The view has been expressed that we spend far too much time discussing the state of higher education in India — especially the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) — when our schools are in such poor shape. There is a point in this. However, so much of our national resources is being poured into this segment, when it has valuable alternative uses, that we would be naive to ignore the outcome. Therefore, we should welcome two recent public interventions that help us see what needs to be done to improve outcomes in higher education. Though these have been made by individuals from different vantages — as with the vanishing point in the work of art — they lead to a singular destination in terms of our understanding.

State surveillance and control

Thus, Amartya Sen has appeared in the media to say that the present government aims to establish control over the institutions of higher learning in the public sector while N.R. Narayana Murthy used the occasion of the annual convocation at the Indian Institute of Science recently to challenge the institution to explain how it could have helped improve lives in India.

These interventions are vital to an evaluation of the democratic project as we build public institutions, and have poured our meagre resources into them for decades, so that they hold a mirror to society, helping us see what we may have missed or, more to the point, what we refuse to look at. For far too long, the functioning of these bodies has been kept off the radar of social audit............Read more

Source web page: The Hindu