Education News

CBSE issues notice against fake sample papers circulating in the web

Delhi: Beneficial examinations reform

Autar Nehru (Delhi) Following heavy criticism from Supreme Court for not having devised an alternative examination system for the pandemic academic year 2020-21 after board examinations were cancelled in the wake of the second wave (March-June 2021) of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has initiated major examination reforms for the academic year 2021-22. It has decreed two terminal exams for class X and XII school leavers in lieu of single annual examinations. Under the new examination system of CBSE — the country’s largest national examination board with 24,240 affiliated schools — the first terminal exam that will test students for 50 percent of prescribed syllabus, will be held between November 30 and December 11. Exam papers will be in MCQ (multiple choice questions) format. The second-term exam scheduled for March-April 2022 will be of the traditional subjective/objective type question papers with students given two hours to write each subject exam. The new bifurcated classes X and XII school-leaving exam system, which is also likely to be followed by the country’s 31 state examination boards, is the outcome of widespread outrage that board exams scheduled to be held in April 2021 were repeatedly cancelled for fear of spread of Covid infection in crowded exam halls, and finally not held at all. On June 1, prime minister Narendra Modi announced cancellation of the CBSE class XII exams of 2020-21. Subsequently, hearing a writ petition Meeta Sharma vs. CBSE & Ors (Civil) Nos. 522/2021) on June 17, the Supreme Court accepted an assessment formula devised by CBSE. As per the formula, students were assessed on the basis of marks obtained in pre-board exams conducted by affiliated schools (maximum 40 marks), half-yearly mid-term exams (30 marks) and periodic units (10 marks) subject to “moderation” by the board. However, the fallout of the board not conducting exams and students certified on the basis of marks awarded by schools themselves, has been raging grades inflation in the pandemic academic year 2020-21. This has posed problems for undergraduate colleges with admission cut-offs in several Delhi colleges set at 100 percent. Nevertheless, academics have welcomed the two-exam initiative of CBSE. “Evaluating students on the outcomes of two term exams is better than judging them on the basis of one all-important exam. It will encourage them to study through the year and will reduce final exam stress and anxiety. CBSE has already pruned the 2021-22 syllabus by 30 percent and children get two chances in school-leaving exams. I am sure once it becomes the norm, students will prefer the new format,” says Dr. Sudha Acharya, principal of ITL School, Delhi and chairperson of the National Progressive Schools’ Conference, an association of 195 private CBSE-affiliated schools. Certainly, CBSE’s adoption of the two-semester board exams system for school-leavers is a radical departure from past practice of the do-or-die final exam and is a half-way house of the continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE) system favoured by most intelligent educators and the report of the K. Kasturirangan Committee…

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Karnataka: Learning loss nonchalance

On September 6, government and private schools in Karnataka (pop. 68.4 million) reopened for on-campus, in-person teaching-learning for classes VI-VIII children after 18 months of Covid disruption. Two weeks earlier, schools had reopened for classes IX-XII students on August 23. Therefore, all middle-secondary students statewide are back in class and learning normatively, subject to prescribed Covid-19 protocols. However, the BJP-led state government is still dithering on the issue of getting pre-primary and primary children back into classrooms. World over — especially in developed OECD countries — schools have reopened in reverse order because youngest children are least vulnerable to Covid-19 infection. Be that as it may, the reopening of in-person classes hasn’t come a day too soon because on that very day, the globally-respected Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994), which has been publishing its authoritative Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) based on field tests to measure learning outcomes of primary school children in India since 2005, released the ASER 2020 Karnataka Rural report. The report confirms that children in the 6-14 age group have suffered huge loss of learning during the 60-week lockdown of schools for fear of the pandemic. ASER 2020 Karnataka Rural reports that 56.8 percent of class I students surveyed could not recognise/read Kannada language alphabets (cf. 40 percent in 2018); only 34 percent of class V students could read a class II text (cf. 46 percent) and a mere 56.5 percent of class VII students could read a class II textbook paragraph with fluency and comprehension. Bad as that is, the decline in arithmetic learning levels is worse. An estimated 42 percent of class I students could not recognise numbers from one to nine (cf. 30 percent in 2018). Only 17.3 percent of class III students were able to do subtraction sums (cf. 26.3 percent) and only 38.9 percent of class VIII students can do simple division sums. For the survey, ASER volunteers visited 13,365 households covering 670 villages in 24 rural districts of Karnataka and tested the learning outcomes of children aged between 3-14 years. Governments around the world have accorded high priority to restarting on-campus, in-person classes for youngest children who are most in danger of forgetting what they may have learned in previous years. Sweden didn’t lockdown schools at all and France and Tanzania shut down primaries for a mere 15 weeks to prevent children’s learning loss. In sharp contrast, the Karnataka government has exhibited no urgency to restart normative schooling despite being fully aware that online learning is a mirage for most children in the state. According to the Internet & Mobile Association of India, Internet penetration in Karnataka — India’s Silicon Valley — is a mere 42 percent. Comments Rishikesh B.S., associate professor at the School of Education, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru: “The ASER 2020 Karnataka Rural report reflects the reality of school education in the state. Learning levels of the majority of children are at least three grades below their class level. The pandemic-prompted schools lockdown has worsened learning outcomes…

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West Bengal: Despondent centenary

The turmoil in Visva-Bharati University (VBU, estb.1921), established by Nobel laureate, sage, savant and litterateur Rabindranath Tagore, shows no signs of simmering down despite this being its centenary year — a time for celebration. On September 15, the Calcutta high court set aside a three-year rustication order issued on August 23 by controversial vice chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty against three students. The court ordered that Phalguni Pan, a student in the economics and politics department, would rejoin classes this month (October); Somnath Shaw, a student of economics, has been allowed to clear his semester backlog in December 2021 or early January 2022, and Rupa Chakrabortty, a Hindustani classical music student, has been permitted to take internal examinations in December 2021 or early January next year. While passing this verdict, Justice Rajasekhar Mantha also had a word of caution for vice chancellor Chakrabarty and the university’s management. “Unnecessary confrontation should be avoided. It is expected that the vice chancellor will follow the order in letter and spirit,” the court observed. Simultaneously, the court directed the university to “review” suspension orders it has given against 60-70 faculty and employees within 15 days. Moreover, while passing the order, the court was also “compelled” to advise the vice chancellor and varsity management to adopt “convivial and inclusive approach” in transacting with institutional stakeholders. Continuous discontent on the sylvan 1,130-acre VBU campus in Santiniketan, which includes three villages and several residential enclaves for former and current faculty, since Chakrabarty was appointed vice chancellor in November, has hurt the reputation of this Central government-funded university. In the annual National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Union education ministry published on September 9, VBU suffered its steepest decline since the ministry’s rankings framework was instituted in 2015. From #11 in 2016, its rank slipped to #50 in 2020 and further to #64 in the league table of Top 100 universities. In the overall category which ranks Top 100 higher education institutions including engineering, medical and other colleges, VBU is ranked #97. In the annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings 2021-22 which rank private and government universities separately, VBU is ranked a more respectable #25 among Top 150 government universities. Senior faculty overwhelmingly blame Chakrabarty — an alum of the London School of Economics who taught at Delhi University for 20 years prior to being appointed vice chancellor three years ago — for VBU’s steep reputational fall. According to the Visva-Bharati University Faculty Association, 11 faculty and 11 non-teaching staff have been suspended, with termination orders served on two professors (including a former officiating vice chancellor, who was dismissed a day before her retirement), and over 150 employees have been issued show-cause notices. Also, for the first time ever, a gag order was issued on January 30, 2020 on all employees except for the PRO, from giving media bytes or interviews. Yet Chakrabarty, the man at the centre of the storm, is silent. At a press conference organised by VBU on September 17, he was conspicuously absent and has…

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Maharashtra: NEET common cause

The State’s Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government, an alliance of the Shiv Sena, Congress and Nationalist Congress Party, which was hastily cobbled together in November 2019 to shut the BJP out of power in India’s most industrialised state, has made common cause with the DMK government of Tamil Nadu in its opposition to NEET (National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test) — the common exam that determines admission to all 542 medical colleges — government, deemed universities and private — countrywide. While the recently elected DMK government has moved quickly to enact the Tamil Nadu Admission to Undergraduate Medical Degree Courses Act, 2021, on September 13, to eliminate the compulsory status of NEET for TN students, Maharashtra’s MVA government has initiated a “review” of the compulsory status of NEET and its impact on admission prospects of students, especially those from socially backward classes, into the state’s 55 medical colleges. The rationale of NEET introduced by the Congress-led UPA-II government in 2012 is that a common entrance exam for aspiring medical practitioners would save students the trouble of writing multiple state government and private college entrance exams. Prior to legislation of NEET, higher secondary school-leavers wrote several entrance exams to improve their chances of admission into medical college. In Maharashtra, while the state government conducted a common entrance test MH-CET, students also wrote the Asso-CET (conducted by the Association of Managements of Private Medical and Dental Colleges) for admission into private medical colleges (affiliated with the Maharashtra University of Health Sciences), and also exams conducted by deemed universities offering medical degree programmes. Inevitably, NEET was opposed by state governments and private colleges as it would dilute their discretionary power to admit students. Under NEET, one national exam conducted by the National Testing Agency would create a national master list with all medical colleges inviting applications indicating admission cut-offs (minimum grades) required. Following four years of litigation, a three-judge bench of Justices Anil R. Dave, Shiva Kirti Singh and A.K. Goel upheld NEET on April 28, 2016. The Lok Sabha passed a Bill mandating the conduct of one common exam for medical and dental courses on July 18, 2016 and the first NEET was conducted in two phases on May 1 and July 24 in its debut year (2016). NEET has since been the sole gateway for admissions to study all branches of medicine — MBBS (bachelor of medicine and bachelor of surgery), BDS (bachelor of dental surgery), BAMS (bachelor of Ayurveda medicine and surgery), BHMS (bachelor in homeopathic medicine and surgery) and other undergraduate medical courses in approved medical, dental, AYUSH and other institutions. A second reason for states’ opposition to NEET is that higher secondary graduates from state board schools tend to be less successful in the pan-India NEET. In a letter written to Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray, state Congress chief Nana Patole has demanded the NEET exam be scrapped for Maharashtra since instances of question papers being leaked and imposters writing the exam are increasing. Also NEET questions based on the pan-India…

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Delhi: Patriotism curriculum gambit

The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has been in power in Delhi state since 2015 and against all expectations, has bested the BJP juggernaut in two legislative assembly elections (2015 and 2019) with K-12 education upgradation serving as a major electoral plank, has introduced a Deshbhakti (patriotism) curriculum which will be taught in its 1,028 government schools statewide. On September 28, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal launched this curriculum to mark the 114th birth anniversary of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, the nationally revered revolutionary freedom fighter. The objective of the new curriculum is to achieve eight learning outcomes — self-awareness, self-confidence, problem-solving, practising constitutional values, pluralism and diversity, environmental sustainability, ethical social behaviour, and collaboration and social/civic responsibility. “Our effort is to make children self-aware and transform their patriotism into a flame. Our aim is to make students good citizens, good professionals, nation builders, respectful to women and against crime,” said Kejriwal, speaking on the occasion. The curriculum is approved by SCERT (State Council of Educational Research & Training) and will be introduced in all classes of 1,028 state government schools, when they re-open after the pandemic lockdown. It will comprise histories of freedom fighters and include other patriotic literature and song lyrics. There will be one Deshbhakti period of 40 minutes daily for nursery-VIII students, and two periods per week for students in classes IX-XII. Significantly, no textbooks nor exams are prescribed. Deshbhakti classes will be of the oral and group learning tradition with students encouraged to develop respect for flag and country. Adhitya Iyer, a well-known Mumbai-based motivational speaker and author of The Great Indian Obsession: The Untold Story of India’s Engineers (2015) believes this initiative of the AAP government is worthy of emulation by other states. “Globally the sense of nationship is reducing, not only in India. Therefore, the timing and intent of the initiative is brilliant. It will motivate children and create a sense of nationality and pride in them,” he says. However, activist lawyer and president of the All India Parents’ Association, Ashok Agarwal is less than impressed and warns that the oral tradition Deshbhakti curriculum can be selectively taught by ruling parties in the state to brainwash impressionable young children. “With most children having lost almost a year of learning due to the pandemic lockdown of education institutions, the focus of the state government should be remedial education in core subjects — language, science, maths and humanities — rather than waste time on exotic subjects such as happiness and patriotism. Patriotism can be misused by future governments to confuse and brainwash children,” warns Agarwal. However, academics in the national capital don’t accord much importance to this new initiative of the AAP government. According to them, the informal pedagogy recommended for teaching the new subject is a clear sign that it’s a political gambit rather than a serious academic programme. “With the ruling Congress party in disarray in Punjab following the ouster of chief minister Amarinder Singh, AAP has emerged as a formidable force in the Punjab…

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Uttarakhand: Legacy schools overdue initiative

In an important even if belated development, several blue-chip boarding schools — some of over 150 years vintage and respected around the world — have jointly promoted the Boarding Schools Association of India (BSAI), registered on September 29. The prime objectives of BSAI declared in the association’s constitution are “to serve the staff and students of member boarding schools through professional training, providing a forum for all member schools to increase interaction and cooperation amongst each other along all facets of the boarding experience, leading the discussion on well-being and all-round development of boarding students, and advancing and supporting best practices in pedagogy… Furthermore to advance the interests of member schools, staff and students, and act as a liaison between different stakeholders such as member schools, the larger educational industry, teachers, students, parents and government”. The founding members of BSAI include The Doon School, Dehradun; Mayo College, Ajmer; Scindia School, Gwalior; Welham Girls and Welham Boys, Dehradun; The Lawrence School Lovedale; The Lawrence School, Sanawar; Pinegrove School, Dharampur; The Assam Valley School and SelaQui International School, Dehradun — all ranked among the Top 10 co-ed, boys and girls boarding schools in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2020-21. Sumer Singh, one of India’s most respected educationists and former headmaster of The Lawrence School, Sanawar and Daly College, Indore, is the founder-president of BSAI. “Unlike boarding schools in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, in India boarding schools lack a voice when the Central and state governments formulate education policies and regulations. BSAI has been promoted to ensure that we contribute to policy formulation. For instance, during the recent Covid-19 pandemic lockdown the Central and state governments issued on and off campus lockdown directives without taking into account that boarding schools fees cover much more than tuition and students cannot be sent home or recalled at a short notice since they come from all parts of the country and often from abroad,” explains Sumer Singh. The newly registered association intends to play a large and evolving role in K-12 policy formulation and education development in the post-pandemic era. BSAI will collaborate with similar associations in the UK, Australia and New Zealand to research and develop international standards for teacher certification in areas such as pastoral care, safety and security, and conduct audits for member schools to ensure compliance with government mandated rules and regulations and establish safe and eco-friendly campuses. “All member schools will benefit through exchange of best practices, conferences, workshops, debates on government policies and certification of vendors of hardware, software and services. BSAI will also provide mentorship to newly-promoted greenfield schools and consultancy services especially for professional development of teachers,” adds Singh. Although left-liberals who dominate the academy and formulate education policies tend to dismiss India’s legacy and new genre international boarding schools as relics of the British Raj and/or elitist, residential schools (and private residential universities such as Ashoka, Jindal Global) are experiencing a resurgence of popularity within postliberalisation India’s fast expanding middle class. “Even before the Covid…

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They said it in September

“The new National Education Policy is expected to revolutionize the educational sector in India and lay the path for the next 25 years as per the Vision 2047 of prime minister Shri Narendra Modi. He stressed that education has to make each one of us more responsible and become global citizen.” – Dharmendra Pradhan, union education minister (NDTV, September 5) “At AICTE, I have been able to completely eliminate corruption and transform the body from being a mere regulator to becoming a facilitator.” – Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) chairman, on the ongoing reforms in engineering education (India Today, September 20) “I am not a big fan of the Modi government and the Hindu nationalism business. But on Afghanistan in particular, and on the foreign policy crisis and the immediate effect on national security, I tend to speak with the same voice. At the end of the day, I believe that domestic politics should stop at the water’s edge, and we should all think of our national interest first.” – Shashi Tharoor, MP, on Taliban’s return to Afghanistan (The Federal, September 23) Also read: “Top priority needs to be given to education & skill development”: Dr. Shashi Tharoor “Who is defending Earth today? It’s so often just the poorest and most vulnerable people who have this incredible apparatus of state power ranged against them.” – Amitav Ghosh, well-known author, on the climate crisis (Mint, October 9) “It violates the principle of academic autonomy. It is the university’s business to decide what it wishes to teach, not the business of the government of the day… It violates the democratic principle of freedom of expression.” – Yogendra Yadav, former president of Swaraj India, on Kannur University dropping lessons on the works of hindutva icons V.D. Sarvakar and M.S. Gowalkar from the syllabus (The Hindu, October 1)

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Karnataka: Unwarranted haste

Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru) One year after the ambitious National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was presented to the nation by prime minister Narendra Modi on July 29, 2020, the southern state of Karnataka (pop.68.4 million) has become the first countrywide to implement its higher education reform proposals. On August 7, the BJP state government issued a circular to 28 state and 19 private universities and 481 undergrad colleges to implement NEP 2020 in the current academic year 2021-22. Two weeks later on August 23, it announced that admissions into all higher education institutions statewide should be made under NEP 2020 guidelines. Formulated after an interregnum of 34 years and crafted over four years following recommendations of two (TSR Subramaniam and K. Kasturirangan) committees, NEP 2020 decrees four-year undergad degree programmes with a foundational year of liberal arts learning for all streams; multiple certified exit and re-entry options and a system of credits to be stored in a national ABC (academic bank of credits) digital repository; phasing out the system of undergrad colleges affiliating with parent universities, and graded autonomy for undergrad colleges under a ‘light but tight’ regulatory framework. It also mandates establishment of a National Research Foundation and permitting top-ranked foreign universities to set up campuses in India. Given this long list of prescribed reforms, the out-of-the-blue announcement of the BJP government in Karnataka to implement the radical NEP reforms in the current academic year which began in August, has taken the state’s academy by surprise with college and university managements totally unprepared to implement the new policy. While the state government has no doubt earned brownie points with the BJP leadership at the Centre for being first off the blocks, institutional managements are unprepared to implement the new undergrad admission guidelines. Moreover, most of the state’s 481 undergrad colleges, which reopened for in-person classes in August, had already begun the admissions process in July and were forced to put it on hold after the government announced on August 7 that all admissions have to be made through a new Unified University and College Management System (UUCMS). Three days later, the government cancelled admissions under UUCMS because of “technical glitches” in the new hastily prepared software. Knowledgeable academics in the state are amazed that NEP 2020, which calls for the constitution of 32 subject committees to prepare a new curriculum framework; mandates flexibility in subject selection across science, arts and commerce streams and switch to transferable academic credits-based system; multiple exit and entry points during the four-year undergrad study programme; and mandatory skill enhancement courses based on the National Skills Curriculum Framework, has been introduced at such short notice by the state government. Comments Prof. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bengaluru and education advisor to the Karnataka government: “Implementing NEP 2020 requires detailed planning and preparedness. The majority of the state’s government and private colleges are small to medium-size and don’t have trained faculty and necessary infrastructure to introduce inter-disciplinary…

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Delhi: AAP’s education gambit

Autar Nehru (Delhi) The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which has ruled Delhi state since 2015 and took on and bested the BJP in the state legislative election of 2020 shortly after the saffron party had swept to power in General Election 2019, is perhaps the sole political formation countrywide that believes provision of high-quality school education is a vote-catching issue. During its six years in office, the AAP government has consistently allocated 20-25 percent of its annual budget to improve, upgrade and enhance the learning outcomes of the 1.5 million children enrolled in its 1,028 state government schools. It’s pertinent to note that the governance structure of Delhi is confusing and complex. Established as a state of the Indian Union in 1991, it is simultaneously governed by the national, state and two municipal corporations. All these governments run their own schools across the sprawling state (pop. 18 million) which includes the national capital. Thus the total number of K-12 schools in Delhi state is 5,755 with an aggregate enrolment of 4.4 million children. Nevertheless it’s commonly accepted that the 1,028 state government schools provide the best education of all public schools because as AAP’s election manifesto (2019) proclaims, it sends its school teachers to “coveted institutes in Finland, Singapore and United Kingdom” for training; it has launched special initiatives to improve foundational literacy and numeracy; introduced a unique happiness period and entrepreneurship curriculum and established parents-dominated School Management Committees (SMCs) mandated under s.21 (1) of the RTE Act, 2009. Moreover, the AAP leadership insists that its 22 Rajkiya Pratibha Vikas Vidyalayas (RPVV) — classes VI-XII schools —and five (K-12) Schools of Excellence (estb.2018) whose students write the national CBSE school-leaving exams, are on a par with top-ranked private schools in the national capital with as good board exam results. The tall claims made by the AAP government to have revolutionised education in state government schools are not mere hype. Two RPVV schools are ranked among India’s Top 5 government schools in the authoritative EducationWorld India School Rankings 2021 with RPVV Sector 10, Dwarka (CBSE average score 90.97 percent) ranked second nationwide. Having discerned that continuous improvement of teaching-learning standards in public/government schools is a vote catching issue, on March 15 AAP announced its intent to establish 100 model primary-secondary (class VI-XII) Schools of Specialised Excellence (SoSE) which will absorb the state government’s 22 RPVVs and five Schools of Excellence. Out of these 27 schools, 20 have been converted into class IX-XII SoSEs with a “strategic tie-up” with the globally reputed International Baccalaureate (Geneva) examinations board. These 20 secondary schools are ready to receive students when campuses re-open following the current Covid pandemic lockdown. Their number will increase to 100 “in the next few years,” according to government spokespersons. Unlike normative secondary-higher secondary institutions, SoSEs will admit students who pass its entrance test, into one of five specialised (classes IX-XII) domains — science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM); performing and visual arts; humanities and “high-end 21st century skills”. Partly modelled on…

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Children returning to school should be empathised: Experts

Maharashtra: Reopening back & forth

Dipta Joshi (Mumbai) In a classic case of too many cooks, the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition government’s grand plans to reopen schools from August 17 onwards has run awry because of divergence of opinion between its two Covid-19 management task forces. Fearing resurgence of the pandemic in the state, the general task force chaired by Dr. Sanjay Oak, vice chancellor, D.Y. Patil University, has recommended that schools remain closed until Diwali (November 14). On the other hand, the paediatric task force led by Dr. Suhas Prabhu, consultant for paediatric infectious diseases at the P.D. Hinduja Hospital and Medical Research Centre, Mumbai, has recommended schools reopening by end-September subject to strict adherence to Covid-19 safety protocols. No sooner did the two task forces make their divergent reports public, state education minister Varsha Gaikwad put an August 10 government resolution (GR) to restart schools on hold. In the absence of official clarification, the overwhelming majority of private schools in Maharashtra have not resumed in-class schooling. There is a backstory to this confusion. Weeks after the first lockdown (March 25-April 14, 2020), the state government constituted a nine-member general task force chaired by Dr. Oak to supervise, monitor and suggest measures to curb the spread of the pandemic in the state. The 13-member pediatric task force chaired by Dr. Prabhu was set up a year later on May 27, in anticipation of a third wave of the pandemic that is forecast to impact children. The task forces’ reservations have derailed the government’s plans to greenlight conditional resumption of in-person classes in areas where Coronavirus infections are under control. The MVA government’s August 10 GR permitted secondary schools in rural areas to hold in-person classes for class V-XII children from August 17. Simultaneously, urban schools were permitted to start in-person instruction for class VIII-XII students subject to their following standard operating procedures (SOPs) including double vaccination of all staff and teachers and compulsory parental approval for all students attending physical classes. This back and forth on the issue of resuming in-school classes in Maharashtra’s 46,365 secondary schools with an aggregate enrolment of 13 million students is not new. Earlier, a GR dated July 7 permitted conditional reopening of secondary schools (classes VIII-XII) from July 15 in rural habitats that didn’t report any Coronavirus cases in the month preceding. This resulted in 17,701 schools restarting on-campus learning for 1.5 million children. Had the August 10 GR been followed, schools in 25 of the state’s 36 districts that have reported low numbers of Covid cases would have reopened in the second phase. “Unfortunately even three months into the new academic year (2021-22) the government is still debating schools reopening. Given experience of the past year of lockdown, one would have expected better co-ordination between the government and its own task forces regarding SOPs. The government needs to ensure all schools are reopened immediately to complete the syllabus for the current academic year 2021-22. We cannot afford another year without exams since we have no reliable…

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Tamil Nadu: Cautious reopening

Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai) Under lockdown to check the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic for over one year, Tamil Nadu’s 37,500 government schools and 12,000 unaided private schools resumed on-campus teaching-learning for classes IX-XII on September 1 subject to maintaining strict Covid protocols and 50 percent capacity, i.e, alternate days attendance. Currently, 4.5 million children are enrolled in senior and higher secondary classes statewide. Although no student is forced to attend in-school classes because the online option is available, with a third pandemic wave imminent, public opinion on the issue of starting classroom teaching is divided. The state government order of August 6, permitted government and private schools to resume in-class teaching-learning for senior school and higher secondary students because the number of Covid positive cases in Tamil Nadu has fallen from a peak of more than 3.13 lakh to 16,478 currently (September 2). Despite this, parental consent is mandatory. For private school managements suffering the load of unpaid tuition fees while stuck with high campus maintenance costs, the resumption of in-school classes promises improved cash flows. Therefore, some of them are pulling out all stops to make their campuses safe. “We have stocked masks and sanitisers in the school with teachers instructed to sensitise students about the importance of masking. Besides, in our classrooms we have ensured 6 ft distancing between benches with only 20 students per classroom. Students have also been advised not to share their lunch meals. To ensure that online classes for elementary school students are not hampered, we have provided wi-fi connection at school for teachers to conduct online classes. Further, we have not resumed the school bus service as maintaining social distance is a challenge on board buses,” says S. Bhagavath, correspondent at the private independent Bharath Advanced Higher Secondary School near Nagercoil in Kanyakumari district, which has 500 students and 39 teachers on its muster rolls. After the lockdown of schools countrywide for almost 60 weeks — the longest schools lockdown worldwide — Tamil Nadu’s children are eager to return to in-school classes with some institutions reporting 94 percent attendance. However, such back-to-school enthusiasm has created unforeseen problems for some institutional managements. “We have 2,000 senior and higher secondary students. As per the government order, we can accommodate only 20 students in one classroom. On day one of reopening 94 percent of our students attended, forcing us to introduce a shift system alternating Tamil and English medium students in classes IX and XI. For children preparing for board exams — classes X and XII — daily classroom attendance is mandatory. We have to see how this system works and are ready to change the programme if necessary,” says an assistant headmistress at the state-aided St. Joseph’s Convent Higher Secondary School, Nagercoil, who preferred to remain anonymous. For children from low-income urban households and rural students with Internet connectivity and digital devices deficits, the newly elected DMK government’s schools restart order has come as a huge relief. “For students in rural areas leveraging technology has…

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West Bengal: Snowballing protest

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) Established by nobel laureate, savant and litterateur Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) as an abode for students from around the world, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan (VBU, estb.1918) has been mired in controversy and continuous turmoil since Dr. Bidyut Chakrabarty, former professor of political science at Delhi University, assumed office as vice chancellor in November 2018. The charges levelled against Chakrabarty — an alumnus of the London School of Economics who taught at Delhi University for 20 years — include autocratic decision-making, destroying cultural and social communication between VBU and Santiniketan residents, sustained endeavour to alienate, exclude and ostracise people from beyond Bolpur district by labelling them outsiders, routinely delaying salaries and pensions of 4,000 present and past employees of this Central government-funded varsity, and attempting to “saffronise” VBU. Simmering unrest on the VBU campus boiled over on August 23, when varsity authorities rusticated leaders of Visva-Bharati Student’s Unity (VBSU), a students’ organisation, for “gross indiscipline and misconduct”. Besides three student leaders, two professors have also been suspended. After suspension of these professors, the number of teachers and staff under suspension at the university during Chakrabarty’s tenure has risen to 20. According to VBU insiders, the roots of the latest protests that have disrupted the peace in Santiniketan, can be traced back to the suspension of Dr. Sudipta Bhattacharya, professor of economics at the university and president of the VBU Faculty Association, on the flimsy charge of ‘maligning’ the university, against which the professor has filed a writ petition pending in the Calcutta high court. “We earned the wrath of the VC when we spoke against the suspension of over ten professors on the charge of airing individual opinions over the state-of-affairs at the university under Chakrabarty’s leadership and organising a protest when BJP MP Swapan Dasgupta was invited to VBU campus in January 2020 to speak in support of the anti-minorities Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019,” says Somnath Sow, a suspended VBSU leader. Since August 28, 40 Visva-Bharati students have gheraoed VC Bidyut Chakrabarty’s residence to protest the rustication of the three VBSU students. Supporting them, the Students Federation of India (SFI) — students’ wing of the CPM — called a two-day protest across the country from August 31, and the Bengal chapter of the All India Students’ Association (AISA) staged statewide protests for two days from September 1. In Kolkata, the Democratic Students’ Federation and the Presidency University Students’ Council also staged a protest rally on September 1. In support of their allegation that Chakrabarty is hell-bent on “saffronising” VBU, the students say that starting from 2019, several RSS/BJP ideologues have been invited to the VBU campus to address students and faculty. On August 9, 2019, ABVP national-secretary Sunil Ambekar was invited to the halakarshana (pastoral livelihood) ceremony started by Tagore in 1929. Two months later on October 19, the VC permitted the Rashtriya Kala Manch, an RSS-backed outfit, to hold a workshop in the varsity’s journalism school. On January 14, 2020, Chakrabarty invited BJP ideologue Swapan Dasgupta to speak…

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Our next step is to appeal to the state government to underwrite unpaid fees,” says Martin Kennedy, president of the Tamil Nadu Private Schools Association.

Tamil Nadu: Confusing court order

Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai) An estimated 12,000 private unaided schools in Tamil Nadu were given the green light to collect 85 percent of annual fees payable for the academic year 2021-22 by the Madras high court on July 30. The court’s order was issued with qualifications. The annual fee is payable in six equal instalments by parents who have not suffered a loss of income during the Covid-19 pandemic period. The court’s order was in response to several writ petitions of private schools and associations which challenged an April 20, 2020 state government order issued under the Disaster Management Act, 2005 restraining unaided (independent) private schools and colleges from compelling students or parents to pay prospective annual fees or pending dues for the lockdown period. Simultaneously, several parents’ associations had also filed petitions pleading for an order to restrain private school managements from making students access to online classes conditional upon clearance of pending and/or prospective school fees. Clubbing and admitting petitions filed by the Private Schools Associations of Tamil Nadu and several parents’ associations, and citing the Supreme Court ruling in Indian School, Jodhpur and Anr vs. State of Rajasthan and Ors (May 3, 2021), Justice D. Krishnakumar permitted levy of contracted annual fees for 2021-22 with a 15 percent deduction for unutilised facilities. The court added that students cannot be denied access to online classes under any circumstances during the new academic year started on June 15. Moreover, he observed that it’s the duty of local education ministry officials to sort out management-parents disputes. However, the learned judge’s ruling with its somewhat contradictory directives has evoked mixed response from private schools and parents’ communities. “Following the court’s verdict, our cash flow will increase by Rs.20-40 lakh this year. This will enable us to pay an additional Rs.1,000-2,000 to our teachers who have been getting only 75 percent of their contracted salaries,” says Priyanka Nandhakumar, secretary at Sri Sankara Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Chennai, which has 1,200 students and 58 teachers on its muster rolls. But even though the high court has allowed private school managements to collect 85 percent of contracted annual fees, they are perplexed about ways and means to derive the benefit of this court order. “Since we cannot block students with unpaid fees from attending online classes, there’s no guarantee that parents will regularly pay fees on due instalment dates. Unless parents willingly pay their instalments, school managements are helpless. With high costs of fees collection and irregular cash flow, our member schools are likely to experience great difficulty in paying the salaries of 300,000 teachers and nearly 200,000 support staff. On the one hand, schools have the authority to collect fees but the order states that schools cannot expel any student for non-payment of fees. Our next step is to appeal to the state government to underwrite unpaid fees,” says Martin Kennedy, president of the Tamil Nadu Private Schools Association. Curiously, instead of pressurising the state government to improve teaching-learning standards in Tamil Nadu’s 37,500…

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Mamata condemns Centre's decision of discontinuing scholarships for minorities

West Bengal: Brick Start

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) Notwithstanding a large shadow cast by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) which after probing incidents of post-poll violence following re-election for a third term of the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) in May, has recommended a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe to the Calcutta high court, chief minister Mamata Banerjee remains unfazed. Even though the seven-member NHRC, constituted following a high court order of June 18, has slammed the newly-elected TMC government for sounding “a death knell” for democracy and remarked that “the situation in the state of West Bengal is a manifestation of ruler, instead of rule of law,” Banerjee has dismissed the commission’s report as biased and exaggerated. She blames cadres of the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist) which ruled West Bengal uninterruptedly for 34 years (1977-2011), for establishing a tradition of violence after every election. Be that as it may, buoyed by the massive mandate awarded to TMC by the West Bengal electorate despite the BJP having repeatedly deployed its election-winning heavyweights — prime minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah — to campaign rallies in the state, Banerjee has set about implementing the TMC’s poll promises. These include duare ration, to deliver food rations to people’s doorsteps; lokkhir bhandar, which provides Rs.6,000 per year as support payment to SC/ST households; and duare tran, as relief payments to victims of cyclone Yaas which hit West Bengal in May. Moreover, post-election surveys indicate that the TMC 3.0 government’s initiatives in education — especially a May 10 announcement to establish English-medium schools in 341 admin blocks statewide, and a June 21 announcement to appoint 32,000 teachers in upper primary and primary schools by March next year — have resonated with the electorate. On June 26, Banerjee announced establishment of six new medical colleges in Hooghly, Howrah, North 24 parganas, East Midnapore, Jahjargram and Jalpaiguri districts, subject to clearance by the National Medical Commission (NMC). Moreover on June 30, Banerjee announced the launch of India’s first credit card for students with an upper limit of Rs.10 lakh to fulfil one of her key pre-election promises. The card empowers any student — from class X to up to 40 years of age — who has lived in Bengal for ten years, to get a loan for higher studies in India or abroad. “No guarantor is needed for this loan. The state government will stand guarantee. Henceforth, students need not run from pillar to post for education loans. I hope this loan will help students fulfil their dreams,” Banerjee told reporters at a virtual press conference. Under the students’ credit card scheme, the loan amount can be utilised for undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and post-doctoral study in India or abroad. It can also be availed for paying the fees of tutorial institutes preparing students for competitive exams, hostel fees, books, study material, computers and laptops with loanees given a 15 years’ time window to repay the loan at a subsidised interest rate of 4 percent with the…

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Karnataka: Urgency deficit

Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru) Almost 15 months after the country’s 1.5 million schools including 450,000 private schools were ordered to shut down by the Central government on March 25, 2020 to check the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, several surveys and reports are highlighting the extensive damage done to children’s education in terms of learning loss and children dropping out of the school system. A survey report submitted to the Karnataka high court on July 16 by the Associated Managements of Primary and Secondary Schools, Karnataka (KAMS) has revealed that 60,094 students dropped out of 250 private schools surveyed statewide in the academic year ended April 30, 2021. The survey found that the aggregate enrolment of these schools plunged from 185,933 in 2019-20 to 125,839 in 2020-21, a drop of 32 percent. According to KAMS, which has a membership of over 3,000 mostly low-priced budget private schools (BPS), this decline in enrolment resulted in revenue loss of Rs.41.34 crore to the 250 schools surveyed which levy average annual fees of Rs.20,000-40,000 per year. Moreover, of the 125,839 students who were admitted in 2020-21, only 45 percent paid the full annual fee, 17 percent paid 70 percent, 9 percent less than 25 percent, with the remainder 29 percent defaulting. Meanwhile, the state’s 21,000 private unaided (financially independent) schools and the BJP state government are at loggerheads over the quantum of fees payable by parents for the recently concluded academic year. In February, several private schools associations filed petitions in the Karnataka high court contesting the constitutional validity of a January 29 state government directive to all private schools — including schools affiliated with pan-India CBSE and CISCE exam boards — statewide to collect only 70 percent of the tuition (and no other) fee for the academic year 2020-21. Spokespersons of the state’s private unaided schools say that 30-40 percent of parents haven’t paid full contracted fees for the past year (2020-21). As a result, fees arrears owing to private schools have accumulated to a massive Rs.4,000-5,000 crore. They contend that private schools, especially an estimated 16,000 BPS, are on the brink of financial bankruptcy, stretched to pay teachers and staff salaries. The KAMS survey highlighting “missing students” is backed by interim student enrolment data for the new academic year 2021-22 — the last date for admissions is August 31, 2021 — compiled under the government’s Student Achievement Tracking System (SATS). Data released by the Karnataka department of primary and secondary education on July 7, reveals that student enrolment in schools (government, private aided and unaided) statewide dipped to around 62 percent in 2021-22 (cf. 70 percent in 2019-20) with government schools recording highest enrolment (76.86 percent) followed by private schools (43.77 percent). Even though it’s common knowledge that budget private schools have mushroomed countrywide as affordable refuges for children fleeing dysfunctional government schools, hitherto primary education minister, S. Suresh Kumar interpreted this data as evidence that government schools are becoming popular again. “Admissions in government schools have seen their biggest increase in…

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Maharashtra: Unfortunate oversight

Dipta Joshi (Mumbai) Succumbing to intensifying pressure from parents demanding reduction of private school fees because of income and job losses suffered during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Maharashtra government is all set to slash fees payable in the new academic year 2021-22. On July 28, the state’s cabinet approved an ordinance to enforce a 15 percent cut in tuition fees of private unaided (independent) schools. However, a battle royale is in the offing as several private schools associations are reportedly set to file writs in the Bombay high court challenging the constitutionality of the proposed order. Maharashtra (pop.115 million), India’s most industrialised state, hosts 18,000 independent private schools with an aggregate enrolment of 900,000 students. A majority of them are now confronted with an existential crisis because of massive fees defaults by parents. “The USF (Unaided Schools’ Forum) has already challenged the Maharashtra (Regulation of School) Fees Act, 2011 in the Bombay high court. We are now exploring legal options to oppose the proposed ordinance. It’s pertinent to note that private schools didn’t increase their fees in the academic year 2020-21 and continued the 2019-20 fee structure approved by every school’s Parent Teacher Association executive committees established under the Act. The proposed ordinance will accelerate unrest among parents and encourage them to abstain from paying even reduced fees,” says Subhash Chandra Kedia, honorary secretary of USF. Citing financial difficulties due to job losses during the pandemic and provision of a few hours of online education to their children during the prolonged pandemic lockdown, parents are protesting against paying full fees. Several parents associations and representative organisations are demanding a 50 percent reduction of school fees and numerous protests have been staged statewide since the lockdown. However, it was only on July 22 after the Supreme Court directed the Maharashtra government to study its Indian School, Jodhpur vs. State of Rajasthan order delivered on May 3 that the Shiv Sena-led MVA coalition government resolved to announce its decision within 21 days (by August 11) as per the SC directive. In the Indian School, Jodhpur case, the apex court directed all private schools in Rajasthan to collect 85 percent of contracted fees for the academic year 2020-21. Taking a cue from this apex court order, the MVA government has proposed to apply this formula for the academic year 2021-22. But parents’ representatives are demanding this order should be applicable with retrospective effect and cover 2019-20 and 2020-21 as well. Even as battle lines are being drawn with school managements on one side and parents and government on the other, government spokespersons are generating confusion. While the cabinet resolved to pass an ordinance, Maharashtra’s education minister Varsha Gaikwad said the state would pass a government resolution (GR) to reduce fees by 15 percent this year. Moreover, on July 26, a directive by Vaishali Jamkar, deputy director of the education ministry’s Nagpur division, ordered private schools to reduce fees by 25 percent following a meeting with Union minister of transport and highways Nitin Gadkari,…

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Delhi: Modest new hopes

Autar Nehru The reconstitution of the union council of ministers on July 7 witnessed the induction of 36 new ministers and 12, including several party heavyweights, dropped, taking the effective strength of the council to 78, just three short of the maximum permitted 81. In this reshuffle, both Union ministers of education (Ramesh Pokhriyal and junior minister Sanjay Dhotre) lost their jobs. A new team headed by Dharmendra Pradhan has been entrusted with the tricky job of giving Indian education a makeover by implementing the new National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 presented to the nation by Pokhriyal on July 29 last year. Besides, Pradhan, promoted from the Union ministry of petroleum and natural gas and steel, there are three ministers of state for education. Moreover, Pradhan has also been allocated the skills education ministry making him the first education-cum-skills minister of the country. An anthropology graduate of Utkal University, Odisha, Pradhan, a former national secretary of ABVP — the students’ wing of the BJP — and a former president of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJP youth wing), has emerged as an important next generation leader of the ruling party at the Centre. The education ministers of state are Rajkumar Ranjan Singh from a royal clan of Manipur, an educationist who worked for unity among the various tribes in the state; Annapurna Devi, former minister of women and child development of the Jharkhand state government and Dr. Subhas Sarkar, a gynaecologist and important leader of the West Bengal unit of the BJP, which although it failed to oust Mamata Banerjee and the TMC government in the recently concluded legislative assembly election, has emerged as the largest opposition party in the state. This strong team replaces a ministry headed by Hindi pulp fiction writer Pokhriyal, who during his two-year term proved an embarrassment for the BJP and the country. During his tenure as education minister, he conspicuously failed to get any allocation for education from the prime minister’s reportedly Rs.20,000 crore pandemic relief package, or any from finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s subsequent piece-meal relief packages. Totally ignorant of Inglish, the link language of India, by insisting on Hindi as the lingua franca of the ministry, he antagonised non-Hindi speaking bureaucrats from southern states working in the ministry. Moreover, he embarrassed the government and academia by holding forth on mythical scientific achievements of ancient India in national and foreign forums (see p.82). Intellectually ill-equipped and indecisive, he presided over the longest total shutdown of all schools, colleges, universities and education institutes (because of the Covid pandemic) in Indian history during his two-year term in Shastri Bhavan, Delhi. “Ever since the days of Kapil Sibal, Union education ministers have behaved as if they are ‘higher education’ ministers. An obsession with IITs, IIMs, Central universities, institutions of national importance, and on entrance tests to the coveted medical, engineering and management institutions has preoccupied the ministry for well over a decade… School education, increasingly on the fringe of policy attention, has slipped further from public discourse.…

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Education News

Cherry picking reforms: New Education Policy 2016

Under the stern glare of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its ideological guardian and mentor, the BJP-led NDA government at the Centre is unlikely to incorporate the comprehensive, sensible and overdue recommendations of the T.S.R. Subramanian Committee Report into its New Education Policy 2016 (see cover story). However, it’s likely to cherry pick some of the committee’s recommendations on which there’s national consensus. This was made plain by Union human resource development (HRD) minister Prakash Javadekar, former minister of state for environment, forest and climate change, who replaced the controversial Smriti Irani in Shastri Bhavan (HQ of the HRD ministry) following a minor cabinet reshuffle by prime minister Narendra Modi on July 5. Addressing a press conference after a meeting of CABE (Central Advisory Board of Education) in Delhi on October 25, Javadekar announced that the BJP/NDA government will amend s.16 of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (aka RTE Act), 2009, which mandates no detention of children in elementary education (classes I-VIII), and reintroduce upper primary (class VIII) if not primary (class V), exams and detain children who fail them. “The quality of education and learning outcomes in schools are deteriorating. It was agreed (by CABE) that the Central government should amend the RTE Act and give states freedom to review the no-detention policy. Therefore, the RTE Act will be amended to allow states to either retain the no-detention policy or scrap it,” said Javadekar, adding that only a few state governments — Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh — were in favour of retaining the no-detention provision of the Act. In its report submitted to the HRD ministry on May 28, the Subramanian Committee Report (SCR) says: “At the upper primary stage, from class V-VIII for children between the ages of 11-14, the committee recommends that the system of detention of children who are below the requisite standard, should be reinstated. This will require a suitable amendment of s.30 (1) of the RTE Act.” Instead of accepting this sensible recommendation of the Subramanian Committee for the good of the country, the minister has ill-advisedly passed the buck on to state governments which have deeply politicised — and ruined — primary-secondary education. At his October 25 press conference, Javadekar also made it clear that CABE and the HRD ministry are in favour of making the class X board exam compulsory for all students. The class X exam was made optional and replaced with the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system by a circular dated September 20, 2009 issued by Kapil Sibal, former HRD minister in the Congress-led UPA-II government, “to reduce examination stress” with students allowed to write their school’s — rather than board — class X exams. Unsurprisingly, the circular was promptly implemented by CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education) — the country’s largest pan-India school-leaving exams board (17,500 affiliated schools) — which is administered by the Union HRD ministry. However, the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) — India’s…

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Madhya Pradesh: Politics of Happiness

Aditi Maheshwari (Bhopal) Evidently inspired by the example of the neighbouring Kingdom of Bhutan which measures national development through a Gross National Happiness Index (GNHI) and latterly by the Delhi state government which introduced happiness classes into the curricula of government schools, the Anand Vibhag (Happiness Department) of the Madhya Pradesh government has succeeded in ameliorating some of the Covid pandemic’s gloom and doom pervading the country’s geographically second-largest (308,245 sq. km) state (pop.73 million) by extending the ambit of the Happiness Department to the education sector. First introduced by incumbent chief minister Shivraj Chauhan in 2016 to spread loosely defined happiness through narration of motivational stories, yoga and mental health advice to rural communities, the department was transformed into the Spiritual Department by the Kamal Nath-led Congress government which was voted into office in 2018. Until March 2020, the focus of the Spiritual Department was to promote intercommunal and religious harmony. However, when the BJP was voted back to power in Bhopal in 2020 after engineering dramatic defections from the Congress, the Happiness Department with a less secular flavour was restored with the mission to uplift the spirits of the people of the state. In 2020 Aloha, an internationally accredited happiness programme, was translated into Hindi and incorporated into the Happiness programmes. Currently, the happiness programme is being disseminated in all 53 districts of the state by 55,000 unpaid volunteers. During the past pandemic year, the department has conducted 100,000 twice-a-week online happiness programmes. The programmes are supervised by the Rajya Anand Sansthan, an autonomous body constituted to promote the department’s objectives. The board members of the Sansthan are eminent citizens working in the areas of culture, society, psychology and academics. “Education was one area that was left untouched by the department, so we decided to sensitise education institutions to the need for happiness, mental peace and well-being, especially in the pandemic era. Therefore for the past one year, introductory programmes have been conducted for school and higher education students in all 53 administrative blocks. Our programmes are not restricted to government institutions and are open to all. They are charged a nominal amount of Rs.200 as registration fees to meet tea-break expenses,” says Akhilesh Argul, chief executive of the Rajya Anand Sansthan. The initial reaction to the happiness programmes being introduced in education institutions — especially in this grim pandemic era — is positive. “The department’s volunteers conducted two programmes for our faculty spread over February and March this year. The programmes included an inaugural prayer followed by yoga classes and interactive sessions with volunteers selected by the education ministry narrating motivational stories and providing pandemic management advice, group singing and poetry recitations. The happiness programmes conducted online, have undoubtedly helped our faculty to destress, refreshed our spirits and diverted attention from the pain points of the pandemic. I’m sure once normalcy is restored and the programmes are conducted on campus, they will be more rewarding,” says Dr. Pratibha Singh, principal of the Sarojini Naidu Govt. Girls Postgrad…

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Karnataka: Wrong Priority

Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru) Even as the new academic year 2021-22 commenced from July 1 with online education decreed compulsory for all of Karnataka’s 76,800 schools including 48,393 government primary-secondaries, the stalemate over fees payable to private schools for 2020-21 and the new academic year is unresolved. In February, several private schools associations filed writ petitions in the Karnataka high court contesting the constitutional validity of a January 29 state government directive to all private schools —including schools affiliated with pan-India CBSE and CISCE exam boards — statewide to collect only 70 percent of tuition (and no other) fees for the academic year ended April 2021. This directive was issued after parents’ associations contended that private schools’ fees should be reduced because online classes are of shorter duration and schools are not providing co-curricular and sports education. Moreover, parents claim they have suffered loss of income and often employment during the pandemic year. On June 29, the state government made a plea to the Karnataka high court seeking permission to constitute a panel headed by a retired high court judge to determine fees for all categories of private schools in the state for the new academic year 2021-22, and to “grant it liberty” to initiate action against private schools disregarding the January 29 fees restriction order. Responding, private schools associations’ counsel argued before a single judge bench that the state government lacks legal authority to regulate fees of unaided private schools and highlighted that, while on one hand, the government had decreed a reduced fee it had simultaneously directed all private school managements to pay full salaries to teachers and staff. After hearing both parties, Justice Magadum adjourned the hearing to July 22. With a second Covid-19 pandemic wave having pushed the state into a 46-day industry and business lockdown in May-June, parents associations have upped their ante and demanded that the state government applies the 70 percent of tuition-feeonly order to the new academic year as well, and constitute a school fees adjudication committee. “Most extra-curricular and sports activities have been halted since classes went online and schools have saved on these expenses. Private school managements can meet their teachers and staff wage bill by collecting 70 percent of annual fees. We demand that the state government immediately constitute a fees fixation committee headed by a retired high court judge to resolve this issue,” says B.N.Yogananda, general secretary, RTE Students & Parents Association (RTE-STUPA). On the other hand, spokespersons of the state’s 21,000 private unaided schools say that 30-40 percent of parents have not paid their children’s fees for the past year 2020-21, and fees arrears owing to private schools have accumulated to a massive Rs.4,000-5,000 crore. They contend that private schools, especially affordable budget private schools (BPS), are on the brink of financial bankruptcy with most unable to pay teachers and staff. They warn that over 3,000 BPS will have to shut down permanently if the restrictive 70 percent tuition fee order is extended to 2021-22. “Taking advantage of…

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West Bengal: Teachers recruitment priority

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) Evidently chief minister Mamata Banerjee, fresh from her resounding third time sweep of the West Bengal state legislative elections, is convinced that her initiatives to reform the state’s moribund education system and raise teaching-learning standards in 92,000 government primary-secondary schools, played a major role in her famous electoral victory in the assembly elections that concluded on May 2. By any yardstick, her Trinamool Congress Party’s tally of 213 of 294 seats in the legislative assembly is impressive given that she successfully defied two-term anti-incumbency, and was confronted with a formidable challenge mounted by the Bharatiya Janata Party, which rules at the Centre. Therefore, right after convening the first cabinet meeting, she announced the government’s intent to set up English-medium schools in all of the state’s 341 administrative blocks. Moreover on June 21, she announced that her government will be recruiting 32,000 teachers for government primaries by March next year. “The appointment process to fill up at least 14,000 vacancies in the upper primary level (classes V-VIII) and 10,500 in the primary level (classes I-IV) will be completed before Durga Puja in October. Moreover, 7,500 more posts for primary teachers will be filled up by March 2022. All appointments will be made on the basis of merit lists and no lobbying will be required,” Banerjee informed a press conference in Kolkata on June 21. During its first term in office the TMC government was focused on cleaning up the mess left behind by the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist)-led Left Front government which uninterruptedly ruled West Bengal for a record 34 years (1977-2011), de-industrialised the state and massively infiltrated education institutions. But in her second-term (2016-21), Banerjee paid considerable attention to ensure regular attendance of teachers in the state’s 92,000 government schools, opposed the no-detention provision of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, and reversed the disastrous Left Front government’s decision on compulsory Bengali medium of instruction in classes I-VII by inaugurating 100 English-medium government primaries in 19 districts of the state. Moreover during her past two terms, the number of universities in the state has increased from 12 in 2011 to 40 at present, with student enrolment in higher education rising from 1.34 million in 2010-11 to 2.03 million in 2020-21. This time around in her third term as chief minister, Banerjee is reported to be determined to resolve the problem of filling teacher vacancies in government schools which defied her efforts in the second term. Soon after the TMC government was returned to power for its second term in 2016, Banerjee promised to recruit 75,000 teachers. But the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET), which is the basis for recruiting teachers for government schools, was conducted only twice — instead of annually — during the past ten years. On both occasions, appointments were stalled because of widespread allegations of test paper leakages, TMC members being favoured, tampered merit lists and appointment irregularities. As a result, more than 20 writ petitions challenging the…

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TN focuses on employability, skilling youth, says CM

Tamil Nadu: Pandemic advantage

Shivani Chaturvedi, Chennai Since it was re-elected to office after a hiatus of ten years, the new Dravida Munnetra Kazhagan (DMK) government led by M.K. Stalin, son of M. Karunanidhi, one of the founders of the party (estb.1949) which initiated uninterrupted rule of Dravidian political parties with close links to popular Tamil cinema way back in 1967, has made an impressive start to his first innings as chief minister. One of Stalin’s first big decisions was to appoint a high-powered Economic Advisory Council (EAC) comprising globally respected Indian diaspora economists including Nobel laureate Esther Duflo; Dr. Raghuram Rajan (Booth School of Business, University of Chicago and former RBI governor); Arvind Subramaniam (former chief economic adviser to the Central government) and Jean Dreze (Delhi School of Economics) to aid and advise the new DMK government to place the state’s economy back on track. In the education space heavily disrupted by the Covid pandemic, an initiative to make transfer certificates (TCs) optional for children switching schools has given a huge boost to languishing government schools. Rules framed by the state government over a decade ago under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, required students to produce a TC issued by the transferor school prior to the transferee school admitting them. This was acceptance of a convention that all fees and dues of the transferor school had been cleared. But under the new directive issued on June 22 to all schools, the state’s education ministry stated that by using the Aadhar card number of a student, his/her details could be accessed from the Educational Management Information System (EMIS), a common online platform connecting schools, teachers and students, by the transferee school. However, this directive is limited to students transferring from private to government and government-aided schools. Students switching from one private school to another still need to produce TCs. As a result, the state has witnessed an unusual reverse migration of students from fee levying private to free-of- charge government schools because the Covid pandemic has resulted in widespread job and income losses for parents statewide. Currently, 5 million students are enrolled in Tamil Nadu’s 12,419 private schools of which 10,000 are affordably priced budget private school (BPS). The new directive making TCs optional has tilted the playing field in favour of Tamil Nadu’s 37,217 government and 8,403 government-aided schools which were hitherto experiencing a continuous exodus to private, especially budget private schools. During the past year, nearly 300 of my 1,200 students have switched to government-run schools, because their parents have experienced Covid-related financial difficulties. Moreover, fees for the academic years 2019-20 and 2020-21 are overdue as most parents haven’t paid their children’s fees. And this year, they are shifting their wards to government schools,” says Dennison, founder of Infant Jesus Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Kalpakkam. K. Radha, founder-principal of the Little Oxford Matric Higher Secondary School, Chennai, affiliated with the Tamil Nadu Board of Secondary Education, says that with the state government’s recent announcement that…

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Maharashtra: Fees regulation imbroglio

Dipta Joshi, Maharashtra Despite a May 3 judgement of the Supreme Court in Indian School Jodhpur & Ors vs. State Government of Rajasthan in which the apex court ruled that the right to determine private school fees is of “management alone,” on June 7, the Maharashtra coalition government announced the formation of five Divisional Fee Regulatory Committees (DFRCs) for Mumbai, Pune, Nashik, Nagpur and Aurangabad districts. Another three divisional committees and an appellate committee to hear school fees-related disputes are on the cards. DFRCs have been established under provisions of the Maharashtra Educational Institutions (Regulation of Fee) Act, 2011. Justifying this initiative, Maharashtra’s education minister Varsha Gaikwad tweeted that “discouraging commercialisation and profiteering in the education sector” is the prime objective of establishing DFRCs state- wide, and advised “parents aggrieved by unjust school fee hikes to look no further.” Although parents contract to pay fees stipulated by private school managements at the time of admission of their children, in a society which has little respect for contracts, many of them subsequently challenge school fees and annual fee increases necessary to adjust for inflation. Several Supreme Court judgements of the 1970s, the heyday of Indian socialism when the apex court was packed with left and communist judges, prohibited “commercialisation of education”. Since then, these judgements have provoked a flood of litigation in the country’s choked courts. The hostility of parents’ communities towards the managements of private schools has increased over the past 15 months during which they have been ordered to shut down because of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. A majority of parents across the state have refused to pay full fees for their children attending online classes provided by private schools. In June 2020, the Bombay high court stayed a state government order of May 8, 2020 directing private schools to refrain from increasing fees for 2020-21 and continue charging fee as per the previous academic year. The court was responding to a petition filed by several representative associations of private school owners who argued the government has no right to directly regulate fees of private schools under the MEI (Fees Regulation) Act 2011. The Act mandates that in private schools, tuition and other fees should be approved by Parent-Teacher Association executive committees (PTA-ECs) constituted under the Act. If fees proposed by the management are not approved by the PTA EC, school managements are permitted to appeal to DFRCs. In July 2017, the Bombay high court affirmed that “parents disgruntled about school fees cannot approach DFRC”. However on the court’s order, the government constituted an 11-member committee under the chairmanship of educationist V.G. Palshikar, which recommended changes to allow parents to appeal to DFRC in some circumstances. The panel also recommended that school managements be allowed a 15 percent fee hike every two years and the right to appeal to DFRC, if the hike is not approved by the school’s PTA EC. In 2018, however, the state’s then ruling BJP-Shiv Sena government (voted to power in October 2014)…

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Delhi govt to work on class-wise reduction of syllabus under Mission Buniyad

Performance grading index politics

Autar Nehru, Delhi The second edition of the Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2019-20 whose release was “approved” by Union education minister Dr. Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank on June 6, has generated a political controversy. Designed by the department of school education and literacy of the Union education ministry and first published last year, the purpose of the annual PGI is to “catalyse transformational change in the field of school education,” i.e, to improve the quality of K-12 education. Launched in 2018, PGI ranks states for quality of school education provided based on data collected from the Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE), NCERT’s National Achievement Survey (NAS), Mid-Day Meal website, Public Financial Management System (PFMS) and the information uploaded by the states and Union territories on shagunPortalEL. However, PGI doesn’t rank states, but grades them by levels I-VII. Best performing states with scores between 951 and 1,000 points are graded Level I, Level II is for scores from 901-950 and the lowest grades for states awarded 0-550 points. In the latest PGI 2019-20, Punjab is awarded a total score of 929 (out of 1,000) with 126/180 in learning outcomes & quality; 79/80 for access, 150/150 for infrastructure & facilities, 228/230 under equity, and 346/360 for governance processes. It is followed by Chandigarh, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andaman and Nicobar. Delhi is in level III with a total score of 898. Delhi’s demotion to level III and #6 national rank has made the state’s deputy chief and education minister, Manish Sisodia, see red. At a press conference convened on June 12, he described Punjab’s top score as prime minister Narendra Modi’s “gift” to Punjab chief minister Capt. Amarinder Singh. According to Sisodia, there’s a secret pact between Modi and Capt. Singh to help the latter win the Punjab legislative assembly elections scheduled for early 2022. “Modiji has stamped the work of Captain (Amarinder Singh) of the past five years as #1 in the country while ignoring the fact that thousands of government schools (in the state) have shut or have been handed over to the private sector and people are troubled by the working of government schools in the state,” said Sisodia. The back story behind Sisodia’s ire is that since the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) first won the Delhi state assembly election in 2015 and swept the 2020 assembly election again despite the BJP wave in General Election 2019, reform of the national capital’s 1,051 public schools has been a major plank of AAP’s election campaigns. In the party’s 2020 campaign and subsequently, AAP leaders have been show-casing Delhi’s government schools as being as good in terms of infrastructure, co-curricular and sports education, and student learning outcomes as top-ranked private schools. Moreover, for several years Delhi state’s AAP government has been allocating 25 percent of its annual budget to education which it claims is the highest of any state countrywide. In the circumstances, its #6 ranking in PGI 2019-20 and its score of 898 cf. Punjab’s 929 smells of manipulation. The…

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Tamil Nadu: Shaky foundations fear

Shivani Chaturvedi (Chennai) The continuing closure of all schools and higher education institutions nationwide to safeguard children from being struck down by the dreaded Coronavirus, has prompted an almost 70 percent drop in pre-primary admissions in nearly 3,000 aided and 12,000 unaided private schools across Tamil Nadu (pop.68 million). According to a survey conducted by the Tamil Nadu Nursery Primary Matriculation Higher Secondary and CBSE Schools Association, in the academic year 2020-21 pre-primary admissions aggregated 6.3 lakh, plus 1.2 lakh poor children admitted under s.12 (1) (c) of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. In the current academic year which commences in mid-June, preschool admissions have totalled a mere 2.5 lakh. Usually in May, there is a rush for preschool admissions with top-ranked pre-primaries closing the admission process by the second week of the month. However, this year most schools have kept the admission window open till the time of writing this report. Many of them having slashed admission and tuition fees to fill capacity. “For this academic year 2021-22, we have reduced the annual fee for LKG (lower kindergarten) and UKG from Rs.30,000 to Rs.20,000. Despite this, we have filled only one against the four-five pre-primary classes we fill normally. Although the usual number of parents have collected application forms, they have not formally admitted their children. Most are waiting for in-school classes to commence once the Covid situation improves and schools reopen. A minority have preferred to give their children homeschooling because of the widespread belief that youngest children can’t learn in the online mode,” says Priyanka Nandhakumar, secretary of the Sri Sankara Matriculation Higher Secondary School, Chennai, which has 1,200 students and 58 teachers on its muster rolls. This unprecedented phenomenon of dwindling preschool admissions is confirmed by Sudha Malini, principal of the CBSE-affiliated RMK Senior Secondary School, Thiruverkadu. “We used to offer a total of 150 seats in LKG every year. In the past academic year, admissions are down to 60, and this year 50 parents took our application forms but only 30 have paid the stipulated admission/ tuition fee. For pre-KG, we used to have 80 admissions. Last year they dropped to three, and this year there are no preschool admission applications,” says Malini. Even low-cost budget private schools (BPS) which hitherto attracted children of lower-middle and working class households anxious for affordable English-medium primary education are experiencing reverse migration. According to a survey conducted by the Tamil Nadu Private Schools Association (TNPSA), in 2020-21 an estimated 3,000 students have migrated to free-of-charge government schools. Even the rock-bottom Rs.5,000-25,000 per year fees levied by BPS have become unaffordable for a growing number of working class households because of jobs and income losses. With a rising number of youngest children dropping out of the all-important foundational ECCE (early childhood care and education) which is given pride of place in the new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 — promulgated on July 29 last year and awaiting implementation — ECCE educators fear that…

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Karnataka: Hard times

Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru) Dwindling student admissions in the wake of the 13-months closure of education institutions nationwide to check the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic have sounded a death knell for the state’s estimated 10,000 brick-and-mortar private tutorial centres offering supplementary tutorials, aka coaching, to secondary students preparing for school-leaving board exams and professional education entrance tests. While established national tutorial chains such as Byjus, Aakash, FIITJEE and TIME have successfully switched to online mentoring, smaller proprietorial tutorial centres have not been able to make this switch effectively. With parents succumbing to the intensive advertising of heavyweight tutorial chains promising seamless online classes, many neighbourhood tutorial centres have slumped into bankruptcy. Usually in April-May, before the start of the academic year in June, private tutorial centres in the state — especially its admin capital Bengaluru — are abuzz with parents and students queuing up for admission. This year, there is an estimated 30-40 percent decline in applications. With the national CBSE and CISCE boards canceling class X and class XII board exams, and professional entrance exams such as NEET, IIT-JEE and CET postponed indefinitely in anticipation of a third wave of the pandemic, parents and students are adopting a wait and watch approach. Usually in April-May, before the start of the academic year in June, private tutorial centres in the state — especially its admin capital Bengaluru — are abuzz with parents and students queuing up for admission. This year, there is an estimated 30-40 percent decline in applications. With the national CBSE and CISCE boards canceling class X and class XII board exams, and professional entrance exams such as NEET, IIT-JEE and CET postponed indefinitely in anticipation of a third wave of the pandemic, parents and students are adopting a wait and watch approach. “Since March 2020, private coaching centres in the state have been shut, opening briefly during November-February. With the state in a lockdown since April, a majority of them have reported a heavy decline in student registrations. Over the past year with schools and the government cancelling exams, parents and students have not taken studies seriously. A majority of parents assume that next year will be more of the same and students will be passed without writing board exams. We tried to make a switch to online tutoring. But the response from parents and students is not encouraging. They are reluctant to pay full fees for online classes. We have had to offer fee rebates even though we have invested substantially in digital infrastructure and teacher training to provide online education,” says Rajeev Ranjan, founder of Brilliant Academy, a private tutorials chain in Bengaluru. Moreover with intermittent state government-mandated lockdowns of business and industry resulting in job losses and/or falling household incomes, parents are unwilling to pay private school tuition and supplementary tuition fees in addition. According to Harish Kumar S, a teacher at Aspire Tutorials, Bengaluru which coaches students for junior college (class XI-XII) exams and the state CET (Common Entrance Test), middle and lower…

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Winning education card

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) In sharp contrast to BJP leaders including prime minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah who stormed West Bengal with over two dozen visits to preach messages of hindutva and dangers posed by illegal Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh, incumbent chief minister and leader of the ruling Trinamool Congress party (TMC) Mamata Banerjee, campaigning for an unprecedented third consecutive term in office, gave high importance to education reforms and upgradation in her election rallies. TMC’s communal harmony and socio-economic development strategy paid off handsomely. On May 5, Banerjee was sworn in as chief minister of West Bengal (pop.91 million) for the third time after TMC swept the legislative assembly election winning 213 of 294 seats, two more than in 2016. The high riding BJP which was confident of winning over 200 seats was restricted to 77. While postmortems of political pundits and analysts indicate that the TMC government’s welfare schemes, ‘Bengali sub-nationalism’ and minority votes consolidation, played a major role in this historic win, they concede that Banerjee’s education reform initiatives were also a significant factor behind the party’s landslide victory. Unlike BJP and northern politicians who seldom bother to include reform of the country’s languishing school and higher education systems in their rabble-rousing election campaign speeches, Banerjee’s education reform agenda evidently struck a resonant chord with West Bengal’s electorate, particularly the bhadralok (refined middle class). Unsurprisingly, following the very first meeting of the new Cabinet on May 10, she announced her government’s intent to establish English-medium government schools in all 341 administrative blocks of West Bengal. Political pundits interpret this as an astute anti-BJP strategy to project Banerjee as a national leader and BJP as a ‘Hindi, Hindu and hindutva’ party. Despite several Supreme Court judgements and fierce opposition from the southern states, the BJP’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 proposes primary education solely in the Hindi medium or mother tongue. It is pertinent to note that West Bengal has witnessed fierce debate over medium of instruction in primary years since the CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist)-led Left Front government that ruled (and ruined) the state for 34 years (1977-2011) uninterruptedly, banned teaching of English in all government schools. The rationale of this ban was to reduce the rate of school dropouts in rural areas, which experts in the party ascribed to aversion of English. That decision, however, proved counter-productive in the course of time as widespread English language deficiency led to two generations of students driving down higher education standards and millions of Bengal’s youth failing competitive national examinations. With the Left Front government also de-industrialising Bengal through aggressive trade unionism, youth from English medium private schools fled the state in millions in search of employment in other states. To her credit, Banerjee started course correcting the state’s disastrous language policy from the start of her second term as chief minister. In 2018, the TMC government promulgated a two-medium policy in select government schools, with students given the option to enroll in English-medium…

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Maharashtra: Pandemic opportunism

Dipta Joshi (Mumbai) A peremptory circular issued on May 19 to Maharashtra’s 21,000 non-minority private independent (‘unaided’) schools by the Shiv Sena-led Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) coalition government, has dismayed private school managements battling the vicissitudes of the Covid-19 pandemic, and has raised the prospects of another round of courtroom battles. In the circular, the state government announced a 60 percent reduction of its obligatory per-pupil payment to private schools that have admitted free-of-charge children from poor households into classes I-VIII. Under s.12 (1) (c) of the landmark Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education (aka RTE) Act, 2009, non-minority private schools are obliged to reserve 25 percent of capacity in classes I-VIII for poor neighbourhood children aged between 6-14 years. However, under s. 12 (2) of the Act, the State (state or local government) is directed to pay private schools that admit poor children tuition fees equivalent to the per-pupil cost incurred by state/local governments in their own primary schools or actual fees of private schools, if lower. The May 19 circular, pertaining to the recently concluded academic year 2020-21 during which all schools statewide were shut down and children learned as best as they could from home, slashes government payout to schools to Rs.8,000 from the liable Rs.17,670 per pupil per annum. This enabled the MVA government to save a paltry Rs.240 crore of the Rs.400 crore it would have had to pay the state’s private primary schools. Since the RTE Act, 2009 became law on April 1, 2010, state governments have been short-changing private schools admitting s.12 (1) (c) children. Although s.12 (2) unambiguously requires government to pay private schools the per-pupil cost it incurs in its own primary/elementary (classes I-VIII) schools, it has fudged its per-pupil expenditure. According to the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, per-pupil expenditure in free-of-charge government schools in Maharashtra is Rs.25,500 per year and the Central government calculates a national average of Rs.28,008 per pupil per year. Against this, the Maharashtra state government had committed to pay private schools Rs.17,760 per child per year. But even of this amount since the Act was first enforced in the state in 2011-12, the state government owes Rs.677 crore to private schools as arrears for the years 2018-19 and 2019-20. The May 19 circular applicable with retrospective effect from the start of the recently concluded academic year, could well sound the death knell for the state’s budget private schools (BPS) which have been struggling to stay afloat because of the mandatory closure of all schools statewide following outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. “There is no official explanation for reducing the reimbursement amount. If the government believes that our costs were reduced because of schools closure, then it must answer why all government school teachers were paid full salaries during the lockdown. The government cannot have different rules for government and private schools. There seems to be a malicious intent to push private schools over the edge by taking advantage of the…

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New Delhi: Exam cancellation conundrum

Autar Nehru (Delhi) Ending months of nationwide tension and anxiety, the Delhi-based Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) — the country’s largest national Central government controlled school-leaving examination board which has 21,271 schools affiliated with it — cancelled its class XII exam for the academic year 2020-21. Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (the other national school-leaving exams board with 2,300 affiliated schools) and several state boards have followed suit and cancelled their class XII board examinations. Following a meeting on June 1 chaired by prime minister Narendra Modi during which he was briefed on all possible options by Union education ministry and CBSE officials, the prime minister announced cancellation of CBSE’s class XII examinations. A notable absentee at this meet was Union education minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, reportedly hospitalised because of complications arising from having contracted the dreaded virus in April. “After extensive consultations, we have taken a decision that is student-friendly, one that safeguards the health as well as future of our youth,” said Modi in a tweet message to the country. The same day, CISCE followed suit and announced cancellation of its class XII ISC exam. Since then, most of the 31 state government boards have — and/or are expected to — cancelled their school-leaving class XII examinations. Meanwhile, the Chhattisgarh state board commenced its class XII public exam on June 1 following adoption of the open book system. The majority of 10.4 million class XII students across the country forced to learn online as best they could because all pre-primaries and 1.50 million schools countrywide have been closed to prevent children becoming Covid positive, have welcomed this decision. In the last week of May, a nationwide poll conducted by the Youth Bar Association of India, which filed a public interest writ petition in the Supreme Court for an order directing cancellation of class XII exams, found that 93 percent of 80,000 youth interviewed favoured cancellation of the exam. But although the class XII exam for 2020-21 has been cancelled, its utility is becoming apparent with every passing day. Hitherto average scores in these exams determined entry into undergrad colleges. The higher a student’s average, the easier to secure admission into a college and study programme of choice. Now the big question is that with this exam cancelled, on what basis will top-ranked among the country’s 39,931 undergrad colleges, in which demand for seats far exceeds supply, admit the most meritorious students? This conundrum has become a subject of intense debate within government, the academy, media, parents and student communities. Among the suggestions: schools to conduct the class XII exam internally and award scores to their students; schools to aggregate final internal exam averages of classes IX, X and XI and submit to CBSE for certification; CBSE to conduct online exams. However, exam boards accepting scores in internal exams has raised fears of grades inflation, and online exams have raised questions relating to the digital divide with large numbers of student households lacking digital connectivity. Therefore, there…

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Madhya Pradesh: Ghost colleges scandal

– Aditi Maheswari (Bhopal) Even as the coronavirus pandemic ravages the Hindi heartland state of Madhya Pradesh (pop. 86.8 million) – 492,276 active cases, and 5,519 fatalities as on April 30 – a fake colleges and universities scandal has emerged as a distracting sideshow which is creating additional problems for the state’s BJP government. An enquiry report written by L.L. Kori, additional director of higher education, Sagar division, and submitted to the state’s home ministry on March 15, confirms that two ‘ghost’ teachers training institutes — NRS College and Sri Ram College in Chhatarpur district affiliated with Maharajah Chhatrawal Bundelkhand University (MCBU, est.2015) — have been issuing fake B.Ed degrees for over three years. “Yes. I have submitted a report to the home ministry. However, I cannot dis[1]cuss the contents or conclusions of the report with you,” Kori informed your correspondent. According to a Times of India correspondent who visited the common premises of these two colleges, one of them is in its initial stages of construction while there is no trace of Sri Ram College — “not even a sign board”. That these two non-existent ghost colleges professedly certified by the Delhi-based National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) and affiliated with MCBU have been certifying teachers for years without detection, has created a stir in academic circles in this educationally laggard state ranked #28 in the Education Development Index (EDI) of the NUEPA (National University of Education Planning and Administration). “This is obviously a well-oiled racket in which fraudsters in connivance with corrupt officials in MCBU are issuing forged and fraudulent B.Ed certificates to desperate youth who pay Rs.20,000-50,000 for them. This is a very dangerous development for primary and secondary education in the state. On the strength of these fraudulent certificates, youth typically bag jobs in remote government schools and draw substantial Seventh Pay Commission salaries. But since they are unqualified, the quality of education they dispense to poor rural children is the worst. This is a perfect example of corruption in the education system of Madhya Pradesh,” says Indore-based social activist Dharmendra Singh Gour who has filed several complaints with the state’s education ministry and Anandiben Mafatbhai Patel, governor of Madhya Pradesh. Gour’s charge that government school children in this Hindi heartland state — India’s largest state in size (308,245 sq. km) — learn very little is confirmed by the Annual Status of Education Report 2018 published by the highly-respected Pratham Education Foundation (estb. 1994) — ASER 2019 and ASER 2020 focused on early years education and pandemic issues. According to ASER 2018, only 56.7 percent of children in class III (aged eight and above) in MP’s government schools can read (Hindi) alphabets and 63.5 percent can identify numerals. On the other hand, in private schools of the state 85.7 percent and 88.2 percent respectively can read alphabets and numbers. Quite obviously the quality of early childhood (anganwadi) and primary school teachers being recruited — some of them not qualified at all — by government is very…

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West Bengal exceptionalism

– Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) West Bengal’s unprecedented eight-phase legislative assembly election ended on May 2 with a thumping third-time victory for the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and incumbent chief minister Mamata Banerjee, not necessarily in that order. Not only did the dream of the BJP led by star campaigners — prime minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah — of winning more than 200 of the 294 seats in the legislative assembly vanish in smoke, Banerjee’s TMC was swept back into office with 214 seats, three more than in 2016. This historic election was controversially held even as the Covid-19 pandemic was running riot statewide. On April 24, West Bengal (pop.91 million) reported 14,281 new Covid-19 cases and 59 deaths of which 20 were reported in Kolkata. Notably two TMC and one Congress candidate succumbed to the deadly virus while campaigning before the Election Commission — which has come in for scathing criticism from the judiciary — banned all mass rallies from April 12 onward. Amidst this chaos, public school education in the state has been hard hit. Though schools were partially reopened from February 12, the second pandemic wave of April has forced their shutdown again. On April 19, education minister Partha Chatterjee directed all government and government aided schools to close from April 20, bringing the summer vacation forward a month ahead of schedule. Thus far, the state government has not cancelled classes X and XII school-leaving exams of government schools. Now that the assembly election is over and Covid positive cases and fatalities are plateauing, they may be held in July, just before the start of the new academic year. Meanwhile, the pan-India CBSE and CISCE exam boards have cancelled their class X and postponed class XII exams. Even if not for law and order — widespread post-poll violence in the state has raised the shadow of President’s rule over West Bengal — Banerjee’s return to power in Writers Building, Kolkata augurs relatively well for the education sector. During her previous terms in office, the TMC government made a discernible effort to bring about the promised poribartan (change) in K-12 and higher education with several initiatives. The most successful among them is the Kanyashree scheme introduced in 2013, which provided adolescent girl children in the 13-19 age group three-tier scholarships of Rs.500 per year for continuing their education, a one[1]time payment of Rs.25,000 at age 18 and full tuition waiver for pursuing postgraduate college education. Initiatives in primary education include measures taken to ensure regular attendance of teachers in the state’s 92,000 government schools; opposing the no-detention (s.16) provision of the RTE Act, 2009 and inaugurating 100 English-medium government primaries in 19 districts of the state. Moreover, in the run-up to the legislative assembly election, Banerjee announced an array of schemes and recruitment drives in the education sector including transfer of Rs.10,000 to the bank accounts of 950,000 class XII students enrolled in 14,000 government and government-aided schools and 636 madrasas for buying smart phones or…

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Delhi: Landmark fees regulation judgement

A detailed and brilliantly reasoned 128-page judgement of the Supreme Court delivered on May 3, has huge implications for the country’s under-appreciated 450,000 private schools which — most people are unaware — host 48 percent of India’s 260 million in-school children. Upholding two sets of appeals filed by the Indian School, Jodhpur and Association of Private Unaided Schools of Rajasthan against the state government, a two judges bench comprising A.N. Khanwilkar and Dinesh Maheshwari JJ, read down, i.e modified, ss. 4, 6, and 10 of the Rajasthan Schools (Fees Regulation) Act, 2016 (FRA). The first appeal filed by the petitioners challenged the constitutional validity of several sections of the Act. In the second set of appeals they challenged an order of the state government — upheld by the high court — directing private schools to collect only 70 percent of tuition fees — and no other fees — from parents for the academic year 2020-21. The state government had successfully con[1]tended in the high court that since all schools had been under lockdown during the academic year and were teaching online, their managements had not provided co-curricular or transport and other services to students, and therefore parents are not obliged to pay for them. Moreover the syllabuses of affiliated schools had been truncated by CBSE and the state exam boards and online education was restricted to three-four hours per day. Therefore, parents should pay only 70 percent of the contracted tuition fees of their wards studying in CBSE affiliated schools and 60 percent for children in state board affiliated schools. This fees reduction order was challenged on the ground that it was issued without any authority of law and was violative of the fundamental right of the petitioners conferred by Article 19 (1) (g) of the Constitution as affirmed by an 11-judges bench of the apex court in the landmark T.M.A. Pai Foundation vs. Union of India (2002). In its detailed judgement the Supreme Court bench held that the right to determine the fees payable by students was vested in every school’s “management alone” by the Supreme Court’s judgement in the Delhi Education News T.M.A. Pai Case. The judges ruled that government can regulate the fee determined by managements of private education institutions only in cases of profiteering and levy of capitation fees. They noted that the state’s FRA prescribed an elaborate process in which the fees of schools were determined by SLFCs (school level fees committees) — drawn from Parent Teacher Associations made mandatory by FRA 2016 — with the right of either party to appeal to a divisional appellate authority and a higher revision authority. Thus the fees of every private school in the state have been agreed to by parents. Moreover under the rules of the Act the school fee fixed by the SLFC was binding for three years on both the parties, i.e. management and parents. This constituted a binding contract with which the State/government cannot interfere. The court also noted that institutional managements determine school…

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Maharashtra: Examination imbroglio

– Dipta Joshi (Mumbai) The state government’s cancellation of the school-leaving class X SSC exam of the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education (MSBSHSE), because of rising Covid-19 cases in the state, has aroused fears of class X students from 21,000 MSBSHSE-affiliated schools being at a disadvantage when competing with students from CBSE, CISCE, IB and other schools for admission into junior colleges (classes XI-XII) of their choice. This year 1.65 million students of state board schools were scheduled to write their class X exams from April 29-May 20. But on April 20, the state’s education minister Varsha Gaikwad announced cancellation of this school-leaving exam. Maharashtra follows a 10+2+3 education system with higher secondary classes XI-XII commonly referred to as junior college. This system classifies class X students as school-leavers and requires them to seek fresh ad[1]mission into junior colleges. Class X exam results are thus an important determinant in securing admission into the best of the state’s 7,000 junior colleges where admission cut-offs are in the 80-90-plus percent range for all streams. Moreover, junior colleges admit class X school-leaving students of all boards including CBSE, CISCE, etc on the basis of their average scores. This intensifies competition for admission into class XI aka FYJC or first year junior college. In the past academic year 2020-21, 2.83 million students registered for admission into junior colleges in the Mumbai metropolitan region under the state’s centralised online admission process. Little wonder ad[1]mission cut-offs of top-ranked junior colleges which are often integrated with undergrad colleges such as St. Xavier’s, Mumbai are 95 percent-plus. Traditionally, students from schools affiliated with national boards (CBSE, CISCE) score highly in class X exams due to the more lenient marking system of these boards compared to their state board counterparts. This is because the national boards follow a system under which board examiners award 80 marks for answer papers and the remaining 20 marks are awarded by affiliated schools’ teachers. State board school parents believe internal marking gives CBSE and CISCE students advantage against MSBSHSE students — all of whom compete for FYJC admissions. The education minister’s announcement that the minis[1]try will “work out a process to mark state board students on the basis of internal assessments,” has not assuaged parents’ fears. “Nobody expects the class X assessments to be fair this year if the onus of awarding marks is on schools rather than board examiners. With all schools shut down for the past year because of the pandemic, CBSE and CISCE affiliated schools conducted well-planned tests and projects evaluation. On the other hand, state board schools have been unable to conduct internal assessments, home assignments, check daily online attendance and project work continuously. Thus with no uniformity in teaching and marking systems of exam boards, marks assigned through internal exams will not be reliable. There will be a huge number of undeserving students who will clear class X. Had the state government heeded our demand to hold online instead of offline exams in urban…

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They said it in April 2021

“People in Bengal were supporting her only because they thought there is no alternative. Now they regard BJP as an alternative.” BJP president J.P Nadda in an interview with India Today (April 12) “The fall-out of the Covid-19 pandemic would have been far less serious had the PM based his policies on the advice of India’s top epidemiologists rather than his penchant for the spectacular and dramatic.” Historian Ramchandra Guha (The Wire, April 20) “There is no logic of incentives or crosssubsidies or a free market in these decisions. There is no epidemiological logic. This is ad hoc social Darwinism. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. A perfect metaphor for our healthcare system.” Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta, former president, Centre for Policy Research, on the Centre’s rudderless Coronavirus policies (April 28, Indian Express) “It is an extreme irony that while we want our children to study science in school, we don’t want to apply scientific thought in our process… Millions of people went to take a dip in the Kumbh Mela. The world laughed at us, as images of record cases and choked hospitals contrasted with lakhs of people at the river banks.” Chetan Bhagat, author, on how contempt for science has prompted spread of the Covid-19 pandemic (Times of India, April 25) “It is one thing to say that the State may regulate the fee structure of private unaided schools to ensure that the school management does not indulge in profiteering and commercialisation, but in the guise of exercise of that power, it cannot transcend the line of regulation and impinge upon the autonomy of the school to fix and collect ‘just’ and ’permissible’ school fees from its students.” Supreme Court judgement in Indian School, Jodhpur & Anr vs. State Government of Rajasthan (May 3, 2021)

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They said it in February

“There needs to be recognition that socialism is not the only ideology that has copyright on welfare. When the economy does not do well and wealth isn’t generated, then social good suffers and so does the welfare state. So, we have now called the bluff that wealth creation is in conflict with welfare.”— Nirmala Sitharaman, Union finance minister, on the Union Budget 2021-22 (The Hindu, February 22) “The government has no business to be in business. It is the government’s duty to support enterprises and businesses. But it is not essential that it should own and run enterprises.” — Prime minister Narendra Modi on privatisation (indiatoday.in, February 24) “The regime seems afraid of a new generation finding its relevance and articulation around ecology and environmentalism… Suddenly planetary issues, from climate change to the future of farming or the fate of the tribe — each a critical human rights issue — have been defined as anti-national.” — Shiv Visvanathan, well-known sociologist, on the arrest of young environment activists on charges of sedition by the BJP/NDA government (Telegraph, February 24) “By various metrics, China is now 10-15 years ahead of India. It reached India’s current per capita income 15 years ago. Similarly, on the Human Development Index, it is 15 years ahead of India. And on the more complex Union Nations Index for Sustainable Development Goals, India is unlikely to get to China’s current index level in another decade.” — T.N. Ninan on the India-China development gap (Business Standard, February 27) “Our babus have not evolved as fast to fit in with the new economic aspirations of India. In fact, ‘babu’ has now become a mildly derogatory word suggesting someone old-fashioned, who creates red-tape, slows things down and enjoys tormenting others with their power.” — Chetan Bhagat, author and columnist, on reforming the Indian Administrative Service (Times of India, February 28)

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Karnataka: Reopening dithering

Reshma Ravishanker (Bengaluru) Even as several parts of the country are bracing for a second wave following a massive surge in Covid-19 cases, parents of primary school children in Karnataka (pop.63 million) are divided on the issue of sending their children back to school. An online survey conducted last month (March) by the Vidyarthigala Nade Shaleya Kade (VNSK, ‘Students’ march towards school’), a Bengaluru-based NGO comprising educationists, doctors, teachers, and parents, indicates that 82.24 percent of households are in favour of commencement of on-campus classes for primary school children in the next academic year beginning July 2021. Of the 3,165 parents interviewed, a majority of 2,603 wanted schools reopened for primary children. On the other hand, another study conducted by LocalCircles, an online platform, indicates that 72 percent of households in Bengaluru and 62 percent statewide are unwilling to send their children to school until a substantial percentage of the state’s population is vaccinated and the Covid-19 pandemic subsides. The LocalCircles online survey covered 9,687 respondent households countrywide including 1,971 in Karnataka. These households have incomes of above Rs.3 lakh per annum. Dr. V.P. Niranjanaradhya, senior fellow at Universalization of the Equitable Quality Education Programme of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, and prime mover of the VNSK survey, says the two surveys reflect the differing aspirations of low-income and high-income households. “The majority of sample respondents in our survey comprised low-income families. Government anganwadis and primary schools provide a safer environment for children than their cramped homes in crowded localities. Moreover, children are assured of a free-mid-day meal in government anganwadis and primaries. That’s why our survey which focused on low-income households, shows an overwhelming preference for reopening of schools,” he explains. The diametrically opposite conclusion of the LocalCircles survey which indicates that 62 percent of parents in the state prefer their children to learn from home is because of the profile of respondents. All parents interviewed had annual household incomes above Rs.3 lakh with half reporting incomes of over Rs.6 lakh. Quite obviously, these households are well-equipped with Internet connectivity and digital devices (computers, laptops, Smart phones) with children enrolled in upscale private schools that have smoothly transitioned to online learning. Unsurprisingly, they prefer their children to learn from home until the worst of the pandemic is over. With poor, income-stressed, and working class households clearly in favour of reopening of public and affordably priced budget private schools — these households/families constitute a majority in Karnataka — the dithering of the BJP government of the state has dismayed educationists. On January 29, ten months after all education institutions nationwide were ordered to be shutdown, the state government permitted in-school classes for senior and higher secondary (classes IX-XII) students. Almost a month later, it allowed on-campus classes for VI-VIII children. However with Karnataka experiencing a second surge in Covid-19 positive cases in March, most upscale private schools have reverted to online classes with the state’s 49,637 government schools reporting 30-40 percent attendance in classes VI-VIII even as…

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Madhya Pradesh: Unprecedented verdict

Aditi Maheswari (Bhopal) Despite ‘ragging’ — an archaic initiation ritual during which new entrants into schools and colleges are teased and bullied by seniors having been banned by the Central and state governments and inviting the wrath of the Supreme Court — acts of ragging are punishable by fines of up to Rs. 50,000, jail terms ranging from six months to ten years — this brutal rite of passage, refuses to die out. In an unprecedented judicial verdict on February 5, a session court in Bhopal sentenced four women pharmacy students of the RKDF Medical College, Bhopal, to five years imprisonment for abetting the suicide of a first-year student following continuous ragging. Additional sessions court judge Amit Ranjan also imposed a fine of Rs.8,000 on the convicts. According to the prosecution, the convicted students mentally and physically tortured Ankita Sharma driving her to suicide by hanging on August 7, 2013. In a suicide note, the deceased named the four senior students and also indicted the college management for not paying heed to her complaints and failing and neglecting to stamp out this humiliating practice. Shortly after Sharma’s tragic suicide, a PIL (public interest litigation) was filed by a medical student in Indore, and the Madhya Pradesh high court served notice on the state government to implement the Raghavan Committee’s report (2007) and Supreme Court directives to curb ragging in education institutions statewide. The PIL petition listed corrupt practices including ragging that are rife in 23 medical and 15 dental colleges of Madhya Pradesh (pop.73 million). Admitting the PIL on September 2, 2013, a division bench comprising acting Chief Justice K.K. Lahoti and Justice Subhash Kakade served notices on Barkatullah University, Bhopal, the district collector and RKDF Medical College, where the accused students and the deceased were studying. However, neither the Congress (Dec 2018-March 2020) nor the incumbent BJP government has addressed the ragging ritual which is practicised widely across the state. According to data compiled by the Aman Movement, which manages an anti-ragging helpline for the Delhi-based University Grants Commission, although ragging cases in higher education institutions countrywide have fallen sharply from 40 percent in 2009 to 4 percent, 132 ragging complaints were filed in MP in 2019. This is the highest number of complaints filed from any state since the Aman Movement started receiving complaints a decade ago. To curb the incidence of this pernicious college initiation rite which often has serious consequences, educationists and human rights activists are calling for specific anti-ragging legislation from the state government on lines of the Maharashtra Prohibition of Ragging Act, 1999. “Andhra Pradesh has its own state legislated anti-ragging law, titled Andhra Pradesh Ragging Prohibition Act, 1997. Consequently, while Andhra had only 29 ragging complaints last year, in MP, 132 ragging complaints were registered. There is a need to have a state enacted anti-ragging law,” says Deepak Gour, a Bhopal-based lawyer. Clearly, an idea whose time has come. Also read: Delhi: Another ragging casualty

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West Bengal: Unwanted new broom

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) It seems to be the season for top-level resignations from blue-chip higher ed institutions. Soon after the highly respected public intellectual Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Dr. Arvind Subramaniam, former chief economic advisor of the BJP/NDA government, put in their papers at the ambitious, privately-promoted Ashoka University in Delhi NCR on March 15, Dr. Anju Seth, the first woman director of the vintage top-ranked Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C, estb.1961), sent her resignation letter to the prime minister’s office and IIM-C’s board of governors. The board is chaired by Shrikrishna Kulkarni, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and former managing director of Panasonic India and founder-president of Fanuc India. In her resignation letter dated March 21, Seth accused Kulkarni and the board of “maligning and denigrating her publicly.” A highly qualified alumna of Delhi University, IIM-C itself and awarded a Ph D in business strategy by the Stephen M. Ross School of Business, Michigan University, USA, Seth was recruited from Virginia Tech (USA) where she is a tenured professor of business management, in Novermber 2018 for a four-year term. “I am deeply anguished at not being able to fulfil this mandate and help turn around IIM-C to a world-class institution with a distinctive Indian heritage. This situation has arisen because of a breakdown in confidence escalating over the past four months between me as director and CEO and you (Kulkarni) as chairman of the board. To the best of my ability, I have been conducting my responsibilities as director and CEO in the best long-run interests of the institute with a focus on urgent reforms, forward-looking decisions and in the interest of all stakeholders,” wrote Seth in her resignation letter accessed by the Economic Times. Although Seth’s resignation letter went viral on social media, Kulkarni, members of the board of governors, and faculty have maintained a studied silence on the issue. Nevertheless, according to off-the-record conversations with faculty and alumni it’s clear that Seth swiftly transformed into a new broom in a tearing hurry to sweep this essentially faculty-run institute clean. She discerned “open breach of government guidelines in matters of procurement and recruitment of personnel” and “legacy issues related to lack of transparency or accountability, misuse of public funds, a weak financial situation,” and charged Kulkarni and the board with “undue interference” which impeded her reform initiatives. But Seth’s aggressive reforms agenda not only cheesed off the board of governors but also the faculty of this vintage B-school which is routinely ranked with IIM-Ahmedabad and IIM-Bangalore as the best B-school in India. Quite clearly neither this widely respected B-school’s board nor its faculty believe that IIM-C needs urgent and radical “urgent reforms”. Last December 60 of IIM-C’s faculty wrote to the Union education ministry complaining that under Seth’s leadership, there was “decline in academic and research environment” and “systematic undermining” of the academic council, the institute’s principal curriculum framing and governance body. Evidently, the board and faculty have no regrets about Seth’s resignation a year before…

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Maharashtra: Witty-Cerestra fallout

Dipta Joshi (Mumbai) The year-long shutdown of all education institutions countrywide to protect children and youth from the Covid-19 pandemic has thrown the finances of the overwhelming majority of the country’s 450,000 private schools into disarray. Even in upscale private schools, cash flows have been adversely affected because a minority of parents who suffered salary cuts or deferment or even job losses are unable to pay children’s school fees. This black swan event i.e, the pandemic, has been made worse for the country’s private schools by the Central government’s failure to classify them as MSMEs (micro small and medium enterprises) entitled to several pandemic reliefs (interest payment moratoria, soft loans etc), and state governments recklessly slashing school fees and imposing fee ceilings. The financial difficulties of private school promoters/managements have created M&A (merger and acquisition) opportunities for well-funded offshore education corporates and REITs (real estate investment trusts). To get around clumsy laws replete with loopsholes, drafted by government bureaucrats prohibiting for-profit corporates and entrepreneurs from promoting or owning education institutions, astute lawyers have devised several strategies to enable private school promoters to earn surpluses for investment in institutional upgradation and promotion of new greenfield schools. Typically, an asset management for-profit limited liability company is registered by a private school promoter. The physical assets — land, buildings, equipment — of a given school/college, are sold to the asset management company and leased back to the school which (from fees paid by students) pays the company an annual/monthly lease rent. Payment of rent for leased premises doesn’t fall within the definition of commercial activity for schools. However, the necessity to negotiate and devise complex contracts to get around legislation and case law which forbids “commercialisation of education” has generated its own problems. In 2016, the Hyderabad-based Cerestra Infrastructure Trust (estb.2015) which describes itself as an “edu-infra partners and institutionalised edu-infra sale and leaseback” company, entered into an agreement with Dr. Vinay Jain, promoter-director of the Mumbai-based Witty Group of Institutions which owns four K-12 schools, to acquire a 51 percent stake in VJTF Infraschool Services (Mumbai) Pvt. Ltd (VJTFI), the asset management company of Witty International School (Mumbai), for Rs.97 crore to be paid in two installments — Rs.47 crore on signing of the agreement and the remaining Rs.50 crore within one year. Under the terms of the agreement, subject to payment of the full amount, the school management committed to pay a fixed lease rental to VJTFI. According to Jain, Cerestra paid Rs.47 crore upfront for purchase of its 51 percent stake in VJTFI. However, it failed and neglected to pay the remaining Rs.50 crore for over three years, a default which prompted Jain to terminate the agreement of sale of 51 percent equity of VJTFI to Cerestra on December 24, 2020. “Subsequently, we learned Cerestra had not taken the required permission to enter into the 2016 agreement from SEBI (Security Exchange Board of India). It had cheated, misrepresented and given wrong representations and warranties to us and wrongly acquired 51…

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Delhi: Roles definition lesson

Avtar Nehru (Delhi) The resignation of prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta from the political science faculty of Ashoka University (AU) on March 15, has stirred the academy in India and abroad and shaken the carefully curated reputation of this seven-year-old university positioned as the country’s first wholly — American Ivy league-style — liberal arts university. When Mehta was appointed vice chancellor of this institution in 2017 and two years later demoted himself to mere faculty, he brought formidable scholarship (alum of Oxford (UK) and Princeton (USA), teaching experience at Harvard, and as president of Delhi-based think tank Centre for Policy Research), to AU. Perhaps more important, as consulting editor and weekly columnist of the multi-editions Indian Express, Mehta has established a reputation as the country’s foremost anti-establishment public intellectual. In his resignation letter, Prof. Mehta wrote: “After a meeting with founders, it has become abundantly clear to me that my association with the university may be considered a political liability. My public writing in support of a politics that tries to honour constitutional values of freedom and equal respect for all citizens, is perceived to carry risks for the university. In the interests of the university, I resign.” Two days after Indian Express broke the story of Mehta’s resignation, Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic advisor (2014-2017) of the incumbent BJP/NDA government at the Centre and professor in AU’s department of economics, also put in his papers in protest. These high-profile resignations not only hogged national and international media headlines but have also sparked a fierce debate on academic freedom and university autonomy in contemporary India, where the BJP leadership is quick to classify all criticism of the government as anti-national, and to slap sedition charges on critics. Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan was among the first to react. “Ashoka’s founders have succumbed to outside pressure to get rid of a troublesome critic. Free speech is the soul of a great university. The founders have bartered away its soul,” says Rajan. Widespread criticism of the university’s administration has undoubtedly dented the reputation of this highly respected varsity ranked India’s #3 private university in the EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings 2020-21, and particularly of its trustees and administration. The faculty and students who hitherto regarded themselves as a privileged elite, are also up in arms. Ninety faculty dons of the university in a letter to the university vice chancellor Malabika Sarkar, wrote: “We are greatly troubled by this scenario. Even more troubling is the possibility that our university may have acceded to pressure to remove Prof. Mehta or to request, and accept, his resignation.” Students — half of them on varying need-based scholarships — under the aegis of its Student Government, have addressed a three-point demand — public acknowledgement by the founders of what Prof. Mehta has indicated; an open meeting with faculty and students and divesting administrative powers and roles from founders of university to elected representatives of faculty and vice chancellor. According to latest reports, Sarkar has given…

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