The government has
mooted to overhaul the archaic education by infusing vocational training into
it
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. It’s a popular adage
universally accepted. The present education system is thoroughly incompatible
to our changing needs and virtually fails to rejig the nation’s economy. We are
in 21’st century where even the kids flirt with the keyboards and play hackers
to their elder sibling’s mail. Contrary to this the old-style education is
supposedly created to hone people’s drafting skill, born out of exigency to
flip through the files of the gargantuan British colony.
The huge human resources
that are generated by this massive industry could better be termed as an exercise
in futility. A sea of educated unemployed can prove to be highly deleterious
for any nation. For a nation undergoing million mutinies, these ticking time
bombs of ever swelling unemployed may make the situation even worse. Jobless
people are the soft targets for these hostile forces. When Kanu Sanyal gave the clarion call for ‘sabotaging brutish’ feudal
system from an indiscrete
village of West Bengal – Naxalbari – horde of unemployed youths from nation’s premier
institutions joined his bandwagon. The movement had consumed a large number of
starry-eyed unemployed. And the Naxalite movement saw the light of day to ‘root
out’ petty capitalists from its soil. Its resurgence in the present time can be
ascribed to multiple factors – non-implementation of land ceiling act that is
gathering dust, lopsided economic development and universities de-linked from
agro-industrial growth.
The vast plateau of
Vidarbha, with insignificant industrial growth, central Bihar, where the paucity of irrigation has reduced
the area into a gray sandy expanse, the ‘unproductive ’dense forests of Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra where the semi-literate and unemployed are lured
by the charm of ‘egalitarianism’ and ‘each according to his need’ became the core
of Naxal movement. We now discover the asymmetrical education at the root of
these chronic problems.
Since independence
several commissions have been constituted by the government to earmark the
lacuna in the existing system and to suggest remedial measures. Reams of paper
wasted but nothing ever changed. On the other hand there emerged a new
‘capitation fee oriented’ professional courses such as engineering, medical,
MBAs, mass
communication, to speak a few. Due to
their high capitation fee, they are beyond the reach of poor. Thus, two sets of
education system came into being – catering to two different classes. The
former, the minuscule urban rich, who could avail of the any prime
existing system and the later, the teeming rural poor who couldn’t and thus
rely on the ‘subsidised’ education on a government platter.
“There should be a
level playing field,” said Ansari Nadeem, an NRI who lives in UAE. ‘The capitation- fee-oriented education
perpetuates discriminative system. It produces two sets of professionals – one
who come out from the regular professional colleges such as IITs, IIMs and state-controlled medical and engineering
colleges that admit the students
on rigorous competition and the others who fail to make it to
competition-oriented colleges donate hefty sums to get into ‘Bangalore-centric’
capitation fee charging colleges.” The government should ban all such ‘colleges
and make education uniform to make it accessible to the poor.
In developed economies,
the universities and research institutions are linked with industries. Thus,
institutions contribute to the GDP of nation. In India we are carrying the burden of outmoded curriculum which is
distantly related to agro-industrial production. Moreover, except small numbers
of vocational and engineering colleges we have large number of general colleges
that are producing graduates and post-graduates in mind-boggling numbers every
year. And the jobs remaining scarce, very few among them get employed by
government as well as private sectors. The educated unemployed whose number is
piling up every successive year is not good for a nation like India which is
reeling under politico-economic instability. Consider Germany of the 1930s. It too had confronted with a
similar situation – double-digit inflation, resurgence of ultra-right
nationalistic forces, xenophobia spurred by Nazi hoodlums - Brown Shirts. The
emaciated economy remains the soft target for these parochial hot heads to
execute their evil designs. Shouldn’t we mend our economy before it is too
late?
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