The paranoia about cut-offs, though understandable, is also comic. It is simplistic to see the ‘cut-off jolt’ as a bolt from the blue. It has been in the offing for quite some time. We had enough time to initiate preventive measures. We did nothing.
This may sound surprising but is true, nonetheless, that conducting admissions is not any less traumatic than securing them. Year after year one goes through the pain of seeing young hearts broken, years of hopes-in-the-making belittled and the outbreak of parental helplessness in epidemic proportions. This is now quite well known. But what is not so well-known is the fact that the admission trauma is not confined to its visible victims. St. Stephen’s College lost a distinguished Principal, William Shaw Rajpal, to the rigours of admission. A man of robust health and indefatigable energy, Rajpal died in office at the age of 63 in the wake of admission in 1984.
Water goes uphill when pumped. The same is true of cut-offs. In respect of education we are a pumping nation. We need to become a pioneering nation. This calls for nothing less than a mental revolution, founded on an upright commitment to meeting the needs of all aspirants and not merely that of an enterprising few.
To see the current problem in perspective, consider this. A few years ago, while I was in the National Commission for Minority Educational Institution, a petition came up before the commission. A Dalit Christian educational society in Tamil Nadu had been struggling to establish a vocational college in a rural area for a few years. There were no similar educational facilities within a radius of 150 miles. They had 11 acres of land but had only hired buildings to get started. No university would affiliate them on the pretext that they did not meet the infrastructure requirements which, incidentally, were not spelt out. They were willing to provide an undertaking that within three years of affiliation they would create infrastructure as would be prescribed. All my efforts to enable them to get started failed. I told my colleagues on the commission then that if the present attitude had prevailed in 1881, St. Stephen’s College would not have been born. It was “established” if you like in three hired rooms in Chandni Chowk! The famous Christian Medical College, Vellore, had the seeds of its inception in the work of a lone American lady doctor who had a bullock cart and hurricane lamp as her infrastructure. She attended to 12,000 patients in the first year of her work!
Last year I wrote to Delhi University for permission to increase the intake of students in St. Stephen’s from 50 to 100 in economics, from 30 to 50 in English and from 10 to 30 in philosophy. I am still to get the required permission.
At an NDTV programme in the wake of the SRCC shocker, I was accused of choking the educational opportunities of young people through reservation in St. Stephen’s. This reservation bogey needs to be seen for what it truly is. St. Stephen’s reserves 50% of its seats for applicants from the Christian community. In Economics Hons., for example, a maximum of 25 seats are available to Christians. The cut-offs for economics in Delhi University will not come down by even 0.1% even if these 25 seats were to be de-reserved. Increasing the seats would have helped. And I volunteered to do so without demanding any infrastructural largesse. This is not a problem. Only reservation is!
The truth needs to be confronted that we lack the will to face the challenge head-on. We can do much. We are very keen to. But somehow it (unlike facilities for VVIP movements) does not get done. We wake up occasionally, self-flagellate and go back to sleep again. The spectre of cut-offs touching the 100% mark in certain subjects needs to be engaged as a wake-up call and not as a sign of malice on the part of some institutions.
We could be headed for far greater confusion next year when we may have only grades to go by. In a context where a tiny fraction of a mark makes the difference between being the first on the list and the 100th on it, how are we to merit-list the applicants? Will our well-meaning measures to allay student anxieties plunge the admission process into greater confusion?
A crucial issue in all this is the growing bureaucratisation of education. This results in an unmeant despoilment of the spirit of education. We profess decentralisation and centralise all control. Why, for God’s sake, can’t we grant a little more autonomy to colleges? Why does everything, every policy decision, every practical arrangement, have to emanate from a centre of power? An educational institution is an organism, not an organisation. It has an inner life, an intellectual cohesion, an institutional integrity that needs to be respected. It belittles education to regulate it like an assembly line on which degrees are manufactured. The MHRD/UGC must fix a ceiling on the student enrolment in a university.
Affiliated/constituent colleges must be granted greater autonomy than is obtained at present, even if they are not autonomous colleges. An educational culture needs to be fostered and the unionisation of education curtailed, without curbing democratic freedoms. Rights should not be divorced from accountability. A tribunal empowered to address legitimate grievances as well as check anti-educational agendas must be set up. Work culture and accountability need to be refurbished. The nation must benefit tangibly from the tax payers’ money. Education must to be renewed with a sense of earnestness, accountability and responsiveness to the nation.
Individual institutions will always need cut-offs, given their space constraints. But education as a whole needs to be liberated from the cut-off mindset. It is high time we moved from exclusion to empowerment. The state must address its duty to meet the needs and aspirations of the youth of India so that education becomes an egalitarian engagement with nation-building and not an elitist privilege that aggravates inequalities and undermines the health and wholeness of our society.
