FROM BUSINESS WORLD OF 14 SEPTEMBER 2006
Educating with
intelligence
The government
is making ambitious and expensive plans to implement its resolve to introduce
reservation for the so called other backward castes (OBC). Its intention is to
expand the tertiary education system so much that the increase in reserved
seats will not lead to a reduction in unreserved seats. It hopes thereby to buy
peace with forward castes.
The government
is trying to avoid hard decisions. That is not necessarily to be decried;
compromise is a part of politics. But compromise in this case will be bought at
the cost of the nation. For the expansion in the education system will be paid
for by the taxpayer; just because it has forcibly deprived him of his money,
the government does not acquire a right to waste it. It still needs to be
asked: is the expansion economically justified, and are there better
alternatives? An analysis of data from the 55th round of the
National Sample Survey (NSS) by Rana Hasan and Aashish Mehta in Economic and Political Weekly (XLI:35) points towards answers that go
against the government’s proposed course.
The NSS figures
they present show that a surprisingly high proportion of males aged 17-30 who pass
secondary school and qualify to go to college actually end up there; the proportion
for the entire country is 56 per cent. It is higher in towns (64 per cent) than
in villages (48 per cent). It is lower for OBCs (50 per cent) than for forward
castes (61 per cent); but the difference is not large enough to call for a
special policy. The group for which the proportion is lowest (45 per cent) is
scheduled tribes, especially those that live in villages (40 per cent); the
rest are not particularly underrepresented in tertiary education. These are
figures of males actually going to college; in addition there would be those
who have already been through college in this age group. Thus, access to
college education is not inadequate in India, and no population group is
particularly disadvantaged in this respect.
But the
proportion of males aged 17-30 who finish secondary school is just 18 per cent.
And it is here that forward castes steal a march over the rest. For 27 per cent
of their males aged 17-30 finish secondary school. For OBCs, the proportion is
14 per cent. But it is not they who are the most disadvantaged; the proportion
is 11 per cent for Muslims, and 10 per cent for scheduled castes, and for
scheduled tribes.
It is in
secondary schooling that there is a yawning gap between towns and villages. Of
males aged 17-30, 30 per cent finish school in towns, and only 13 per cent in
villages. In its obsession with literacy, the government has proliferated
primary schools. But it has neglected secondary schooling; so most children
that go to school give up too early. This must limit the returns to education
as well as the incentive to go to school. More children will go to primary
schools if there are more secondary schools to go on to.
Schools do not
require government investment. Facilities in government schools are so poor,
and teachers in them are so truant, that private schools have come up in the
remotest villages. They do a better job of schooling at a lower cost, for the
salaries of their teachers are market-determined, whereas bureaucrats’ trade
unions push up government teachers’ salaries. Their fees are low – often low
enough even for poor parents. All that the government needs to do is to set up
standardized examinations at fixed stages that would reveal the quality of the education children receive.
That does not
require much money; the government would save much money and India would get
educated faster if we relied on competition in the private sector. The money
the government saves should be spent on boosting completion rates. All children
that pass board examinations at the end of 4, 8 and 12 years of schooling
should get scholarships that are so generous that poor parents would be able to
live off their children’s scholarship. And brighter children should be given
such huge scholarships that they can ride their own scooter to secondary school
and car to college. No, not a Mercedes; just the Rs 1-lac Bengali-made Tata Red
Star.
