And there it has come again, the time for admissions into the various undergraduate courses. On one hand, there will be a whole lot shouting and leaping in jubilance on getting into the top institutions of the country or their states, while for every ten of those there will be thousands shouting in agony and disbelief at not getting the institute of their choice. Those thousands are further classified into three distinct classes, the upper, middle and lower classes. The uppers will not think twice, they have had already shortlisted the top private institutions for their wards (expensive too). The middles are thinking of what to do, hamming the pages of the brochures of different banks (again private) for loans. The lowers though, are the most relaxed ones, because they do not have either, they have had already decided, “chalo beta kuch aur padh lo”.
The above paragraph brings about a very sad picture, the true picture of our education scenario, where there has been incessant and rabid privatisation of the higher education. The seats in government colleges have been cut down or have remained stagnant since time immemorial. The stress on some courses have reached such a high level that the interest on such courses have pretty much superseded everything beneath. Of course, we do not need to name the courses which have done the superseding task, its engineering.
The lure of engineering studies have escalated to such a high level that parents these days, do not think twice before taking up a 32 lakh. They pay the interest of the loan happily, with dreamy eyes for a better future for their sons and daughters. But, they don’t think about how their wards would repay that loan when maximum of the jobs that they are going to get in today’s market does not cross 40k in the beginning . The students getting into the government ones are relieved; they are going to finish their degrees within a low budget, no loans and all. But it’s not true that they had got that cheap too, because the amount of money a parent has to spend on coaching and all, makes about 50 percent of what the private colleges charge, and we all know the dwindling number of students have the mettle to make it to a government college cracking the entrance exams with no coaching courtesy the increasing “level of intellect” needed to crack such “inhuman” exams. The better coaching one has, that is the higher money one can spend on caching, the higher are the chances of cracking the entrance exams. Rarely, these exams provide a true and fair ground for battle to all the examinees. It will not be too surprising if there ever arises a nexus between the coaching centres and the question setters.
The poor ones have the assets to fund none. Neither the coaching nor the private colleges, what should happen to them according to our government? Should they be just left out in the open without studying what they want to study? And for what? Just because his or her father did not have the money to fund their education? The progressive students organisations have been trying to get the government hear the plight of such students. They have been protesting against this rapid privatisation and uncensored funding of such in the PPP mode. The government seats in courses, whose demand is higher, should be increased. This is the most logical solution to the problem of increasing money being invested in the private colleges by the parents. It is an utter hypocrisy on the governments’ part when they say they are short of funds, while the same government lends out lands to the private money mongers to build institutions of their own.
If the students would have been provided with a fair battleground for getting into the colleges or even if the seats for studies demanding higher interest would have been increased, there would not be such a huge upsurge in the private college scenario of the country. Cases of money laundering in such institutions are heard every day, centring on such institutions, consultancies have grown up. The owners of such consultancies consider education to be nothing more than just some object, which they have to sell to the person who pays better.
Is this what our idols, the great student leaders of the yesteryears, Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev, and many more had dreamt of? An education system based on how much money one has?
That’s not all, if we take the cases of some particular states , we would find that the budgetary allocations to the government colleges have been decreasing rapidly over the years , and with it, there are private colleges mushrooming all over the states on lands owned by our very own governments. While the government has failed to impose on any restrictions on the private colleges’ fees, they have become a hub of commercialisation of our education.
It will be pretty correct to say that the system rarely educates, it just sells.
