Reserva-shun: Part II

At the time of writing Part 1 of this post, it seemed like there was still some scope for introspection on the part of the Govt. and an opportunity to define the specifics of a more rational reservation policy. In the week or so it's taken me to get back to writing this, it seems like our netas have managed to figure it all out, shove their decision down everybody's gullets and feel quite smug about themselves.

So why write at all? As it seems, the agitating medicos aren't taking this egregious we-don't-give-a-damn-what-you-think attitude and are keeping up their strike... so there's still a debate in the public arena whether our dear PM would like to acknowledge it or not. Also, a few friends from IIMA have been thinking about ways to support the movement and make a difference, and so... here I go again! :)

I've been arguing for sometime now that those agitating against this latest round of caste-based reservation politics are bound to fail unless they (we) articulate a more comprehensive policy alternative that addresses the legitimate concerns of the oppressed members of society. More importantly, we need to use this movement to politically mobilize a section of the public that has traditionally been electorally inactive - without such a mobilization, the logic of electoral math will continue to supercede any "public interest" rationale that contradicts it.

The specific issue of reservation in higher education institutions has been a highly emotive issue. Underlying this issue are factors of a precarious demand-supply situation students face in the country today. There is an absolute dearth of quality educational infrastructure in India today. Even our famed IITs (in the words some of their own alumni) owe their fame more to a rigorous selection system than the educational infrastructure they have nurtured. The constriction in supply is acute - we have just a few thousand students in the IITs, just a couple of "good" NITs that suffer from the same problems of faculty and infrastructural shortages etc. The situation is worse in the medical sciences where students who slog to get their MBBS degrees soon realize that it is practically useless - and then discover that the odds of getting a postgraduate degree are almost nil, barring super-duper-brilliance OR a sackful of cash.

I don't pretend to have the 'right' answers to this muddle, but in my view there are two aspects to the issue worth considering:

1. Equitable and just access to educational resources
2. Administration of higher education in India

Without addressing both these aspects, I fear that we'll continue to be shackled within the same us vs them mindset and dialogue that has characterized the debate thus far.

Equity, Access and Merit

It's a universally accepted fact today that share of underpriviledged sections of our society in higher education is far less than their share of population. Providing opportunities for higher education was intended to enable these sections of society to break the cycle of oppression by giving them the training and opportunity to access/enter professions they would otherwise not have had a chance to practise. It is argued that these underprivileged sections cannot compete on a level ground with others who have had access to a richer set of educational resources.

But how to ensure equity while balancing the need for merit? Here's what I've been able to come up with:

• Ensure that minimum proficiency criteria are set for all fields. This could take the form of a two-stage test similar to what we have at the IIT-JEE today. Those not clearing this basic-skills hurdle would be ineligible.
• Each institute could run special coaching classes that provide a "boot camp" to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds to attain a basic level of competence before commencement of courses.
• Unfilled seats from any applicable quotas should be filled by residual "general merit" students
• Inter-institution transfers should be allowed/encouraged after the first year to fill any capacity created by students not progressing from one year to the next. Students who had applied previously under the general merit category may also be invited to join by the insitution in subsequent years. Where such transfers may involve a lack of "coverage" of courses missed by incoming transfer students, individual institutions can insist on students completing these credits before graduation.
• Since education is intended to provide access to job opportunities that are typically accessible after undergraduate education, higher education should ideally be excluded from the purview of reservations. It's however unlikely that such a position find acceptance given the situation today.
• Candidates can claim reservation at only one point of time during their higher education. So a candidate entering an undergrad institute through reservation will have claimed his fair share of the helping hand of the State and be ineligible for a future hand-out.

At a more fundamental level, we can also try to implement a verification of Mandal-esque criteria on an individual basis e.g. whether the person studied in a backward area; if the living circumstances are disadvantaged (poor neighbourhoods or dwellings); whether loan history indicates an above-average lifestyle or not (home loan amounts, car loan histories etc.). Certainly, the technology to do this exists today. This would also have the effect of creating truly objective criteria that the disadvantaged irrespective of caste or creed could meet and thereby become eligible for state support.

Fixing the System

I think almost everyone who's been through the higher education system in India agrees that it is horribly broken. The supply is horribly constrained (see Shekar Gupta's wonderful editorial in this regard), and the quality of education imparted (even at some of the "best" colleges available) is simply appalling. Good faculty are very hard to find, and the training resources available to students are far below what their peers would enjoy outside the country. It's generally acknowledged that we as country churn out students with degrees rather than real skills, leaving it up to their prospective employers to train them to do anything useful.

Till date, we have lived with the rationing and the pathetic quality - the jobs available were typically fewer than the aspirants anyway. Yet today, with economic growth finally kicking in, we find ourselves in a unique position - a country with millions of unemployed graduates where corporates scream about a lack of usable talent!! We need to fix this urgently for everybody's sake and it's going to take some serious systemic changes... here are my 2 cents:

• Enable/Promote private participation in education at both primary-secondary and higher education - NK Singh came up with this wonderful idea of putting the power of choice in the hands of the common man, and letting a free-market dynamic address the demand for education in the country. He proposed putting education coupons in the hands of every family for an amount equivalent to the proposed state spending per capita on education. Families could then pay for education with these coupons and top up the amount to the extent they saw fit. He reasons that the private sector will respond to the demand (as it already is), but more extensively as people who today have nothing to give will be remarkably empowered through this mechanism. We already have ration cards and electoral cards - there is no reason why we cannot enable this as well. He recommends that the state limit its role to testing and quality control. He reckons that when schools are ranked based on their performance, parents will vote with their feet. In addition to his recommendations in a BS article that I can't seem to find, I'd also suggest leveraging the existing school infrastructure in some kind of Public-private-partnership on a BOO(T?) model - we could work in some kind of user fee norms and SLAs into agreements which enable private parties to take over the running of public school infrastructures. Reimbursing the economic cost of education in cases where govt. initiated quotas are in place for those seats where revenue opportunities are being constrained on account of govt. policy - an area of concern for all private managements today.
• Provide clear guidelines for accreditation/affiliation of institutions and have a transparent system of evaluation - One of the big reasons for malpractices on hte part of managements of private institutions has been that the Govt. has created an immensely corrupt adminstrative system. All certification authorities are accused of conducting a cash-and-carry evaluation system. This is particularly acute in the case of medical education - the bribes paid to set up a medical college are humungous as is the annual hafta paid to the blokes who reassess the situation each year, and the rot is said to run up to the very top of the Dept. of Health (surprise!!). It's hardly surpising then that medical education is also characterized by exorbitant capitation fees (and in black!), the worst demand-supply gap and nepotism of every imaginable kind!
  
• Implement fool-proof privacy methods that prevent candidate identification - this would help check the current system of "rigging" the application process to serve the interests of those who "buy" seats on the black market today.
• Enforce clear guidelines and transparent mechanisms for application processing/evaluation - though one expects that if fee-setting is up to the management and that one is counting on consumers to vote with their feet depending on the quality of the service provided.
• Provide complete autonomy in managing finances to all Govt. promoted institutions - this should extend to curriculum-setting, fee-setting, compensation and hiring practices. Govt.'s role should only be limited to providing an independent watchdog to monitor and publicize quality/performance levels.
• Promote research ecosystems through a rapid ramp-up in funding across different disciplines ranging from the sciences to the arts. Seed research corpuses in institutes to fund initial research from new faculty. Create scientific equivalents of DARPA, NIH etc. to fund research projects across different fields. These researchers need to bring their research-driven insights to the classroom and develop an academic ecosystem for the future.
• Promote private contribution to university-based research through tax cuts and other incentives.
  

Okay, so that's all I could think of in the ummm... week or so I've had. I do wish that we start looking at this as an opportunity to do something really meaninful than simply mumble tokenisms to the ghost of Mandal. We really, really could do with some new solutions in this space... and fast.

Here's hoping that my dear spineless PM actually stops resting on his past laurels and starts leading from the front with some serious policy initiatives, rather than play Joe Doormat...