The money alone won't help

The Planning Commission has proposed that the Centre's gross budgetary support for education should go up from 8 per cent of GDP in the Tenth Plan (2002-07) to over 19 per cent in the Eleventh. This is welcome because India spends much too little on education. However, what the Planning Commission thinks will happen and what actually happens are often two different things. Reason: there are several layers of intermediaries who decide how the money should be spent. In consequence, either the money doesn't get fully spent or it gets spent on something else altogether. The litany of resulting complaints is well known: single-room schools still exist, many of them without toilet facilities for girl students; teachers don't reach because there is no incentive for doing so, and no disincentive if they don't do what they are paid to do. Funding has been arranged for better facilities, through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, but progress has been patchy. Institutional reform to supervise teachers better has been sabotaged. So, while spending more money will by itself address many issues, the non-financial issues are, in a way, even more important.

As for higher education, we continue to have perfectly good students turned away from the elite technology and management institutes "" indeed, some of those who fail to get in end up at the best American universities, with scholarships to boot. Some effort has begun to improve access, but progress has been slow. So there is a shortage of doctors, and of quality engineers, while the relative scarcity of students emerging from the quality management schools has resulted in hugely inflated salaries. The proliferation of sub-standard institutes in these fields is no solution; what the country needs is more institutes of excellence.

Two basic issues need attention. One is the growing disparity in salaries between what prevails in academe and what is available in the commercial world. Those who choose to make a career in teaching and research are usually prepared to give up the prospect of wealth, but they should not be expected to live in semi-penury. The problem with getting quality staff at today's salaries as prescribed by the University Grants Commission is an issue that needs urgent attention, for it takes years to mould a good professor.

The second issue concerns international affiliation. A Bill to permit this has been in the works, but keeps getting shunted into sidings. It is worth recalling that all the IITs and the initial IIMs began with international partnerships; there is everything to be gained by going back to those models and getting Indian centres of educational excellence to interact with their counterparts in other countries.

It is also necessary to descend from the policy heights to the harsh realities of Indian university life. The reputed Delhi School of Economics has been short of more than a dozen and a half professors, readers and lecturers for around 15 years. As a result, it is not able to offer the full range of courses that an institution with such a reputation should. When it comes to physical infrastructure, it needs to be asked: how many university campuses offer wi-fi environments for easy connectivity, and free, 24-hour computer access in libraries? At the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, it can take a researcher up to eight weeks to get something required in laboratory work. At the Jawaharlal Nehru University, senior faculty had to buy their own blackboards until a few years ago. In the mid-1990s, a director at the Delhi School of Economics went half crazy trying to get a sanction for a water cooler.