Market education

Until the 1970s, milk was in short supply and used to be rationed. Then came Operation Flood, and India is today perhaps the world's largest producer of milk. Until 2001, telephone connections used to be in short supply and hard to get. Then came the telecom boom and now India is one of the biggest providers of telephony services, which are available plentifully and cheaply. It is possible to give many such examples; suffice it to say that in each case, a supply revolution was allowed to take place. The question which the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) should have asked while examining issues related to education reform is why this is not being done in respect of education. Instead, it has come out with a set of recommendations that assume slow growth of higher education and therefore the need to ration it out, albeit on a set of criteria that is superior in its equity aspects than using merely caste or community as the entitling variable.

Accordingly, it has suggested the use of a "deprivation index" to more accurately determine who is deserving of preferential treatment and who is not. The D-Index will take into account "social background, caste, religion and gender, family education history, family income, type of school, place of residence (distinguishing between urban and rural areas, and accounting for regional deprivation) and physical disability." While there could be some quibbling over how exactly the index should be constructed, the idea is fundamentally a sound one. Whether it will be accepted by the political class is another matter altogether. The chances are that the politicians will reject it because it runs foul of caste-based vote-gathering by parties.

The Knowledge Commission has also suggested that there should be an independent regulatory authority for higher education, partly so that it can be freed from the clutches of the human resource development ministry. Once again, this is a good idea but its workability remains doubtful for the usual gaggle of political and bureaucratic reasons. If the bureaucrats manage to push it through, they will create more jobs for themselves but change little of substance.

In fairness, though, the report is not entirely silent on how to increase supply. It would like to see the import of educational institutions""an idea proposed by this newspaper 10 years ago. The problem here is of keeping out the tricksters and getting the good ones in. If that gets resolved, fees will be high and could become an issue. The best short-term solution the report proposes is in respect of the idle resources of universities and colleges. In Delhi University, or example, the average class size is 45 and after 1 pm the classrooms mostly remain idle. There is a clear opportunity to increase supply here but there is one problem: the teachers' unions. Unless they can be persuaded, supply-side solutions will be hard to implement. It is also hard to understand why the report says that government funds should continue to remain the "cornerstone" of universities. The European experience has shown how disastrous this can be for higher education over the long run. In the final analysis, the best way to sort out the problem of inadequate supply is to do what the southern states did in respect of engineering and medical colleges, which was to treat education as a market and apply its principles. They therefore allowed all comers and, over a decade, the market sorted itself out in the way that markets can and do, in terms of both price and quality.