There is an amphibian called the paradoxical frog. Its tadpole is three times the size of the adult. Our National Education Policy, now in its fifth year, has outdone this feat of
shrinkage. The draft NEP filled nearly 500 pages; the final version, just over 60.
It makes up by a plethora of prescriptions. It extends the undergraduate course by a year without stipulating additional faculty, space or funds. It concentrates research under a single body with a pre-set range of topics. It drastically cuts down on grants. Instead, institutions must borrow from the Higher Education Financing Agency and hike fees to repay the loan. Admissions across India are increasingly centralised in one-size-fits-all entry tests. Academic autonomy and diversity vanish in the process.
Not all the provisions are specified in those 60 pages, but follow from them and invoke their authority. Prescriptions and restrictions have grown incrementally. School textbooks revalue not only history and culture but also the theory of evolution and the periodic table. Sectarian objections are raised against university syllabi. Lectures and conference topics are vetted, as are the speakers. IIT Kanpur set up a committee to investigate a song by Faiz Ahmad Faiz. The University Grants Commission issued a circular against spitting on campus. (This was long before Covid.)
What is the outcome of this orgy of commission and omission? It may be too early to answer with factual precision. Crucial factors like campus freedom and academic morale cannot be quantified in any case, but both have unquestionably declined. Campuses are controlled by ‘committed’ faculty and, at ground level, by politicised student brigades. They do not flourish in spite of the heavy-handed control but as its instruments and even arbiters. Academics across India are wary about speaking their minds as never before. This tells on their readiness to take initiatives or foster original thought, even as they are assessed for ‘academic innovation’.
Knowledge and understanding cannot be quantified either, but they are threatened with a reductive conformity. Syllabi are largely standardized across the country. Online teaching occupies more and more pedagogic space. It not only saves on teachers’ salaries but also pleases the big edutech houses and, most importantly, confines the nation’s youth to a sanitized, unthreatening course of instruction.
Given the dismal situation, even this might often be a gain. But it impairs our best legacies of learning, and deflects the nation disastrously from the goal of a productive knowledge society. Predictably, college education is losing its shine. This year's Common University Entrance Test saw more applicants but fewer students actually taking the test. Engineering colleges, once the destinations of choice, are shutting down. At the juvenile end of the spectrum, the Annual Status of Education Reports reveal an alarming lack of basic skills. In 2024, 25% of teenagers could not read a book in their mother tongue meant for seven-year-olds. The most radical innovation in the NEP has been quietly forgotten: merging anganwadis with early primary education, which might truly have changed India’s basic educational profile.
The paradoxical frog thus provides a new and depressing parable. When the drumbeats die down, the actual output proves sadly meagre.
An alternative scenario dispenses with the drumbeats. Cash-strapped state governments prefer this option as it saves money, which can then be dispensed elsewhere for better political returns. West Bengal offers an instructive example.
Bengal has doubled its state universities in a little over the last dozen years. But the new ones are hardly past the signboard stage, while the established ones are starved of funds and personnel. The latter would be lucky to have half their sanctioned faculty, while some new ones have hardly any full-time teachers at all. Labs, libraries and other infrastructure are in commensurate decline or, in new institutions, virtually absent. Most affiliated colleges reflect the same deficiencies magnified in smaller compass.
The scenario is not peculiar to Bengal. Madras University was unable to pass its annual budget this March. The permanent faculty at major universities might number less than a hundred across departments. College departments are closing alarmingly for a nation intent on doubling its enrolment in 10 years.
Private institutions might be absorbing part of the exodus. But their sheer cost shuts out the majority, with little prospect of compensating employment thereafter. One section of our youth doggedly pursues draining courses at crippling expense. Another section is giving up on higher education altogether.
That is the unspeakable tragedy of the dismantling of the state education system: it robs most Indians of all chance of a meaningful education. Government-run schools are varyingly deficient in virtually all states. In Bengal, an inadequate but once serviceable school system is crumbling through unchecked corruption and neglect. The teacher-student ratio fails all acceptable norms: there is scarcely one full-time maths teacher per high school. Inevitably, faculty morale at all levels is at an all-time low.
A field left fallow is overrun with weeds. Politicized mafiosi call the shots on all too many campuses, even at the hallowed level of medical colleges. Systemic revival seems a receding prospect. Our rulers bask complacently in the impasse under shelter of court orders, skirting the onus of cleaning up the mess. Moreover, as in other Opposition-ruled states, the government and the governor (also chancellor of the state’s universities) wrangle over authority while institutions languish and students flee the system.
I have outlined two alternative educational scenarios: misdirected bounty against lack of funds, motions of frenetic activity against torpor and negligence. Ultimately, the two overlap. Both deprive the deprived, cheating the nation of productive human resources.
The path of action might offer more passing rewards than the path of dereliction; neither will lead us to a true knowledge society. T.S. Eliot saw the world as ending “Not with a bang but a whimper.” Our educational world affords a choice between the two, or perhaps both together. That might simply double our sense of loss.
We thus revert to the paradoxical frog. Its tadpole may be many times the standard length, but it ends up the same size, croaks in the same key.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University