The milch cow of higher education

By Amrik Singh

PERHAPS NO set of students in India were as luckless as those who joined the distance education sector some years ago. In the early 1980s, several universities decided to offer the B.Ed. degree by correspondence. This was something unprecedented. After that tentative beginning, many more universities did the same thing and at least two of them enrolled something like a quarter of a million students over 7-8 years. One requirement of the B.Ed. course is that actual practice teaching in a classroom is central to whatever is taught. These universities made a pretence of doing so. In the bargain, they raked in about Rs. 100 crores most of which was put to uses other than those for what the students had paid.

This was nothing but exploitation. In the formal system, fees cannot be raised because students band together and oppose even legitimate revision of what they have to pay. When they are enrolled in the distance education sector, they cannot come together to protest. Not a few universities took advantage of this situation. No one felt called upon to object to what was happening. The only ones bothered were those connected with teacher education. Both the UGC and the IGNOU could have stopped it. So could have the Ministry of HRD. In point of fact, an ex- Union Minister of Education, who had been a teacher of education himself, approached his successor to intervene in the matter but nothing got done. The whole thing was in total contrast to the general feature of higher education in India wherein students are subsidised rather than asked to pay for others. It is in that sense that those enrolled in the distance education mode are being described as the milch cow of higher education.

Two things happened recently to reverse this trend. One was the intervention of the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) in respect of B.Ed. courses. As a result, things have been rationalised. Those who want to do B.Ed. by correspondence can still do so but in terms of the norms regarding practice teaching, student-teacher ratio and such other things laid down by the NCTE. Fortunately, these are being honoured by most universities. The second intervention was made by the UGC recently. Certain universities entered into franchise arrangements with certain other universities, a few of them foreign institutions. About 15-20 per cent of them tried to exploit the situation. But the rest were academic in their approach and there was not much by way of underhand dealings. In any case, the UGC protest has made the IGNOU sit up and take a fresh look at what it ought to be doing.

A parallel phenomenon too is at work and deserves to be taken note of. During the last few years, there has been considerable expansion of technical education and Information Technology facilities. Owing to the current recession, there is a good deal of surplus capacity available. In this situation, certain universities have been adventurous enough to establish contacts with them and a spate of new deals are being negotiated and so on. Perhaps several hundred millions will be made in the process! The growing number of such universities joining the race for unearned income upset the UGC and it took a public position on this subject.

In this connection, it may not be out of place to refer to the Central decision to take away certain powers from the UGC when the IGNOU was established in 1985. Till then, the UGC was the only body which oversaw higher education. Following the British precedent, the Centre decided to vest the IGNOU with the power to regulate distance education. Since the UGC was still handling a substantial part of the distance education sector, the matter was negotiated between the UGC and the IGNOU and it was decided that the latter would call the shots. Incidentally, while the UGC has legal powers of a fairly far-reaching kind, as of today, it does not have legal powers to regulate the entry of foreign universities. A Committee which this writer headed for the HRD Ministry in 1998-99 in regard to the Amendment of the UGC Act, recommended such a step. But the UGC Act is yet to be amended. Nonetheless it is gratifying to find that the UGC in pursuit of its overall commitment to standards in the country - not always honoured though - has sought to intervene and straighten out things. As far as the IGNOU is concerned, it is still caught up in internal discussions of what needs to be done and what needs to be avoided. This is unfortunate.

In this connection, the odd situation of the IGNOU might also be referred to. The IGNOU is both a player and an umpire. It runs an open university on its own and its enrollment is almost eight lakhs. At the same time, it has been vested with powers to help other open universities both with funds and academic guidance. Sometimes, though not always, the latter are regarded as rivals. and the extent to which it should intervene in the affairs of the open university system.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that there is a fairly vocal lobby within the IGNOU by and large opposed to any kind of accountability. These people want things to continue as they are. Should the IGNOU choose to get tough with other universities, it will have to be tough with its own faculty too and this is what the teachers do not want. The situation is so confused that unless the IGNOU defines its attitude in clear terms, the Centre might feel obliged to reconsider the issue of having vested it with powers in regard to open universities etc.

The fact of the matter is that all these years the IGNOU has given so much attention to the task of building up the university under its charge that it has had no time to attend to its other responsibilities. This is both wrong and indefensible. A body called the DEC (Distance Education Council) was set up several years ago but on devoting, say, something like one third of its time and attention to this part of its responsibility, not even 10 per cent of it is being given to this task.

Apart from the IGNOU, one rarely hears of the other open universities. Is their performance so inconsequential that there is little to say anything about them? Not only that, there are 60-odd universities running poorly-managed correspondence courses. Properly speaking, each one of them needs to be put back on the rails. In other words, proper study centres will have to be set up, teacher-counsellors appointed and students properly guided. The model which the IGNOU has laid down for itself should, in course of time, become applicable to each one of these courses. Nothing of that kind has happened so far nor are there any signs of any movement in this direction. The correspondence courses are simply assisting the process of academic dilution.

In fact, one could go further and say that private appearance of candidate should be banned altogether. Anyone who wishes to sit for an examination as a private candidate should be required to join one of the universities which run correspondence courses or teach through the distance mode. Several States have already enforced this policy. Today, students pass or fail purely by chance. Our assessment system is so unscientific and so unreliable that to expect it to distinguish between those that deserve to pass or not to pass is to expect more than what it can deliver.

The entire responsibility of looking after almost one fifth of the total student body enrolled in the distance education mode has been cast upon the IGNOU. How well is that responsibility being discharged? It is time to ask a few questions; the more searching they are, the better it would be.

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