FYUP row: Why Delhi University must be privatised now

What a F-UP! An “autonomous” Delhi University rams through a four-year undergrad programme (FYUP) that it has not thought through despite opposition from most stakeholders (teachers, students). The University Grants Commission, the regulator, stays mum, presuming it has the government’s nod. A new government comes in, and UGC is suddenly asking the university to wind up the course, again without thinking it through. The DU boss is said to have resigned, but at the time of writing, it was not clear if he had. The matter is ending up in court. Either way, it is one godawful mess. If the setting up of FYUP was no great shakes, its abolition was no great shakes either. There was no tearing hurry to bring it down. Why did everyone, from the HRD Ministry to the “autonomous” regulator to the “autonomous” university flunk the basic test of keeping institutions above petty manoeuvres? Pratap Bhanu Mehta, writing in The Indian Express (25 June), sees all stakeholders as being at fault: the government, especially the UPA, the autonomous institutions, and academics themselves. “The word autonomy has become a slogan of war, not a feature of academic culture. Every bit of the system wants to claim autonomy for itself and not for others. Just ask yourself a basic question: Who should define the academic identity of an academic institution? Who defines it in practice? We do not have a clear answer to either question.” [caption id=“attachment_1589385” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Only complete financial autonomy will help: PTI[/caption] Mehta’s own answer seems to this: “In education, there needs to be a presumption against centralisation. The approach to institutions cannot be crassly instrumental. None of them (previous education ministers) understood that reform will require…. reclaiming institutions one by one in a context that respects their identity and needs.” I would like to take it further and say that educational institutions should be kept as far away from government as possible. They should largely be privatised, with government retaining only the regulatory role. Ask yourself: what is the chance that Delhi University would have been in such a mess if it had been a private institution, with its own financing? A malevolent government can, of course, make any institution’s life miserable, but for that there are the courts to seek justice from. But autonomy is something internal: if you have the financial wherewithal, you can be autonomous. If you have to keep going back to the government for cash and basic appointments, you might as well forget about it. Government role in education is something both Left and Right broadly agree on. The Left, of course, heartily believes in government; the Right may not want government to be in business, but it thinks it should be focusing on non-profit social sectors like education and health. However, this hypothesis is seriously flawed, at least in the venal Indian context. My reasoning is this: if we say that the public sector is not good enough to run even commercial operations, where the simple goal is a positive bottomline, how can it run an incredibly complex operation like education, where the metrics to measure success are infinitely more complicated and the impact of government spending on outcomes is tougher to evaluate? In fact, the evidence is that educational institutions in the public sector are even less accountable to anybody compared to private ones as the staff cannot be sacked, the bosses cannot be held to account for failing to produce results, fees cannot be raised to reasonable levels - and nothing will be measured to check if public money is delivering bang for the buck. Autonomy, if given, will be often abused  as seems to be the case with Delhi University’s FYUP, or fictitious - as the University Grants Commission’s order to wind up the FYUP suggests. Public sector autonomy is a mirage because the system puts babus and ministers on top. Autonomy cannot be real as long as you have to go to the government for cash. The two preconditions for autonomy are thus financial independence, and privatisation. If these are not done, you will get interference and incompetence. Let’s ask the question again: if Delhi University had been a private institution, would we have seen such a foolish experiment as FYUP being bunged in without much thought, in the first place, or would we have seen a regulator ride roughshod over its autonomous decision to launch it anyway? The answer is obvious: a private institution bears the risk of failure and thus would not launch a programme without market research and a hard assessment of value. When a government is footing the bill, why bother with such niggling details about what value an extra year in college adds? The short point is this: the government’s role in running educational institutions should be minimised. Its job should be that of an enabler and regulator, not player. The counter-point may be this: the IITs, IIMs and the NITs are also products of the public sector and they seem to be doing quite well. Does this not disprove the hypothesis that governments can’t run higher educational institutions? Actually, the success of our best-known educational institutions owe much to two factors: one is the meritocracy that they initially espoused (which is now dwindling in a sea of caste-based quotas); the other factor is the extreme competition to get in, which automatically filters out weak alumni. What the IIT-JEE, AIEEE, CET and CAT entrance tests really do is weed out all but the best at the entry stage itself. If less than one percent of applicants can get in, the quality of people entering these institutions is of such calibre that what is taught in these institutions is of almost secondary importance. It is the opposite of gi-go (garbage in, garbage out). The IIT/IIM types are about Wi-Wo. Winners in, winners out. But even with this quality of students, the IITs and IIMs do not figure in the top 100 list in international rankings. They do not produce great research or cutting edge ideas despite having been in existence for decades. Notes a Business Standard report of 2013: “The IITs…slipped in the world’s top-200 university rankings. IIT-Delhi slipped 10 notches to 222, down from 212 last year. The annual ranking, with 800-strong education institutions, includes 11 Indian institutions, with IIT-Bombay at 233, IIT-Kanpur at 295, IIT-Madras at 313 and IIT-Kharagpur at 346.” The point is not to say these institutions are not great, but that they may be held back from becoming even better by the dead hand of government. Our best higher educational institutions need to be made financially independent and freed from government control. Privatisation is not an idea applicable only to the Air Indias or BSNLs of the public sector. It has to be brought to education, too. This is not to say all higher education must be for profit; but the role government can play is to enable students to pay for worthwhile courses. It means widening the ambit of partial and full scholarships to many more lakhs of students, and not trying to run institutions with huge subsidies and an academic delivery far below potential. In fact, there is an implicit acknowledgement of the government’s inability to deliver in the Right to Education Act, which deals with schooling. The Act covers 10 percent of the schools that are private and not the 90 percent that are public. In effect, this is the government telling us it cannot educate kids in school as well as the private sector. It is time to acknowledge the same in higher education. Delhi University, among others, should be on the block for privatisation and/or full financial autonomy. At the very least, it should be asked to look for ways to achieve full financial autonomy so that it can control its own academic output.