“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.”
‐ Bill Copeland
“लक्ष्य न होने के साथ समस्या यह है कि आप अपना समस्त जीवन मैदान में ऊपर नीचे दौड़ते रहने के बाद भी कोई जीत हासिल नहीं कर पाते।”
‐ बिल कोपलेंड
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said that the faceless tax scrutiny assessment and appeal would help in easing compliance burden of taxpayers and increase fairness and objectivity in the tax system. “It eases compliance burden, it brings in a fair objective and a just system, there shall not be any physical interface between the department and the taxpayer and to an extent, it shall bring in the certainty of information,” she added.
Cases relating to:
The University Grants Commission (UGC) and the State of Maharashtra with other parties are engaged in a vicious legal battle. It has put the spotlight, once again, on the fraught nature of Centre-state relations in the area of higher education. The case is simple: Given the epidemic and concerns of safety, Maharashtra and some other states have cancelled the final year exams for college students and wish to award grades and degrees based on in-semester performance.
The UGC has said that this “dilutes standards” and has passed a diktat that universities must hold exams — online, off-line or blended — before September 30. It has claimed that the actions of the states have “encroached on the legislative field of coordinating and determining the standards of higher education which is exclusively reserved for the Parliament under Entry 66 of List I of Schedule VII of the Constitution.” It has also claimed that its directives are to “protect the academic future of students”.
These broad claims must be examined carefully. Right now, fresh graduates are losing job appointments simply because they cannot furnish a final degree certificate. And yet, the MHRD has not bothered to inform employers and institutions to defer this requirement.
Entry 66 does indeed spell out the Centre’s role as “Coordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions”. It has been repeatedly used by the Centre to shape the contours of policy and governance. In fact, it is the basis of the UGC Act of 1956. That led to the UGC-NET, a qualifying examination for college teachers. The IIT Act of 1961 led to the JEE and eventually GATE, and the 2016 amendment to the Indian Medical Council Act of 1956 gave us NEET. Thus, a single provision in the Constitution and a few key Acts have entangled India’s higher education in a web of qualifying and competitive exams, regulatory agencies and professional bodies. All this is in the name of upholding standards.
And yet, there have been few efforts to evolve standards and link them with concrete societal goals. There is the excessively bureaucratic national system of accreditation and rankings for institutions. This led to thousands of research papers in worthless journals and hundreds of crores spent on exotic research areas.
The new National Education Policy (NEP) claims that the purpose of higher education is to “enable personal accomplishment and enlightenment, constructive public engagement, and productive contribution to society”. But what is this in concrete terms, for students, institutions, the state and the nation? Should a “good” student be able to write a newspaper article on a local issue, or conduct a study? Should IIT Bombay or Shivaji University analyse the Kolhapur floods or measure the parameters of the epidemic in their cities? Can the state rely on its colleges for research on drinking water? Should the nation expect that elite institutions will work to improve the railways and devise timetables for shramik services? These questions have never been answered.
Instead, national competitive exams such as the JEE, NEET and GATE have become the de facto standards for education. The folly of this is well known. They adversely impact the overall development of our youth. They encourage coaching and intervene in the state’s ability to provide doctors and engineers from the local population. They distort the meaning and practice of science. And yet their impThe most exceptionable is the UGC-NET, the qualifying exam for college teachers. Their curricula are, of course, “national” or for that matter “global”. In Economics, it is the last chapter (of 10 chapters), where the Indian Economy is finally introduced. Missing is the District Economic Plan, a document which is regularly prepared by state governments, or the economics of the city. Sociology wends its way through Marx and Weber, ignores key development programmes such as MGNREGA and forbids any regional content. In Engineering too, the national curriculum for civil engineering is the same for Himachal Pradesh and Maharashtra. The national governing body for engineering has now determined that Virtual Reality and Quantum Computing are important emerging areas! Thus, the Centre decides the curricula, the teachers and their salaries. The states pay.
This standardisation is merely “world-class” wool pulled over our eyes and not based on any study of what the states need. In fact, the disconnect of curricula and teachers with the real world is the real dilution of standards. It is perhaps the principal reason for poor student employability and the reluctance of the states to invest in higher education.
Pedagogically too, it is known that students learn better when presented with real-life problems in a familiar context. And yet the case study on local problems has been absent in the curricula. When states innovate, the MHRD is more likely to steam-roll it. This was witnessed in Maharashtra, where its innovative programme, Unnat Maharashtra Abhiyan, linking colleges with district administration was refused support by the MHRD.
Finally, about elite central institutions such as the IITs or IISERs, the less said the better. Most regulations of the UGC or MHRD do not apply to them. They soak up most of the funds and prestige and yet their output is not commensurate.
Setting standards in higher education requires us to connect societal needs and professions with training and research. The MHRD or UGC have failed to do this. Nor have they considered the harmful impact of the de facto standards on students and society. The new NEP continues to live in the same exalted evidence-free world of national curricula and nationalised testing.
So what is to be done?
The courts should point out that a constitutional right comes with duties. The UGC has failed to appreciate this. They should set aside the issue of encroachment and judge the case on concrete questions. Can the states really hold exams during a pandemic? Are they really that important? Can transport or access to computers be managed? Did the central committee consider all this? Does it have the data?
Secondly, students should understand that their future is bogged down by a higher education system and a scientific bureaucracy which is structurally flawed. It is an elite centralised system which is not accountable to meaningful jobs or welfare within the states. It is time for the states to create a system which opens up professional opportunities, standards and training for our youth to serve their community, of achieving excellence through relevance.
This article first appeared in the print edition on August 27, 2020 under the title ‘UGC versus States’. Sohoni teaches IIT Bombay and IIT Goa. Dharap is a researcher at IIT Bombay
Source: Indian Express, 27/08/20
The 2020 Global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) data and publication "Charting pathways out of multidimensional poverty: Achieving the SDGs" released on 16 July 2020 by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at the University of Oxford and the Human Development Report Office of the United Nations Development Programme. The global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) measures the complexities of poor people’s lives, individually and collectively, each year. This report focuses on how multidimensional poverty has declined. It provides a comprehensive picture of global trends in multidimensional poverty, covering 5 billion people. It probes patterns between and within countries and by indicator, showcasing different ways of making progress. Together with data on the $1.90 a day poverty rate, the trends monitor global poverty in different forms.
The COVID-19 pandemic unfolded in the midst of this analysis. While data are not yet available to measure the rise of global poverty after the pandemic, simulations based on different scenarios suggest that, if unaddressed, progress across 70 developing countries could be set back 3–10 years.
It is 10 years before 2030, the due date of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), whose first goal is to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. The MPI provides a comprehensive and in-depth picture of global poverty – in all its dimensions – and monitors progress towards Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1 – to end poverty in all its forms. It also provides policymakers with the data to respond to the call of Target 1.2, which is to ‘reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women, and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definition'. By detailing the connections between the MPI and other poverty-related SDGs, the report highlights how the lives of multidimensionally poor people are precarious in ways that extend beyond the MPI’s 10 component indicators.
The Indian State has a novel way of dealing with what seem to be intractable armed conflicts. Engage (with stakeholders, including rebels); assert (the State’s authority) and coerce; divide (especially rebel groups which are often prone to fragmentation); concede (but only partially, without compromising on core principles); and repeat the cycle. The template has been applied, with varying degrees of success, in different contexts. But broadly, it helps ensure peace without concessions, maintains the centrality of the State, and either weakens rebel groups or creates incentives for them to stay within the framework of a peace agreement.
The Naga peace talks between the Centre and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (I-M), which started in 1997, have followed a similar trajectory. Asia’s oldest insurgency, when talks began, appeared intractable — Naga groups were insistent on their distinct identity; they wanted a Greater Nagaland, which included Naga-speaking parts of other Indian states and Myanmar; they saw Nagaland as sovereign, with its own symbols. New Delhi was clear that neither would a Greater Nagaland be possible, nor would these groups be allowed to claim absolute sovereignty. But to keep the peace, the State often, rhetorically, accepted the distinct identity of Nagas; it informally allowed NSCN (I-M) to operate (including allowing it to function as a de facto parallel regime which had its own armed militia and collected tax); it also bridged differences and accepted the idea of “shared sovereignty”, a form of asymmetric federalism.
But there was no pact, and the perils of prolonged talks are now visible. RN Ravi, the key interlocutor for the Naga talks and now Nagaland’s governor, expressed the State’s exasperation at the operation of a parallel regime when he criticised “armed gangs”. NSCN(I-M), exasperated by the lack of a tangible solution despite a framework agreement signed in 2015, and annoyed at what it perceives as lack of respect, wants a new interlocutor and structure for talks. The geopolitical churn makes the situation more challenging — remember China has historically encouraged many armed insurgents in the Northeast, and given the current state of India-China ties, renewed Chinese support for those against the Indian State is quite possible. The Naga peace process is an achievement. It has kept the peace in a region troubled almost since Independence. New Delhi must sustain it and break the stalemate, by reviving talks and institutionalising an agreement. The old template must be tweaked to accommodate new realities.
Source: Hindustan Times, 26/08/20
“He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.”
‐ Arabian Proverb
“जिसके पास स्वास्थ्य है, उसके पास आशा है तथा जिसके पास आशा है, उसके पास सब कुछ है।”
‐ अरबी कहावत