Does Kapil get it?

That’s the question most are asking of new Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal. Getting rid of the 10th class board exams has gone down very well with the kids (my 12-year old says he loves ‘Kapil-uncle’ even though he’s never seen him, even on TV!), but it’s not necessarily a good thing. The 10th Board may have added to pressure, but it also gave kids a fairly good idea of just where their skills lay (or didn’t lie, more accurately)… with the Boards abolished, I bet schools will be pressured by parents to allow their children to study ‘science’ till the 12th, even though it’s obvious they don’t have the aptitude for it. And I don’t see how it helps if, as Kapil Sibal wants eventually, even the 12th Board is abolished and, instead, kids just give an entrance examination for university, much the same way those wanting to do an MBA sit for the CAT. One exam is being replaced by another, that’s all. And what happened to the vocational studies after the 10th which was the original reason for the 10 + 2 system … basically those who wanted to study beyond the 10th would do so, the rest would do vocational stuff … secretarial courses, windows, carpentry and so on. Since the vocational training never happened, why not just go back to the old 11 years in school?

There are a million other such questions being asked of Kapil Sibal and his enthusiasm to implement the Professor Yashpal report – if someone like Kaushik Basu should dissent from the other members of the committee, it has to be for a good reason (Disclosure: Kaushik was one of the best teachers we had in DSchool back in the mid-80s). Plus, it’s still not clear, even after having gone through all Sibal’s interviews and press conferences, how he plans to deal with the issue of getting better quality teachers, higher salaries for them, genuine autonomy for colleges/schools. Is he saying the government, and his ministry in particular, will not appoint the next chief of the IIM Ahmedabad, or that the next vice chancellor of Delhi University will be decided by the university itself?

Maybe Kapil Sibal doesn’t get it in quite the same manner that educationists like Kaushik Basu or people like Pratap Bhanu Mehta (he’s the head of the Centre for Policy Research and resigned from the National Knowledge Commission) who’ve spent a lifetime looking at such issues. But no one person agrees with everyone else (think Kaushik and Prof Yashpal), so why hold this against Kapil Sibal? The minister’s understood a few basic things, and he’s got them absolutely right.

One, since you can’t resolve everything, focus on just a few things. Two, most of the problems we’re seeing today are related to poor quality of supply. So, Sibal’s solution is to create more supply! Once you do away with the UGC granting clearances for universities and come up with some basic criterion which people who want to set up universities must meet, the supply response will be great – by way of example, most of the big software companies, like TCS or Wipro, run mini-universities anyway even today for their staffers, so if one of them wants to set up a full-fledged university, it shouldn’t be too difficult.

In an ideal world, Sibal should give Delhi University autonomy and concentrate on getting it back to shape. But that’s like attempting for the moon. Why not create another university, or a group of classy colleges, that will give Delhi University a run for its money? To understand this, let’s use the telecom example, since that’s an area I understand.

In the mid-1990s, BSNL was your only choice if you lived outside of Delhi and Mumbai. So, if you wanted top quality phones, you’d ask the same questions you’re asking about Delhi University. Will the government ever free up BSNL, allow it to hire top-class professionals at market-salaries and so on? The government didn’t do it then, and it won’t do it now, or if the UPA has its way (as you can see, I’m an NDA fan!), ever. But what happened? Bharti came up and took up that space! And now it is really irrelevant whether BSNL survives or not. Of course it’s a tragedy that BSNL is being suffocated the way it is, but we can either spend the rest of our lives trying to fix it and run up against all manner of obstacles or simply circumvent the problem – it’s a bit like a bypass surgery. By the way, that’s precisely what Dr Manmohan Singh tried to do in the early 1990s – to create more supply. Of course there will be problems, but just the presence/threat of new supply will also fix a lot of things.

Will the new accreditation system Sibal has in mind for universities help? Basically, much like in the US, you’ll be able to choose your universities on the basis of scores some independent evaluating agencies give. You have to be naïve to think it’ll work flawlessly – arre, the financial mess we’re in is largely the result of ‘independent’ credit rating agencies colluding with financial institutions. But it’s not as if the current evaluation system is flawless and doesn’t throw up charlatans. So, we’ll have to come up with ways to ensure the raters don’t get captured by those they’re rating.

Short point is that there is no final solution to anything, at least if you’re not like Hitler, or Sanjay Gandhi. So, give Sibal’s plan a chance. He’ll get a lot of things wrong, and won’t be allowed to go ahead with a lot considering education is a concurrent subject, and he hasn’t thought through a lot of things… how do you square the demand for reservation with institutions of excellence, for instance? And, as we’ve learnt to our horror, if you don’t get the detail right, the whole plan goes for a toss… the best-laid plans of men and mice, and all that. But anyone whose plans centre around creating more schools/colleges has clearly grasped the main point.