IASbaba’s Daily Current Affairs – 1st June 2017

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NATIONAL

TOPIC: General Studies 2

• Issues relating to development and management of Social sector or Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.

Twenty world- class “Institutions of Eminence” to be established

In news:
In a bid to improve the quality of education in India and provide better facility to students, the government has planned to set up 20 world-class “institutions of eminence” around the country.  The plan is to have 20 world-class universities—10 private and 10 public—with each requiring an investment of at least Rs5,000 crore over the next few years.

• While a select group of existing public institutions will be upgraded to the world class status, both existing and upcoming private institutions can bid for the tag.
• The institutions of eminence will have greater autonomy compared to other higher education institutions. They can be free from the clutches of the overarching regulatory regime of bodies such as University Grants Commission (UGC), AICTE, and Medical Council Of India (MCI).
• More autonomy in designing syllabi and deciding fee structure. Teachers would also be allowed to take up consultancy work among others.
• Public institutions will get financial support from the human resource development ministry.
• The private institutions under the project will enjoy two key freedoms: one, they can offer as much salary as they want to their teaching staff; and two, the course fee can be completely market linked. The government institutions, however, will have to follow the UGC scale of pay for permanent employees. For contractual staff including professors on contract, they too can pay as much as they wish.
• If a new institutions fails to make enough progress in the first 18 to 20 months, then the government will cancel its candidature. And the disqualified institution will be replaced from a reserve list of institutions.

Higher education in India is in deep crisis:

• Most Indian graduates are unemployable because of poor quality of higher education.
• Research in both the sciences and the humanities is generally below par.
• Even elite Indian universities do not make it to the very top of global listings.
• Disparities in accessibility to higher education in terms of economic class, gender, caste, ethnicity etc.

Reasons behind poor standard of higher education in India:

• An excess of regulation in the name of good governance.
• Absence of linkage between research institutes and universities. In the early years after independence, a conscious decision was made to keep research institutes separate from universities which were meant to focus only on teaching so that scarce resources could be directed in a targeted manner to stand-alone research institutes. While some of India’s scientific research centres, such as the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the Indian Institute of Science have done good work, the universities have suffered considerably. The separation of research from teaching provides very little incentive to faculty for becoming scholars, producing a poor generation of academics.
• Politicization of public institutions.

Way ahead:

If these institutions develop and deliver on suggested lines, eventually driving innovation and economic growth, they could potentially mark the beginning of a new chapter in India’s nation-building exercise. If not, they will be the missed opportunity that sets back India’s aspirations to be a great power. China makes for a good example. In an effort to revamp its tertiary education sector China marked out elite institutions for generous state funding, and changed its focus from quantity-oriented deliverables such as enrolment numbers to quality-oriented deliverables such as citations in respected peer-reviewed journals.  The results began to show in less than a decade. By 2008, it was already churning out the largest number of PhDs in the world.

• Liberalising education. As the government sets up these institutions(institutions of eminence) the fundamental structural problems related to over-regulation that continue to hobble the Indian education sector needs to be addressed.
• Establishing a link between research institutions and education sector. A commonly cited example of how research universities have incubated innovative ecosystems around them is that of Stanford University and Silicon Valley. Similarly, across the world in Israel, Technion University was the catalyst that sparked the start-up nation. Thus the new set of institutions must be structure in a way so as to emerge as research centres as well.
• An inter-disciplinary approach must be adopted by these institutions.
• For any development in higher education to bear fruit, it must be supported by the strengthening of primary education. An important reason why Chinese higher education has galloped ahead of India is that it strengthened its primary and secondary education systems first, which India is only now attempting to achieve.
• S.R. Subramanian committee has recommended that top-rated educational institutions in India be given greater autonomy including the freedom to fix salaries of their staff—a break from the controlled pay structure decided by bureaucrats sitting in New Delhi or in state capitals.
• Financial autonomy to institutions should be linked to their performance as recommended by the Subramanian committee. The institutions on the upper end of the scale of performance must be given total autonomy in all respects, including fixing faculty salaries, fee structure, entering into collaborations, etc.
• Regional and rural-urban disparities must be addressed while selecting institutions to be tagged as “institutions of eminence”.
• GIAN(Global Initiative of Academic Networks GIAN) that brings talent pool of scientists and entrepreneurs, internationally must be engaged with the institutes of Higher Education in India so as to augment the country’s existing academic resources, accelerate the pace of quality reform, and elevate India’s scientific and technological capacity to global excellence.

Conclusion:

Development in educational sector is very crucial for the future of India and next generations in India. The attempts of improving the educational sector will always be beneficial to all the people living in India and mostly, to the children as good education has a strong link with better jobs and opportunities.
The upcoming institutions are a step closer to a better India and its better future. A well-thought decision should be made with regarding the issues in the educational sector just like the decision of approval of word class institutions in India.

Connecting the dots:

• Indian higher education is in need of major reforms if India has to reap the benefits of its huge demographic dividend. In this light discuss major reforms being proposed by the government and how helpful such steps will be in improving quality of higher education in India.

Also read: The state of education in India

NATIONAL

TOPIC: General Studies 2

• Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
• Issues relating to development and management of Social sector or Services relating to Health, Education, Human Resources.

Better Evaluation System

Introduction

Today’s children are tomorrow’s citizens and they shape the future of the nation. Hence it is important that their development is sound and scientific from all fronts. Every year with annual results of 10^th and 12^th standard and the divide between rural-urban, haves-have nots’s are crucial.

Issue:

• The use of moderation by the Central Board of Secondary Education while finalising Class 12 marks under a Delhi High Court directive poses the immediate question of how various State boards of education that have not adopted the practice will respond.
• It also points to the long-standing challenge of achieving comparability while assessing students for undergraduate studies from different systems.
• Some boards have already published the results without moderation, while others will resort to the practice, making it necessary for college authorities to make offsets while fixing admission criteria.
• Another substantive concern is the pattern of testing procedures placing high importance on a single external examination, without an assurance to all students that the same tasks are being assessed on the same standards.
• Across-the-board use of tools such as moderation also raises questions on the actual scores.
• It is extraordinary that tests for non-quantitative subjects such as English and Political Science yield perfect scores of 100% in the CBSE examination and elsewhere, giving the impression that the questions require to be answered only within a limited framework laid out in a textbook, leaving little scope for creative responses that reflect the quality of teaching in the classroom.

Concerns:

• Moderation of marks under the CBSE policy has been followed partly to offset the ambiguity of questions and any errors, and to achieve parity in the evaluation process and the annual pass percentage.
• The Central Board recently decided to do away with the practice, in consultation with State boards, and sought the assistance of the Human Resource Development Ministry to make a complete shift.
• This is something the Ministry should take up on priority, since a consensus among the States would eliminate litigation on grounds of uneven competition — which is what invited judicial intervention on the issue of moderation this year.
• It is also relevant to point out that the emphasis on a single external examination has heavily influenced the learning process, tailoring it almost entirely to score marks. Built on a foundation of weak primary education, it does little to improve outcomes for the majority of students at the secondary school level.

Learning Levels and impact:

• The Annual Status of Education Report, 2016 found, for instance, that among rural students in Class 8, only 43.3% could correctly solve a simple three-digit by one-digit division problem.
• What this makes clear is that encouraging performance on enrolment of students even in some of the backward States is not the same as achieving high outcomes in actual learning.
• There is also the issue of access to private tuitions for a better examination score, which affects less-privileged students. It is against the depressing backdrop of such distortions that India’s school system must prepare an evaluation mechanism for students.
• Reform should recognise the role of the teacher in ensuring genuine learning and encouraging creativity.
• An external test that evaluates sound learning is the answer, although the challenge is not to stifle educational innovation that individual State boards are capable of

Conclusion:
Policies should be done with due consultation and field expertise. Judicial intervention in the interest of a particular section is vested and narrow. It is important to formulate policies that are time tested and grants parity to the entire nation’s aspirants especially in education and future deciding courses.

Connecting the dots:

• Critically discuss the impact of judicial interventions in education and course related aspects. Does it amount to judicial overreach? Elaborate.

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