Promoting mediocrity
Universities, the one time centers of excellence have also become a thoroughfare. Entrance examinations for universities present a poor picture of what should be expected from a graduate or post graduate.
A LEADING daily in Bangalore dated in late 2009 quoted C N R Rao, the Chairman of the Scientific Advisory Council to PM as saying “It is tough to find talent for top science jobs”. His concern holds true for almost all sectors in India. The idea of excellence is miscommunicated from the foundation years of one’s life, i.e. primary education. The slogan of ‘Universalisation of Education’ has led to a dramatic increase in literates across the country. However, a skewed purpose of education is propagated. Private educational institutes lead to a higher literacy count but tend to confine education to rote learning. High school & intermediate question papers are a testimony to the fact that one who is able to learn better, scores better. As questions get more objective (even language papers), importance of rote learning is on an all time high. Speaking of government aided education, not only does it lack amenities to foster quality and excellence, measures to promote education like ‘mid day meal’, ‘scholarships’ are grossly inappropriate. Undoubtedly, it is difficult for the poorest to spare working hands for school, but, in the hindsight, considerable numbers of people do not realise the importance of education and enroll their wards in multiple schools just to extract scholarships. Since, the purpose of education is misconstrued at schooling, excellence suffers in all fields. Higher education seems to be in an even thicker soup. Unlike primary education, higher education needs not be universalised. However, here too, the focus is shifting towards dissemination. Making education ‘available to all’ is a different proposition than ‘imparting it to everyone’. Premier institutes like IITs and IIMs face a threat as government goes ahead with setting up more branches under heavy clouds of circumspection among intellectuals. Universities, the one time centers of excellence have also become a thoroughfare. Entrance examinations for universities present a poor picture of what should be expected from a graduate or post graduate. The proliferation of private universities has guaranteed education to all who have deep pockets. Reservation has acted as the last nail in the coffin bringing down standards and outputs detrimentally. After years of relaxations, if there is still demand for reservation to continue, there is some serious flaw in the philosophy. Successive governments, however, continue to adopt the outdated policies of providing crutches to some communities for the fear of losing votes. Job markets, also do not present a rosy picture either. Indians capture a huge market in service sector. Reason being we provide relatively good services at very low costs. To elucidate, let’s take an example of IT, one of the fastest growing industries in India. Indian companies employ lakhs of technical graduates as engineers but one has to be into IT to understand the nature of work they are made to perform. The work nature does not match that of a technical person. So, one finds B. Techs and MBAs doing out rightly BPO work. There are two ways to rule the market, be the best or be the cheapest. Since, we do not make an attempt towards specialisation; we are unable to get rid of 'The Cheap Labour’ tag. We witness mediocrity in fields ranging from teaching, police services, R&D to media. The crux is that although we have large population, and it’s important to keep Human Development Index (HDI) levels high, we cannot completely ignore the idea of ‘excellence’, so essential for a civilisation to progress. Its time we start taking tough measures and encourage excellence or else we shall turn into a country of average millions, the author being a part of the millions.
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Rightly said... good article covering very relevant topic. Being a big country with diversity, we have many challenges on HR front and it's not easy to formulate and implement same scheme across the country. We need to leverage more powers to local bodies to achieve this, at the same time local bodies should exercise their powers carefully. Thanks for bringing this up.
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