The crisis of governance has been one of the abiding features of Indian higher education for decades. Alas, in the last ten years, this crisis has become steadily worse despite the proclamations of the New Education Policy, 2020 to the contrary.
This crisis has a simple feature: a tendency to ignore or deny the root causes of a problem and take arbitrary policy decisions, affecting lakhs of students, without talking into account our resources, abilities and competence. The obsession with centralised admission to any institution of higher education in the country on the basis of marks in a single test in a multiple-choice question format is the most serious and the most visible reflection of this crisis. As of now, these tests are NEET-UG for undergraduate medical admission, NEET-PG, for post graduate medical admission, NET- UGC for PhD, for eligibility for a teaching job in a college and research fellowship, CSIR-UGC for admission to PhD in science subjects and CUET for admission to undergraduate courses in all central universities.
As I write this, NEET-UG, 2024 is under investigation for paper leak, the functioning of the NTA is being investigated by the CBI and the Supreme Court is busy hearing many petitions on the issue. The NEET-PG and CSIR-UGC tests were first postponed and have been now rescheduled, NET-UGC test was held and later cancelled on account of paper leak and CUET results have been delayed. In other words, all examinations for admission into non-engineering courses across the country have been disrupted, affecting more than 50 lakh students.
At the centre of these centralised admission and qualifying tests is the National Testing Agency (NTA). This agency is responsible for about 25 national level tests during the year. It is an autonomous agency registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 affiliated with the Ministry of Education. Surprisingly, it has only about 25 permanent employees. Clearly, the NTA — not quite a government body nor an academic body — does not have either the technical or academic staff or the sheer logistic competence on its own, required for conducting such examinations at the national level, given the size of the country, its diversity, the gross imbalance of resources available in different states of the country and, indeed, in different centres within the same state.
There are many aspects of this crisis. First, while one single, national level test for admission may theoretically be desirable to get away from the multiplicity of state level and central level tests over time and thus to reduce stress on students, an obsession with such centralised and uniform tests strikingly and deliberately ignores the immense diversity and differentiation of standards and boards of education in the country. Further, it not only undermines theses state level boards, their syllabi, their examinations and assessments, the MCQ format also reduces the complexity of understanding of subjects to simplistic options: more tuned to rote learning and coaching classes than the qualitative assessment of learning, a necessary component of good higher education.
Second, the persistent and widening gap between demand and supply of good quality institutions of higher education means that there would always be immense pressure on students to do extremely well to get admission into prestigious colleges and universities. For example, this year, almost 24 lakhs students appeared for NEET-UG for about 1 lakh seats in medical colleges. Further, about 50 percent of these seats are in government colleges where annual fees range from Rs 60000 to Rs 3 lakhs. On the other hand, in another 50 percent seats in private colleges and deemed universities, the annual frees are 10 to 20 times the government fees. Thus, the immense pressure on students is regarding admission into government colleges. The seats in private colleges primarily go to children of very rich parents, independent of their ranking in the examination as long as they qualify (shockingly, the qualifying marks in NEET- UG can be as low as 20 percent of total marks! This year, the qualifying marks for admission in a medical college for general category students are 164 out of 720. Let me add, that these are the 50th percentile marks, that is, 50 percent of students who appeared for NEET-UG this year scored less than 164 marks!).
Third, this government fixation with digital, technological solution to any problem, independent of the larger context, is deeply flawed. Shockingly, to fix the present admission fiasco, there is now discussion about introducing completely online computer-based tests but nothing else is likely to change. This technological obsession is also reflected, increasingly, in the government’s choice of leadership in major educational institutions and bodies. Almost, all the top officials are drawn from an engineering background: from the UGC to NTA to NCERT and many others.
The final contributory factor to this crisis of governance is this government’s obsessive preference for ideological affinity of bosses in higher education — from different boards, to UGC, to NTA, to vice-chancellors of central universities and others — with its own partisan politics instead of their competence for the job (which, ironically, in all issues in higher education, calls for an ability to take independent, professional decisions for the task at hand!).
The problem is there is no quick-fix solution to this ongoing crisis. The basic, long-term solution lies in moving away from the present format and encouraging a large number of state-level institutions over time, with funds and more autonomy, to improve the quality of their education and infrastructure and making them participants in decision-making. Unless that happens, cosmetic changes are unlikely to improve the dismal scenario any time soon.
Vrijendra taught in a Mumbai college for more than 30 years and has been associated with democratic rights groups in the city
