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Some loopholes in education reforms need to be plugged

Two recent moves by the government in the field of higher education deserve scrutiny. The first is the announcement of reforms to major entrance examinations, including the Joint Entrance Examination to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT-JEE). Some major changes have been planned in order to make the experience less traumatic for the aspirants. One big improvement is to hold the examinations twice a year instead of just once. This reduces the chance of "losing a year" in case of a bad result and increases the flexibility on offer to students. It is also easy to understand the motivation of moving the examinations online. Yet, this must be done with caution; it is best to preserve a written option as far as possible, so as to ensure that the test is not discriminatory. The eventual aim should be for entrance examinations that can be taken online at the students' discretion, as is the case with the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the United States, for instance. That is the mechanism least likely to cause unnecessary stress. However, the government deserves credit for thinking about this problem and seeking to implement solutions. Any situation in which there are so few desirable seats and so many applicants cannot but be somewhat stressful, but policy should work to ease the process and add to the number of such seats.

The government should also be complimented for its attempt to create "institutions of eminence (IoEs)" that will be insulated from certain other regulations pertaining to colleges and universities. The intent is to push for these institutions to eventually break into the top ranks of global universities — Indian institutes have largely been missing from such lists. Such institutes would have manifold benefits. They would serve to keep Indian talent on-shore; they would be incubators of basic and applied research with major spill-over effects; they would help create an indigenous but globally-engaging narrative in humanities and social sciences. To enable such institutes achieve these goals, the IoE tag will help in providing relative autonomy from onerous regulations, such as setting fee structures and launching new courses, of the University Grants Commission. 

However, allowing greenfield projects to be an exception is questionable since doing so would involve pre-judging an institution without any proven track record. Another aspect of the government rules that allow greenfield IoE is the requirement that the collective net worth of individuals promoting the institute should be more than Rs 50 billion. Far from bringing down the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs in the private sector, this provision is likely to hold back many. In the absence of clear-cut regulations, such arbitrary benchmarks can undermine the credibility of the reforms as they cast a shadow on the transparency of the selection procedure. For instance, the Rs 50 billion net worth requirement for the promoters seems unnecessarily restrictive. There is no clear justification for the benchmark. India’s education woes need an increased supply of quality institutions. Of course, there should be strict monitoring of outcomes and education delivery but a regulatory framework that forecloses supply options should be avoided. Overall, the government should take these criticisms to heart and reform the scheme swiftly.