holds only 3% of the wealth. The values of tyaga, tapa, dana, daya, kshama, and dharma are to be evolved in a country that is ranked 107 on the Global Hunger Index with the highest child-wasting rate and has one-third of the world’s undernourished population. With the alarming ‘serious’ levels of hunger, what we lack most are ‘values’ and ‘professional ethics’ amongst the 23% of the youth population that is unemployed.

The document relies on a ‘survey’ of HR managers to highlight unethical practices in Indian organisations and finds favouritism, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, a lack of confidentiality, and a lack of transparency in one go. It passingly mentions selective constitutional values, fundamental duties, and fundamental rights and stresses that their ‘misuse’ must be checked. The document differentiates the roles of the academic administration, governing body, support staff, staff union, teachers, external experts, students, and their union. While the staff and student unions find mention, the teacher’s union is conspicuously absent, probably an assertion that there are not to be any teacher’s unions. The ‘unions’ are expected to raise ‘legitimate’ issues in a ‘dignified’ manner. The document places emphasis on training teachers, students, and staff with a reward and reprimand mechanism. However, it conspicuously omits mentioning the training of academic administration.

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Mulya Pravah suggests an ‘indicative’ curriculum, focusing on the Indian ethos and laws of Karma and Nishkam Karma. It adds values, values, and more values with every unit, and to learn it, it heavily relies on yoga, recommending five hours of practice per week.

With a profound disdain for theoretical frameworks evolved over the centuries, both Indian and Western, the curriculum gives prominence to a little-known homegrown ‘Conscious Full Spectrum Response Model,’ which is yet to face rigorous peer review by already-known theorists. This document further establishes a stereotypical correlation between concentration and math or music, with no reference to or theories suggesting such a correlation.

The proposed curriculum, which begins with believing in nonexclusionary individual and universal values, ends talking about three gunas (sattva-rajas-tamas), undoubtedly to eulogise sattva and to denigrate tamas (avoiding non-vegetarian food), four antah karan, and five koshas, again only to boisterously beat about the majoritarian Hindu ethical way of living. It is not only an ideological apparatus but is so exclusionary that it wants everyone to learn about the Ayurvedic concept of well-being without even acknowledging Allopathic, Unani, Siddha, Homoeopathy, or any other system.

This Mulya Pravah curriculum and the document are both another feather in the list of thoughtless, un-analytical, and stereotypical guidelines to be implemented hysterically across the nation so that we all must evolve so that we may be criminals but not sinners.

(The writer teaches in the Dept. of Education, Central University of Himachal Pradesh, Dharamsala)