Learning is a serious pursuit, a tapasya that lasts through one’s life. Learning transcends what one learns from written text and also spans the world of active life. A child begins learning from the day of its birth. While formal education has its eminent strengths including the kind of expertise and discipline that are inculcated among the young by way of formal schooling, glaringly, the higher education sector mostly under the system of universities and IITs etc in India has failed to maintain high standards. Several experimentations in recent decades have not helped these institutions change with the times and change for the better. One such was the insistence since the 1990s that a PhD should be mandatory for lecturers/professors of all recognized universities. This ‘enabled’ them to get fat UGC-prescribed salaries. UGC chairperson Prof. Jagadesh Kumar now makes it clear that doctorate would, from now on, not be mandatory for the post of assistant professor.
Academic circles were somewhat unanimous that the insistence on PhD, by itself, had not served much purpose. Rather, the standard of doctorates itself has fallen over the years, matching with the standard of the academic community as a whole. In global rankings, Indian higher education institutions are hardly ranked among the first 100 — a sad commentary on the quality of education that these entities provide. Over 13 lakh Indian students are studying in foreign universities as per statistics of the external affairs ministry. Contrast this with the less than 50,000 foreign students that come mainly from Nepal, Afghanistan etc to study here. UGC itself is known to be packed with incompetent ‘academicians’, mostly props of the political establishment.
India, that was Bharat, was the seat of knowledge and educational pursuits from time immemorial exemplified in its great institutions of learning like the Nalanda (in Bihar) and Taxshila that’s now in Pakistan. Starkly, both Bihar and Pakistan have become anachronisms of a kind thanks to the sinking levels of political maturity and leadership. The process of democracy will be a success only when the polity demonstrates the inner strength to craft a competent and visionary leadership. While the Narendra Modi government provided political stability and strengthened basic infrastructure for the past nine years, it failed to address several pressing issues of the nation. Governments vacillated over attempts at effecting meaningful changes in the higher education sector. It required a war in Ukraine to shake the political leadership here out of its slumber – and know that so many Indian students were reaching such countries to get a degree in medicine and the like. Institutions like UGC need to be urgently revamped. Old mindsets must change.