Introduction

            By the 19^th Century when great men like Ramakrishna Paramahans and Swami Vivekanand came on the scene, India as a nation had, perhaps,reached the lowest point in its decline.  One of the evident areas of degeneration was education. With British administration gaining control, the indigenous education system was destroyed without anything to replace it.  This led to mass ignorance and illiteracy. Where a new system was put in place, it destroyed indigenous languages, knowledge systems and culture and replaced  it with something alien that removed the students emotionally from their roots, created alienation and bred an intense sense of inferiority about their own cultural heritage and traditions.  It is ironical that almost sixty eight years after the country’s independence the demand for English language is so palpably strong, not as the learning of an additional language required as an international lingua franca, but as the medium of instruction.  Inextricably linked with language is the culture of the people which in turn, is connected with the individual’s  rootedness in the soil of the country.  The elite who were educated in the new education system lost their moorings in India and aped the west in all aspects of their lives holding their own people in contempt.  They became part of the bureaucracy in British India and became the head of governance structures in post-independence India.  They propagated the western norms blindly which led to the masses to also aspire to them blindly.  The hallmark of education became the ability to speak English and to live a westernized lifestyle.   Macaulay  succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Decline of Indigenous Education

            Ananda K. Coomaraswamy speaks about the products of the new education as early as 1908:

Speak, to the ordinary graduate of an Indian University-he will, hasten to display his knowledge of Shakespeare; talk to him of religious philosophy– you find that he is an atheist of the crude type common in Europe a generation ago, and that not only has he no religion but is as lacking in Philosophy as the average Englishman; talk to him Indian music–he will produce a gramophone or a harmonium, and inflict upon you one or both; talk to him of Indian dress or jewellery he will tell you that they are uncivilized and barbaric; talk to him of Indian art–it is news to him that such a thing exists; ask him to translate for you a letter written in his own mother tongue-he does not know it. He is indeed a stranger in his own land.

            In this context it would be useful to examine what was the state of education before British administrative control of India and what causes led to its downfall.  Seminal work has been done on this by Dharampal in The Beautiful Tree.  He refers to what  Mahtma Gandhi pointed out in his lecture delivered to the Royal Institute of International Affairs on 20^th October, 1931,

I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully that today India is more illiterate then it was fifty or  hundred years ago because the British   administrators when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were began to root them out.  They scratched the soil… and left the root like that and   the beautiful tree perished.

            The reasons for the decline and disappearance of indigenous schools have been pointed out by the British officers themselves. These have been also cited by Dharampal.   A.D. Campbell, the Collector of Bellary, in his report to the Government of Madras, dated 17.8.1823 on the state of education  said,

            I am sorry to state that this is ascribable to the gradual but general impoverishment of the country. The means of the manufacturing classes have been, of late years, greatly diminished by the introduction of our own European manufactures, in lieu of the Indian cotton fabrics. The removal of many of our troops, from our own territories, to the distant frontiers of our newly subsidized allies, has also of late years, affected the demand for grain. The transfer of the capital **of the country, from the native governments’ and their Officers who liberally expended it in India, to Europeans, restricted by law from employing it even temporarily in India and daily draining from the land has likewise tended to this effect. . . The greater part of the middling and lower classes of people are now unable to defray the expenses incident upon the education of their off spring, while their necessities require the assistance of the children as soon as their tender limbs are capable of the smallest labour. Of the 533 institutions for education now existing in this district, I am ashamed to say, not one now derives any support from the state. 

Similar state of affairs were noted by Adam, a Baptist missionary who came to Bengal in 1818,  as also by Leitnerwho was for some time the Principal of Government College at Lahore and Acting Director Public Instruction, Punjab in 1882, among others. 

The people were impoverished because of the colonial exploitation of the economy and so could not support education as they had done earlier.  Not only that they were unable to send their children to school as poverty compelled them to put every working hand to earn as soon as possible, even at a very tender age.  Hence, children were made to work as early as they could to bring in some income to the family.  Besides, wherever the British put an education system into place, it was very expensive and beyond the reach of the common man.  It was also very alienating.  Further, the management of schools was far from satisfactory which aggravated the situation.  As Adam says:

In the report of 1st July 1835, mention is made of an English school at Bauleah, the capital of this district, but no information was then possessed respecting it… The school was established in July 1833 and placed under the care of an English teacher receiving eighty rupees per month, with an assistant receiving twenty rupees and Bengali teacher receiving eight rupees.  The English teacher in addition to his salary had a bungalow built for him at a cost of eight hundred rupees which he occupied rent-free; and a school house was built at an expense of one thousand and two hundred rupees. With economical repairs and proper care, both the houses might last fifteen years. The expense of books, pens, papers, ink, and a sweeper to keep the school house clean, was estimated on an average at twelve rupees per month. The current monthly expenditure thus amounted to one hundred and twenty rupees.

As Dharampal points out, the consequences of uprooting Indian education and replacing it  by an alien rootless system that too not properly managed, not only led to the obliteration of literacy and knowledge but also destroyed the social balance.  It is no wonder that education formed a part of the nationalist agenda articulated by the most ardent nationalist of the time like Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Mahtma Gandhi  and Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, among others.

Manifesting the Perfection Within

What was Swami Vivekananda’s vision of education? What did it mean to him? What for him, was the purpose of education?“Education” said Vivekananda, “is the manifestation of the perfection already in man”.  All knowledge then is nothing but what a person discovers or unveils by taking the cover off his own soul which is a mine of infinite knowledge.  Lest we think that he is only talking of matters  spiritual, the example that Vivekananda gives is of Newton and his discovery of the force of gravity.  Gravity, as he says, was not something  lying in a corner waiting to be discovered by Newton.  Its recognition was alreadythere in his mind. Newton only observed an external phenomenon and came to a conclusion by rearranging all the previous links of thought to uncover a new link, the law of gravitation.  Therefore,  “All knowledge and all powers are within” as Vivekananda says.

            This implies thatno one can really teach another.  Each of us has to teach himself or herself.  The external teacher only offers the suggestion which arouses the internal teacher to work to understand things.  Just as the small seed has the potential to give rise to a large banyan tree, the mind has immense potential to grasp and create the most complex of things.  A child cannot be taught just as a plant cannot be grown; only conditions can be created to protect and nourish the plant so that it may grow.  And it is not only teachers who have to realize that children can only learn and grow according to their own potentialities and at their own pace, the parents too have to give their children free scope for growth otherwise they become stunted.  As Vivekananda puts it, “If you do not allow one to become a lion, one will become a fox”.  Hence liberty is a prerequisite to growth.  No one, not even parents, can work out someone else’s salvation.  They cannot presume to know everythingand take charge of someone else’s spirit, even if it is their own children.

            The purpose of education is not to stuff the brain with information that remains undigested and runs riot throughout an individual’s life.  Education, to use Vivekananda’s words is “life-building, man-making, character-making”.  Learning the ideas of others by rote, and that too in a foreign language that one does not really understand, is not education. In any case, what does such an education equip one for? A clerkship? To become a civil servant,  lawyer or any other profession?  But does such an education teach the common mass of people how to equip themselves for the struggle of life?  For Vivekananda, the end of all education and all training is to make a person grow in a way that he is  able to meet the challenges of life with equanimity.   For this to happen, education must,above all, develop the strength of character and mind to face the ups and downs of life. 

Formation of Character

            The character of any man is but the aggregate of his tendencies, the sum total of the bent of his mind as these evolve in his journey of life.  It is impacted by the challenges that life poses in front of him.   Part of our energy is used in preserving our bodies.  Beyond that, every particle of our energy is being used to influence others,whilesimilarly being influenced by them. As we experience pain and pleasure, they leave an imprint on us and mould our character.  We are what our thoughts make us.  Words are secondary to thoughts.  Thoughts live and travel by themselves and through words.   If a person has good thoughts his speech will be good and he will do good work.  Good work motivatesa person to do even better.  Similarly, bad thoughts lead to bad actions and these too have a way of multiplying.  Great occasions and great crises arouse a person to great actions.  But only that person is truly greatwhose character remains great at all times even in adversity and irrespective of where he is.

            Both good and evil mould character, but at the end of the day, pain and adversity are greater teachers than happiness.  If we study the great characters that the world has produced, it was adversity that taught them more than happiness and wealth.  The blows of life bring out the inner fire more than praise.  Buffeted by the storms, when hope seems lost, the light within gleams.  Help does not come from outside but from within.  And it gives courage and strength to undo or deal with the mistakes made.

            Therefore, the ideal education and training is to develop the strength within, and thus pave the way for the growth of man.  An internally strong person is a dynamo of power who, when he is ready, can do anything and everything he likes.  And yet we spend time in our teaching on polishing the outside and neglecting the inner core.  Philosophers and religious teachers who may not seem very sophisticated have succeeded in moving nations and countries.  This is because they do not  touch only the intellect, they touch the very being of a person.

Developing the Personality

            How can such a personality be developed?  The science of yoga is one path that can be used.  It has uncovered laws which develop personality.  By proper attention to those laws and methods, each one can grow and strengthen his personality.  These laws are much finer than the physical laws.  According to Vivekananda,

There are no such realities as a physical world, a mental world; a spiritual world whatever is, is one.  Let us say, it is a sort of tapering existence, the thickest part is here, it tapers and becomes finer and finer; the finest is what we call spirit; the grossest, the grossest, the body.  And just as it is here, in the microcosm, it is exactly the same in the macrocosm. This universe of ours is exactly like that; it is the gross external thickness, and it tapers into something finer and finer until it becomes God.  And the greatest power is lodged in the fine, not in the coarse. 

For example, muscles have great power but it is the fine nerves that give the muscles their power.  If any one of these tiny nerves is cut off, the muscle loses its power.  And the nerves derive their power from something finer; that is thought.  Often we can see the movement of the muscle but are unaware of the movement of the mind, or thought, that made the muscle move because it is so subtle that we may not even be conscious of it.  Therefore, control of thought is self-mastery.

            This strengthening of personality is needed by everybody – householder, rich, poor, women, men of business, spiritual man or whoever else.  But how can thought be controlled?  The aim must be to control even the fine movement of thought because only then can thought can be controlled at the root;even before it has become thought, and so necessarily before it has become action. When this mastery is gained, it becomes possible to control the whole existence. If we can find a method by which we can analyse, investigate, understand and finally grapple with the finer powers, the finer causes, then it is possible to have control over ourselves. And the man who has control over his own mind assuredly can control every other mind.   “That is why” says Vivekanand, “purity and morality have been always the object of religion; a pure, moral man has control of himself. And all minds are the same, different parts of one Mind. He who knows one lump of clay has known all the clay in the universe. He who knows and controls his own mind knows the secret of every mind and has power over every mind”.

Attaining Knowledge

            How does one attain knowledge?  There is only one way and that is by developing the powers  of concentration.  From the illiterate to the yogi, all have to use concentration to attain knowledge.  The chemist needs concentration in his laboratory as does the astronomer as he peers into his telescope. The professor, the student and the workman, all need concentration.  A man polishing shoes will do them better if he concentrates, just  as a cook will make better food when he concentrates.  Even someone only interested in  making money will be more successful if he concentrates, as will be the one worshipping God if his mind does not wander.  As Vivekananda points out, the main difference between men and animals is that while human brings can concentrate, the animals can’t.  Animals are trained through repetition followed by predictable outcomes while human beings learn through their power of concentration and so can deal with unpredictable outcomes and innovate.  The attention of the highest evolved man is not diverted by any distraction while the least evolved person  is easily distracted.  All success in any field depends on concentration.

            The question is how to develop concentration?  The practice of meditation leads to concentration.  What is the  difference between the two?  Concentration is to direct all one’s powers to a single point to solve a problem.  Meditation is to watch one’s mind so that one becomes aware of the flitting of one’s thoughts and then learn to control this so that the mind can learn to focus on one thought or work at a point of time.  Both together are means of controlling the mind, so that it becomes one’s servant and not one’s master.  The two essential ingredients to successful learning are concentration and detachment.  What is detachment? It is the ability of the mind to step back and see a situation objectively without personal involvement, without allowing even a trace of self-interest into it. Once the instrument or mind is perfected, that is, it can look at something objectively, focus on the issue and remove any self-interest from it, it can collect facts at will.

The Teacher and the Taught

            There are certain conditions necessaryfor learning.  The qualities of both the teacher and taught are important.  Students must have  purity of character,a real thirst for knowledge, andperseverance to acquire it. Purity in thought, speech and action builds a strong moral fibre and prevents distractions from the path of seeking knowledge.   As forthe thirst for knowledge, it is an old law that we get whatever we want or seek. None of us can getother than what we fix our hearts upon. As Vivekanand says, “Theremust be a continuous struggle, a constant fight, anunremitting grappling with our lower nature, tillthe higher want is actually felt and victory isachieved. The student who sets out with such aspirit of perseverance will surely find success atlast”.

            With regard to the teacher, it is not relevantwhether he knows the scriptures of all religions or not.  He should haveimbibed the spirit of the scriptures. The whole worldreads the Bible, the Vedas and the Koran butthey are all only words, syntax, etymology, philology the dry bones ofreligion. The teacher must go behind all this to grasp the essential concepts and communicate them to his students.  The teacher who deals too much in wordsand allows the mind to be carried away by the force of words loses the spirit and it is the knowledge of the spirit that lies behind the  scriptures that  alone constitutesthe true teacher. This holds true not only for the scriptures but for any subject or discipline.  It is one thing to know, for example, the rules and laws of commercial transactions, but another to know the concepts and spirit behind them.  The former will lead to a mechanical implementation and may cause much injustice.  The latter will create a more compassionate and caring attitude that would be helpful in the larger sense.  But a teacher can only develop this  attitude of caring if he fulfils the second condition that is that the teacher like the taught must have purity of character. 

            Purity of character is neededin a teacher because truth cannot be acquired for oneself, or forimparting to others, without the purity of heart and soul.  It is the teacher’s character that impartsvalue to his words. The function of the teacher isnot mere classroom transaction.  It goes far beyond.  It is the transference of something from the teacher to the taught which is notthe mere the stimulation of existing intellectualfaculties in the taught. Something real and appreciable comes from the teacherand goes to the taught. Therefore, the teacher mustbe pure. The third condition is in regard to themotive. The prime motive of a teacher cannot be money or quest for name or fame.He must work out of love.  The rest is subsidiary.  Teaching is not simply a profession; it is a passion, a love of learning,  a love for the student and for humanity.  It is a spiritual force that can only be transmitted throughlove. Any selfish motive, such as the desire for gainor name, will immediately destroy the conveyingmedium.

Educating the Masses

            For Vivekananda, one of the greatest national sins of India was theneglect of the masses which had led to her downfall.  No amount of politics, he felt,  would be of anyavail until the Indian masses are once more welleducated, well fed and well cared for.One yardstick to measure the advancement of a nation was to see what was the proportion of educationand intelligence that hadspread among the masses. The chiefcause of India’s ruin was themonopolising of educationbya handful of people. The only service that we can do for the people is to give them education to developtheir individuality. Their eyes have to be opened to what is going on inthe world around them, and then they will develop the ability and strength to  work outtheir own salvation which will also lead to the salvation of the nation.  This idea of self-reliance Vivekananda repeatedly asserts because he is clear that no outsider can help people who have no capacity to help themselves.Peoplehave to understand and be convinced thatthey can do it and are not inferior to anybody else.  This is the only help they require from us, the rest will inevitably follow.

            Education which teaches people to become self-reliant and self-sufficient has to be imparted in the languageof the people, that is, inthe vernacular. This will make them  understand the importance of an education that leads to their growth. Once the aspiration for education is implanted, they will get the information themselves. However, one thingmore is essential, and this is culture. Emphasizing the importance of culture Vivekananda says, that massesmust be given culture for “Until you can give them that, there can beno permanence in the raised condition of themasses”.  The majority of people have been so engrossed in their struggle for existence, that they have had no time oropportunity for the awakening of knowledge.They have worked so long like machines andthe clever educated section of society has taken advantage of them for so long, appropriating the substantialpart of the fruits of their labour that they have had no time, inclination or means to inculcate the fine aspects of life through culture. But times havechanged. The poor exploited masses are gradually realizing their condition and uniting againstit. The upper classes will not be able torepress the lower for much longer.  In their own self-interest, it will become imperative for the higher classes to help thelower to get their legitimate rights.

            To spread education among the masses, three things are necessary.  The first is to feel from the heart because intellect or reason goes only a fewsteps and then stops. But inspiration comes through the heart and loveopens impossible gates.  The second is to go beyond talk and to try and find a solution.  In the path of that solution, there will be many impediments, including from one’s family, community and others.  These test one’s steadfastness and sincerity of purpose.  The third is work.  While one feels and knows the solution, the only way to ameliorate the situation is to work towards doing so.

Conclusion

Hence, for  Vivekanand, the decline of India was inextricably connected with the decline of education and of condemning the  masses to ignorance.  The indigenous system was dismantled by the British without replacing it with anything viable.  Indian economy became a colonial economy exploiting the people for the aggrandisement of the coloniser.  What replaced the indigenous system of education was both beyond the means of the impoverished masses and alienating for those who could afford it.  Two aspects of education were very important for Vivekanand purity of thought and of purpose both in the teacher and taught.  He saw education as a means of uplifting the masses but in a way that made them self-reliant and able to withstand any hardship while improving their own lot and serving the nation. 

Dr. Kavita A Sharma
President, South Asian University, New Delhi, president@sau.ac.in

Abstract

Sustainable development has been put squarely on the world agenda by the UN through the adoption of Sustainable Development Goals post the Millennium Development Goals. Moving towards sustainability requires fundamental changes in human attitudes and behavior. Education plays a vital role in bringing about the behavioral changes in the youth. It is the only long term solution for the avoidance of conflict in the society and maintenance of peace. Education holds the key to the prevention of dangerous manifestations of unsustainability of the present development growth trajectory namely hunger, poverty, unemployment, diseases etc. It has been recognized to be a sustainable development goal that is pertinent for the realization of other goals. In spite of the efforts of the national governments, education has not percolated down to the marginalized sections of the society. This fact holds true in respect of most of the developing countries including many South Asian countries. The national governments in many places finds itself incapacitated, incapable or sometimes unwilling to reach the ‘lower strata’ of the population giving rise to unrest among those who feel left out. This unrest takes the form of violence and conflict in many areas. Civil Society can serve to be a body that can become the voice of those who were left out. It can reach places where government cannot. Civil Society Organizations when properly funded by the governments could act as a medium through which the policies of the government reach down to the marginalized sections of the population. As far as education is concerned, CSOs with its local element and wide reach can make sure that education never suffers during the time of conflict as well as peace. For the realization of universal quality education for all, the governments must act hand in hand with the CSOs.

Key words: SDGs, MDGs, Sustainable education, universal quality education, resolution of conflict, localization, Civil Society.

1. Introduction

Education has been recognized by the world community as the key to resolve various conflicts that exist in the contemporary world. It is a tool to empower the marginalized population and serves as a medium to uplift people from the vicious cycle of poverty. Education also promotes resolution of conflicts in peaceful manner and contributes to build a society where there is mutual respect for human beings, other species, nature and development with sustainability. The supreme importance accorded to education led to its inclusion in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) where the countries of the world came together and pledged to achieve universal primary education by the end of 2015. However, it was realized that the quality of education was being compromised in the wake of achieving high enrollment rates in schools. Recognizing the importance of quality education and the impact that different types of education can have on the sustainable development, Goal 4 of Sustainable Development Goals was dedicated to the cause of achieving quality education along with universal primary education by the end of the year 2030. One of the major points of difference between MDGs and SDGs was that the latter gave prime importance to the element of localization which focuses on the involvement of various stakeholders like people in general, interest groups, civil society, and local government. Civil Society played a major role in the negotiations that led to the adoption of SDGs and as agreed by the global community they have a major role to play in its implementation too. There are many areas where the government cannot reach due to its incapacity, unwillingness or inability. In some communities there is a general mistrust against the government. Civil society can act as bridge in such situations between the government and the people. Education must continue even during the time of conflict and civil society can be a medium through which it can reach to places where it is not possible for the government to reach. For the better realization of SDGs, education is a must and for the percolation of education and the policies of government to every section of the population, the role of civil society is pertinent. The present article throws some light on this intersectionality between SDGs, Education and Civil Society.

2. From MDGs To SDGs

The millennium Development Goals (MDGs) can be termed as the first concrete attempt by the global community to achieve a set of targets that had versatile social significance for making the world a better and peaceful place. The platform for MDGs was set by Rio+20 conference where the resolution called ‘The Future that We Want’ was passed by the member states in which it was agreed by the international community that it needed to work on the eradication of poverty, energy, water and sanitation, health and human settlement. In pursuance of this resolution eight MDGs were agreed upon in the Millennium Summit of UN in the year 2000. These were: eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education, promote gender equality and empower women, improve maternal health, reduce child mortality, combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, ensure environmental sustainability and develop a global partnership for development.¹ These eight MDGs form a blueprint agreed to by all the world’s countries and leading development institutions with the aim of achieving these important social priorities by the target year of 2015.² As described by Bill Gates, the MDGs have become a type of global report card for the fight against poverty for the 15 years from 2000 to 2015.³

There was substantial progress made in the eight target areas by the countries across the globe. However, this progress was not even and often concentrated in certain regions or for certain groups. A 2015 UN assessment stated: “the assessment of progress towards MDGs has repeatedly shown that the poorest and those disadvantaged because of gender, age, disability or ethnicity are often bypassed.” However, it cannot be denied that the MDGs were a historic and effective method of global mobilization to achieve a set of important social priorities worldwide that expressed a widespread public concern about poverty, hunger, disease, unmet need for schooling, gender inequality and environmental degradation. The efforts made by developing countries were commendable; however, it was highly variable across goals, countries and regions and communities.⁴ For instance, except for Sri Lanka and Maldives, the rest of the countries in South Asia, have struggled with the MDGs in the area of education. Also, the developing countries as a whole have cut the poverty rate by half between 1990 and 2010 which has largely resulted from tremendous economic growth in China. For a decade and a half, the MDGs remained a focus of global policy debates and national planning. That is, perhaps, what led to a widespread feeling that the fight against poverty and inequity must continue.⁵

The MDGs focused on the achievement of universal primary education for all children across the globe by the end of year 2015. The data from 2000 to 2015 shows massive progress in the developing countries with the total enrolment rate going up to 91 percent in 2015, and the number of children dropping out of school worldwide has reduced by almost half. Along with it

¹ Millennium Development Goal 8, Taking Stock of the Global partnership for development, MDG Gap Task Force Report 2015, available at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/ MDG_Gap_2015_E_web.pdf (Last Visited on 26.3.2018). ² United Nations, Millennium Development Goals and beyond 2015, available at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/ (Last Visited on 26.3.2018). ³ Jeffrey D, Sachs, From Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals, The Lancet , Vol. 379, Issue 9832 , 2206 – 2211, available at http://www.thelancet. com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60685-0/fulltext, (Last Visited on 26.3.2018). ⁴ Id. ⁵ Idthe literacy rate has also increased dramatically and the enrollment rate of girl child has also increased. These successes are remarkable.⁶

However, the progress has been tough in some developing regions due to high levels of poverty, armed conflicts and other emergencies. In Western Asia and North Africa, due to ongoing armed conflict the number of children out of school has drastically increased, which is a worrying trend. While Sub-Saharan Africa made the greatest progress in primary school enrolment among all developing regions – from 52 percent in 1990, up to 78 percent in 2012 – large disparities still remain continues as the children from the poorest households are up to four times more likely to be out of school than those of the richest households. Disparities between rural and urban areas also remain high in these regions.⁷

Despite being so targeted MDGs suffered from many lacunae which were inherent in it. It concentrated on the number of children getting enrolled in schools without any consideration of the quality of education. As a result of which there was a substantial increase in the number of children attending school but a consequent decrease in the quality of education. MDGs have also criticized by civil society groups for being more state centric and not involving enough public participation. Due to these reasons the benefit of the national policies did not percolate down to the bottom of the society and the poor and marginalized were left behind.

Nonetheless, the progress made by MDGs towards the alleviation of poverty, hunger and disease could not be ignored and there was a widespread feeling among the policy makers and civil societies to continue this effort even beyond 2015. As a result of which, another set of global goals were adopted, which were know as the Sustainable Development Goals. The Open Working Group (OWG) of the General Assembly that preceded the adoption of the SDGs pointed out the central difference between the MDGs and the SDGs being that the latter would emphasize on ending hunger; empowering women and mobilizing everyone while partnering with local government. Localization by involving massive public participation, active role of civil society and government at all levels lied at the heart of SDGs.

Although the SDGs built upon MDGs but it covered a much wider range of issues consisting of seventeen goals with 169 targets in Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with the underlying thread of commitment to end poverty. The Preamble states of the document

⁶ United Nations Development Programme, Goal 4: Quality Education, Sustainable Development Goals, , available at http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable­development-goals/goal-4-quality-education.html (Last Visited on 26.3.2018). ⁷ Id.

states: “Eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is the greatest challenge and an indispensable requirement for sustainable development.” SDGs seek comprehensive responses to several critical issues as they make a bold determination to ensure that no one is left behind.

The seventeen SDGs are as follows: No Poverty; Zero Hunger; Good Health and Wellbeing; Quality Education; Gender Equality; Clean Water and Sanitation; Affordable and Clean Energy; Decent Work and Economic Growth; Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure; Reduce Inequalities; Sustainable Cities and Communities; Responsible Consumption and Production; Climate Change; Life Below Water; Life of Land; Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions; and Partnership for the Goals.

2.1 Goal 4 Of SDGs

Goal 4 of SDGs states the commitment of the world community to ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning. Goal 4 is the bold attempt by the world community of education, as stated in the Open Working Group of the UN General Assembly, to ensure that all learners acquire knowledge and skills needed to promoted sustainable development through “education for sustainable development and sustainable life styles, human rights, gender quality, promotion of a culture of peace and non-violence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development. There are seven targets under Goal 4: Universal Primary and Secondary education, Early childhood development and universal pre-primary education, Equal access to technical/vocational and higher education, relevant skills for decent work, gender equality and inclusion, universal youth literacy, education for sustainable development and global citizenship; and three means of implementing them: effective learning environment, scholarships and qualified teachers and educators.⁸

Education is the key for the realization of many other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Quality education gives the ability to people to break from the cycle of poverty. Education inculcates value in people and lets them view the world from a different perspective that transcends the existing inequalities in the society which leads to its subsequent reduction. It also empowers people everywhere to live more healthy and sustainable lives. Education is also crucial to fostering tolerance between people and

⁸ UNESCO, Sustainable Development Goal 4 and its target, available at https://en.unesco.org/education2030-sdg4/targets, (Last Visited on 25.3.2018). contributes to more peaceful societies as it is considered to be the instrument of minimizing conflicts.⁹

According to Irina Bokova, “A fundamental change is needed in the way we think about education’s role in global development, because it has a catalytic impact on the well-being of individuals and the future of our planet. … Now, more than ever, education has a responsibility to be in gear with 21st century challenges and aspirations, and foster the right types of values and skills that will lead to sustainable and inclusive growth, and peaceful living together.” ¹⁰

It has been suggested that if all students left school with basic reading skills 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty. A mother’s education improves her children’s nutrition and a child whose mother can read is 50% more likely to live past age five. One additional school year can increase a women’s earning by up to 20%. As societies become more educated they understand the link between clean water, sanitation and health. Educated citizens are more likely to adopt new technologies that are environmental friendly. Each additional year of schooling increases the average national GDP by 0.37%. A 0.1% improvement in country’s education, over 40 years, raises it per capita income by 23%. With higher level of education people show respect to the well being of the environment. Increasing enrollment in secondary education by 10% can reduce the risk of war by 3%.¹¹

That Education is the key factor was recognized by the UN when it declared 2004-20015 the decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Education for all has always been an integral part of the sustainable agenda. The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in 2002 adopted the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI) which reaffirmed the MDG of achieving Universal Primary Education by 2015 and the goal of the Dakar Framework of Action on Education for All to eliminate gender disparity by 2005 in primary and secondary education and at all levels by 2015. The Muscat Agreement adopted at the Global Education for All Meeting (GEM) in 2014 and the proposal for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed by the Open Working Group of the UN General

⁹ United Nations, Quality Education: Why it matters, available at http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/ENGLISH_Why_ it_Matters_Goal_4_QualityEducation.pdf, (Last Visited on 25.3.2018). ¹⁰ UNESCO, Education for sustainable development goals, Learning Objectives,2017available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002474/247444e.pdf, (Last Visited on 27.3.2018). ¹¹ Global Partnership for Education, 17 ways education influences the sustainable development goals, August 13, 2015, available at https://www.globalpartnership.org /multimedia/infographic/17-ways-education-influences -sustainable -development -goals, (Last Visited on 30.3.2018).

Assembly on SDGs (OWG) also emphasized education for sustainable development.

The Aichi-Nagoya Declaration on Education for Sustainable Development emphasized the potential of Education for Sustainable Development to “empower learners to transform themselves and the society they live in by developing knowledge, skills, attitudes, competences and values required for addressing global citizenship and local contextual challenges of the present and the future, such as critical and systematic thinking, analytical problem-solving, creativity, working collaboratively and making decisions in the face of uncertainty, and understanding of the interconnectedness of global challenges and responsibilities emanating from such awareness.” It recognized that Education for Sustainable Development was “an opportunity and responsibility for both developed and developing countries in intensifying efforts for poverty eradication, reduction of inequalities, environmental protection and economic growth, with a view to promoting equitable, more sustainable economies and societies benefitting all countries, especially those most vulnerable such as Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries.” It underscored that the implementation should “fully take into consideration local, regional and global contexts, as well as the contribution of culture to sustainable development and the need for respecting peace, non-violence, cultural diversity, local and traditional knowledge and indigenous wisdom and practices, and universal principles such as human rights, gender equality democracy and social justice.” It urged all stakeholders “to engage in collaborative and transformative knowledge production, dissemination and utilization, promotion of innovation across sectoral and disciplinary boundaries at the science-policy-ESD practice interface to enrich decision-making and capacity building for sustainable development with emphasis on involving and respecting youth as key stakeholders.” The objectives outlined in this agenda hint at the possibilities of great social capital which could successfully accrue from the collaborative functioning between nations.

Sustainable development requires a thoughtful renovation of how we think and act. To build a more sustainable world and to achieve the targets of SDGs, individuals must become sustainability change-makers, which requires the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that empowers and motivates them to contribute to sustainable development. Education is the basis of achievement of sustainable development. However, the type of education also becomes determinative of sustainable development. The approach of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) does not just promote economic growth alone which might contribute to unsustainability but empowers learners to take informed decisions and responsible actions for environmental integrity, economic viability and a just and equitable society for present and future generations.¹²

ESD as a key component for sustainable development has been recognized internationally as it was acknowledged at the three seminal global sustainable development summits: the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro; the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa; and the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), also in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It has also been recognized in other key global agreements, such as the Paris Agreement (Article 12).¹³

3. Challenges And Role Of Education

In today’s world the lines between conflict and no-conflict are blurred. Rarely do two states officially declare war upon each other. What is more common is ‘low level’ conflict between the government and a section or sections of society or between different sections among each other. Hence the world continues to be engulfed in both violent regional conflicts and violent internal conflicts. Conflicts lead to vast destruction and massive displacement of people. They create political refugees and asylum seekers. Movement to another part of the world only worsens the situation of most as they live in below subsistence level conditions with minimal of education and health care. The uneasiness and fear become sharper because of huge disparities existing in the world that cause tensions between the local and the global. Issues of education, health and employment play out against this backdrop. However, what is important is not conflict itself but the destructive impact of the conflict. Apart from armed conflict there are other factors fuelling tensions. One concern is the growth of population and its distribution which would impact not only the life styles and standards of living but also financing and public expenditure. At the same time, about 26.3% of the world population is below 14 years of age with its own needs and requirements. Population movements do not take place only internationally because of conflicts, environmental disasters or in search of better economic opportunities. These also take place within nation states as people move from one part to another in search of safer habitations or greater opportunities. Consequently, rural areas are marginalized and accelerated urbanization takes place. The uprooting that goes with migration leads to the breakdown of family life, uncontrolled urbanization and

¹² UNESCO, Education for sustainable development goals, Learning Objectives, 2017 available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002474/247444e.pdf, (Last Visited on 27.3.2018). ¹³ Id.

collapse of neighborhood solidarity that leads to the isolation of individuals and their marginalization, brutalizing and often criminalizing them. There is growing inequality because of poverty and exclusion not just among different nations of the world but within social groups within nations. Using the World Bank definition of $1.25 a day, there were 1.2 billion people living in extreme poverty in 2013. According to ILO, the world faces the urgent challenge of creating 600 million jobs over the next decade in order to generate sustainable growth and maintain social cohesion. But simply creating more jobs is not enough as 900 million workers live with their families on less than $2 dollars a day and most of them are in developing countries. This is unsustainable.

Globalization has its own far reaching effects. Globalization involves the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before–in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and nation-states to reach round the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before, producing a powerful backlash from those brutalized or left behind. Hence, it should not come as a surprise that crime too has become globalized. Technology has created a digital divide between those who have adjusted to these technologies and those who haven’t because of lack of resources or political will.

While the link between conflict and education is difficult to establish but it is seen that schools and health centers are increasingly becoming targets of military activity. When educational institutions are targeted, it leads to the breakdown of the education system itself which results in large numbers of young uneducated men that creates circumstances that sustain conflict. Hence, education or rather lack of it can exacerbate conflict. There are studies that show that it is the rapidity of change rather than poverty per se that contributes to conflict because many high income countries with well developed education systems also have conflict. So perhaps it is the type education and attitudes that it promotes that are important for peace. Simply providing education does not ensure peace. The relationship between education and conflict should not be considered only at a time of crisis but should be an integral part of development thinking. It can be examined through three perspectives.

(1) Education as a right: this should be maintained in the most difficult of times and not neglected during conflict. For example, Vietnam ensured basic education for its people even through thirty years of war and emerged with almost hundred percent literacy at the end of it, in spite of the incidences of violent conflict.

(2) Education as a Millennium Development Goal: education is an important tool for human development and the eradication of poverty. Children rarely get a second chance for education once the opportunity has been lost due to conflict situation. It means loss of social capital required to recover from the conflict. Now with the SDGs, by placing the individual and the community at the heart of development, education becomes more important than ever.

(3) Education as a part of the problem and a potential cause of conflict: policies and practice at all levels within an education system need to be analyzed to see whether they aggravate or ameliorate conflict.

On education lies a heavy responsibility. Nothing can replace formal education which introduces students to many forms of knowledge. There is no substitute for teacher student relationship which is underpinned by authority and developed through dialogue. Through basic education, marginalized people learn more about health and are better able to protect themselves and their children against disease. This in turn improves the receiving and benefitting from education. Increased access to education and skills can contribute to reducing poverty and to breaking the cycle of transmission of poverty from one generation to another. Thus, improvement in education leads to benefits in other and hence synergies between them have to be sought and found.

4. Role Of Civil Society

One of the major criticisms of MDGs has been less involvement of different stakeholders which was essential for the achievement of these targeted goals. Most of the debates were concerned with the setting of goals and indicators and less attention was paid to the roles and responsibilities that different stakeholders should have in the implementation of these goals so that its effect could permeate to the local level. In the negotiations leading to adoption of SDGs it was realized that the given massiveness of the scope and targets of SDGs, it would be impossible for the national governments to achieve the agendas alone. It was agreed that they must facilitate participation of all sectors of society, including civil society organizations (CSOs), the private sector and the general public at the local level. This “localisation” calls for an inclusive approach that utilizes local knowledge to tailor the ambitious global-development agenda to specific local circumstances.¹⁴

Civil society stakeholders played a critical role in the negotiations that led to the adoption of SDGs by participating in the sessions of the intergovernmental negotiations and the Open Working Group and provided input to governments ahead of and during sessions. Through their research

¹⁴ Global Public Policy Institute, Role of civil Society in localizing the sustainable development goals, March 7, 2016, available at http://www.gppi.net/publications/ innovation-in-development/article/the-roles-of-civil-society-in-localizing-the-sustainable-d evelopment-goals/, (Last Visited on 25.3.2018). and persistent advocacy CSOs influenced governments’ positions even outside the formal setting. CSOs worked in coalitions across sectors, countries and regions to coordinate their effort and strengthen their advocacy and helped in the shaping of the 2030 Agenda, making it ambitious and holistic and covering a wide set of objectives across social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. Addressing many of the shortcomings of the MDGs, they firmly called for an agenda which was grounded in human rights principles with the aspiration of improving outcomes for all people, including marginalized population groups.¹⁵

Goal 16 of SDGs acknowledges the role of civil societies in the achievement of its targets. It states: “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.” This shows the paramount importance of CSOs in implementing the targets and achieving the SDGs.¹⁶

5. Role Of CSOs In Promotion Of Education Under The SDGS: Inter-Sectionality

There are many reasons that make the involvement of CSOs imperative in the promotion of education. CSOs act as the voice of the poor and most marginalized section of the society.¹⁷ As stated above education is the key to the realization of all SDGs. However, despite overall increase in the number of children attending school, there are millions who only dream of it. Even among those who attend the school, quality education is missing. Most of the uneducated people belong to the lower strata of society that is marginalized. Lack of education leads to lack of employment which further contributes to poverty leading to several health hazards and poor standard of living. This is a vicious cycle that continues through generations. Government has come up with several national policies for the education of these marginalized children. However, the progress has been very slow. It is not possible for the government to go to the local levels and try to

¹⁵ Raffaela Dattler, Not Without Us: civil society’s role in implementing the sustainable development goals, available at http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/ 319308/6-Not-without-us-civil-society-role-implementing-SDGs.pdf?ua=1, (Last Visited on 26.3.2018). ¹⁶ United Nations, Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform, available at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdg16, (Last Visited on 31.3.2018). ¹⁷ Global Public Policy Institute, Role of civil Society in localizing the sustainable development goals, March 7, 2016,available at http://www.gppi.net/publications/ innovation-in-development/article/the-roles-of-civil-society-in-localizing-the-sustainable-d evelopment-goals/, (Last Visited on 25.3.2018).

implement the policies and do away with the problems that are associated with the implementation of such national policies. Sometimes the government is incapable, incapacitated or unwilling to go to the grass root of the problem. Role of civil society becomes significant here. CSOs are closer to local people and communities which makes it easier for them to interact with people, listen to their problems, build dialogues and a strong relationship of trust. This helps in assessing the grass root level impediments which is impossible to evaluate from the national level. For ex-There are certain areas where people have a general mistrust against the government and its policies like some of the naxalite areas in India and other conflict zones, CSOs can reach out to these people and can disseminate the benefits of the policies which would never reach them otherwise. This would be in consonance of the policy of ‘leaving no one’ which is underlying principle of SDGs.¹⁸ The Treaty on Environmental Education for Sustainable Societies and Global Responsibility recognizes the central role of education in shaping values and social actions and creating sustainable and equitable society and also emphasizes on the role of CSOs in furthering of education for all.¹⁹ Sometimes the arguments of the poor and marginalized people are rejected because it lacks the legal backing and structure which can be provided by the CSOs. They can act as the voice of people and translate it into strong arguments that could be addressed by the local authorities. CSOs can act as a bridge between people and local authorities and government and can disseminate information to the people and be a tool of social change by educating people about the benefit of education and SDGs.

CSOs also act as the agent of accountability urging the government to be transparent and accountable in its actions. This involves designation of clearly defined roles which are specific, so that the responsibilities of all the stakeholders are stark and transparent which would allow the easy identification of lapses and accountability. Corruption is a problem that has engulfed the whole world. Developing countries have the highest incidences of corruption which is fueled by wide inequalities in the society. The difference between haves and have not has increased to such a level that it has reduced many sections of the population to extreme poverty. The benefit of national and global policies never reaches to these people because of the existing corruption in-between. Therefore, role of CSOs become critical in keeping the government and public officials responsible and accountable to the general public. CSOs can take the help of media, pressure groups,

¹⁸ Id. ¹⁹ The Treaty on Environmental Education for Sustainable Societies and Global Responsibility, available at http://www.stakeholderforum.org/fileadmin/files/Earth_ Summit_2012/1992_treaties/Treaty_on_Environmental_Education_for_Sustainable_Societi es_and_Global_Responsibility.pdf, (Last Visited on 1.4.2018).

litigation and public shaming to keep the officials in check and to ensure that the people avail the benefits which are meant for them. There has been end number of misappropriation of fund cases in India in the field of education. The plight of Government run schools in India speak for the corruption itself.

CSOs may act as service delivery agents too²⁰ especially in regions of conflict and extreme poverty where the government cannot reach. It is pertinent for the realization of SDGS that education must not stop even during the time of conflict. It has been observed that schools and health centers are increasingly becoming targets of military activity. When educational institutions are targeted, it leads to the breakdown of the education system itself that results in large numbers of young uneducated men which further helps to create circumstances that sustain conflict. Hence, education or rather lack of it can exacerbate conflict. CSOs can help in continuation of education system which can both be formal and non formal. Non formal education refers to organized activities, international in nature which is held outside of formal educational institutes, by the CSOs with a certain degree of systemization and structure, with the objective of offering select types of education to specific subgroups of the population.²¹ During the times of conflict too CSOs can help by continuing the non formal education, if the formal system gets disrupted. However, this would involve a lot of funding by the government and that is why the government must act hand in hand with the CSOs. Instead of finding faults and blaming each other for the gaps, aim should be to collaborate for the greater good. It is better if the funding is granted by the government over international organizations²² because it would create a system of accountability between the government and the CSOs and the local issues could be better tackled. International funding makes the CSOs accountable to the international community and there would be greater chances of misappropriation.

The example of Brazil can be quoted here-where the Government institutionalized this non formal system. However, it can be further argued

²⁰ Global Public Policy Institute, Role of civil Society in localizing the sustainable development goals, March 7, 2016, available at http://www.gppi.net/publications /innovation-in-development/article/the-roles-of-civil-society-in-localizing-the-sustainable-d evelopment-goals/, (Last Visited on 25.3.2018).²¹ Virgínia Talaveira Valentini Tristao, José américo martelli Tristao, The contribution of NGOs in environmental education: An evaluation of stakeholders’ perception, Ambient. soc. [online], vol.19, n.3, pp.47-66, 2016, available at, http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php? script=sci_arttext&pid=S1414-753X2016000300047&lng=en&nrm=iso, (Last Visited on 1.4.2018). ²² Global Public Policy Institute, Role of civil Society in localizing the sustainable development goals, March 7, 2016,available at http://www.gppi.net/publications/ innovation-in-development/article/the-roles-of-civil-society-in-localizing-the-sustainable-d evelopment-goals/, (Last Visited on 25.3.2018).

that this can take place in formal education system as well. Hence Tribal education can be different from what the formal world teaches, and it should be respected, but when it comes to environment then the same should be universalized. The versatility and the accessibility of civil societies help them in reaching the areas where the Government cannot.

Hence it is important to involve them on a non profit basis to formalize this institutional education system with special concerns relating to environment. The non profit nature further helps the goals to be realized not merely in form but essence. The people and groups who volunteer to bring out such changes are real heroes of progress. The problem of funding can be resolved by consulting Private enterprises and giving them incentives to invest in such Civil Societies by way of tax exemptions and other procedural preferences.²³

CSOs can also contribute in the policy making by aiding the government in research, monitoring the implementation process through collection of data and statistics by going to the marginalized areas.²⁴

It can also help in giving expert opinion and work towards the attainment of sustainable education by collaborating with other groups. Collaboration among different civil society groups and NGOs would not only help in the achievement of SDGs but would also create a network of checks and balances where corruption could be kept at bay.

CSOs can provide meaningful help in the attainment of SDGs only when they get a free environment to work and operate which requires respect by governments to fundamental right to freedoms of speech and expression and of association and peaceful assembly as well as to access to justice. It further requires transparency in the government office and public access to information.²⁵

²³Virgínia Talaveira Valentini Tristao, José américo martelli Tristao, The contribution of NGOs in environmental education: An evaluation of stakeholders’ perception, Ambient. soc. [online], vol.19, n.3, pp.47-66, 2016, available at, http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php? script=sci_arttext&pid=S1414-753X2016000300047&lng=en&nrm=iso, (Last Visited on 1.4.2018). ²⁴ Community of Democracies, The importance of ensuring an enabling environment for civil society as it relates to the Sustainable Development Goals, , June 2017, available at http://www.community-democracies.org/app/uploads/2016/09/Study-Enabling­Environment-and-SDGs.pdf, (Last Visited on 31.3.2018). ²⁵ Raffaela Dattler, Not Without Us: civil society’s role in implementing the sustainable development goals, available at http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/ 319308/6-Not-without-us-civil-society-role-implementing-SDGs.pdf?ua=1, (Last Visited on 26.3.2018).

6. Conclusion

The role of civil society would be of extreme significance in spreading education which is sustainable to every strata of society. Sustainable education is a lifelong learning process that requires adequate changes in attitude and inculcates values that would further help in the realization of other SDGs. South Asia is a region of multiple cultures and religions that sometimes create a situation of conflict. There are incidences of dominance of the majority community over the minorities. These reasons coupled with economic disparity create an environment of distrust and chaos which gives rise to a number of internal and external conflicts. This region is also crippled with a low literacy rate. Education seems to be the only long term tool which has the capacity to improve this situation. It is only through creating an environment of trust, respect and mutual understanding that South Asia can get out of these mini battles. It is also a region of political instability and extreme distrust in government. This factor intensifies the role of civil society. Education can only reach to the remotest parts of the region when there is an active participation of civil society which is supported by the government. Because of the abovementioned reasons the inter-sectionality of Education, SDGs and Civil Society assumes magnanimous significance as far as South Asian Countries are concerned.

Today we are here to deliberate on Gandhi and also mark the International Peace Day which was on 21^st September.  What is peace?  The word, like justice or equity, is complex and means different things to different people.  At the very least, it is absence of disturbance or violence.  On a more positive side, it is harmony and collaboration among different sections of society towards a common goal.  However it is defined, Mahatma Gandhi is considered an apostle of peace who led India to independence through non-violent resistance.  Gandhi had tested out his ideas with success in S. Africa and he applied what he had learnt there on his return to India on January 9, 1915.  Of course, it was not a mechanical application but a continuously evolving process.  However, these ideas did not come in vacuum.  Gandhi used Satyagraha or  demand based on truth, to protest when in 1906, the transvaal government promulgated a new Act compelling the registration of the colony’s Indian and Chinese population.  At a mass protest meeting held in Johannesburg on 11^th September 1906, Gandhi adopted Satyagraha or non-violent protest for the first time.  He urged Indians to defy the new law and to suffer the punishment for doing so.  The community adopted the plan and in the seven years that followed, thousands of Indians were jailed, flogged or shot for striking, refusing to register, burning their registration cards or for engaging in other forms of non-violent resistance.

Gandhi’s ideas and leadership in India did not bear fruit in a vacuum.  Some ground had been already prepared.   As Kireet Joshi points outon his return from England, Sri Aurobindo, then twenty years old had the courage to offer a scathing criticism of Congress for their positions and cravings for ineffective and minor reforms.  Some of the first words he wrote were articles called “New Lamps for Old” in Indu Prakash.  He said,

Our appeal, the appeal of every high‑souled and self‑respecting nation, ought not to be to the opinion of the Anglo‑Indians, no, nor yet to the British sense of justice, but to our own reviving sense of manhood, to our own sincere fellow‑feeling — so far as it can be called sincere  with the silent and suffering people of India. I am sure that eventually the nobler part of us will prevail, that when we no longer obey the dictates of a veiled self‑interest, but return to the profession of a large and genuine patriotism, when we cease to hanker after the soiled crumbs which England may cast to us from her table then it will be to that sense of manhood, to that sincere fellow‑feeling that we shall finally and forcibly appeal.

It was during the three years in which Shri Aurobindo edited the daily BandeMataram, that the basic programmes of the struggle for the freedom of India were visualized socially or educationally, and empowered for their ultimate enfoldment leading to their victorious fulfilment during the next forty years.  This was a done through a series of articles that Sri Aurobindo wrote in the daily particularly from April 11 to April 23, 1907.

Sri Aurobindo rejected the idea of dominion status and wanted complete freedom which would make India and Britain equal nations.  This alone, for him, was Swaraj.  He also enunciated the programmes of boycott and non-cooperation together with Swadeshi and a nationalist education to be formulated through a National Council for Education.   He advocated reaching out to the masses and proceeded to do so through Bande Mataram.  The impact, as he himself points out, was electrical:

In the enthusiasm that swept surging everywhere with the cry of Bande Mataram ringing on all sides men felt it glorious to be alive and dare and act together and hope; the old apathy and timidity was broken and a force created which nothing could destroy and which rose again and again in wave after wave till it carried India to the beginning of a complete victory.

In these articles Sri Aurobindo first enunciated three possible ways of fighting for independence .  One was petitioning, which the Congress had been doing.  This, however, was an unprecedented way and could not succeed.  The second was self development that the Congress was at that time advocating.  Self development whether industrially, socially or educationally, Sri Aurobindo convincingly argued was not possible unless there was a control authority that could bring out the best thought and energy of the country or the majority of its citizens.  But there was no such authority in India nor had anyone tried to develop it.  The consequence was that while there had been much talk of enlightenment and national regeneration, but instead of national progress there was national confusion and weakness.  That wasbecause there was no central authority to lead the people towards development.  The third is organized resistance to the existing form of government.  This could be passive or active, defensive or aggressive.  Here is where Sri Aurobindo’s path diverged from  that of Gandhi.

The object of organized resistance said Sri Aurobindo, could be the vindication of national liberty, or to substitute one form of government for another, or to remove particular objectionable features in the existing system without any entire or radical alteration of the whole, or it could be simply to redress particular grievances.  Passive resistance, said Sri Aurobindo, was the only affective means available  at the time.  The other alternative was actual armed revolt, by which the organized  strength of the nation could be gathered around a powerful central authority and guided by the principle of self development and self help, it could  wrest control of national life from an alien bureaucracy to eventually replace it by a self-governed India, liberated from foreign rule.  Organisednational resistance had three courses open to it.  It could make administration impossible by organized passive resistance.  The second was to make administration impossible by organized aggressive resistance through an implacable campaign of assassinations, rioting, strikes and agrarian uprisings.  The third was armed revolt.  The choice had to be determined by the circumstances of servitude and looking at the conditions in India, he felt, the most suitable weapon seemed to be passive resistance.  He recognized that peaceful resistance was less bold and aggressive than the other methods but it called for  heroism of its own kind and the participation of people was more because it required universal endurance and suffering.

The essential difference Sri Aurobindo pointed out, between active and passive resistance was that the aggressive resister attempted to cause positive harm to the government while the passive resister abstained from doing something that would help the government.  The object, however in both cases, was the same — to force the hand of the government; only the line of attack is different.  Passive resistance took the form of boycott as in refusing to purchase foreign goods making the further exploitation of Indian economy  impossible.  This makes it clear that self development and passive resistance are connected as foreign goods have then to be replaced by goods made in India.  Further, passive resistance not just ignoring the alien bureaucracy but to have nothing to do with it either by giving it assistance or by acquiescing to it.  Hence, petitioning he felt, had to be replaced by boycott.

Sri Aurobindo then went on to elaborate on three necessities that make passive resistance possible.  One, passive resistance both at the  individual level and en masse, should always be prepared to break an unjust coercive law and take the legal consequences.  For the same reason, the people must be prepared to disobey an unjust or co-ercive executive order whether general or in particular, and third, they must be willing to boycott those  guilty of disobedience to the national will.  He recognized that an individual is apt to be weak or selfish and unless he is sure that the mass will not tolerate individual treachery he, after the initial enthusiasm, will fall prey to his weakness or selfishness to the detriment of his community.  This is an important psychological insight.

In a major deviation from what Gandhi was to advocate later, Sri Aurobindo said that there were limits to passive resistance.  The moment violent on coercive methods were used on passive resisters, passive resistance must cease and active resistance becomes a duty.  If, for instance, the executive chooses to disperse a meeting through violent means, active resistance becomes the right to self defence as long asit does not exceed the violence that is needed for defence, This shows that Sri Aurobindo was realistic enough to understand and it was easier to speak of love than to love.  Love that drives out hate is a divine quality of which only one man in a thousand is capable of.  However, politics is concerned with masses and not with individuals.  To ask masses to act as saints, rise to the heights of divine love and practise it in relation to their adversaries or oppressors, is to ignore human nature.  Aggression he said, was unjust only when unprovoked and violence was unrighteous when used for unrighteous ends.  It would be a barren philosophy said Sri Aurobindo, if non-violent passive resistance is applied as a mechanical rule to be followed whatever may be the circumstance or if an attempt was made to  fit all human life into it.

Gandhi first enunciated his theory and practise of passive resistance in Indian opinion which he published from South Africa for about eleven years.  He called it Satyagraha or Truth Force.  Tolstoy called it Soul Force or Love Force.  Carried out to its utmost limit, this force is independent of pecuniary or material assistance, and certainly of violence even in its elementary form.  Violence he said, was the negation of this spiritual force as it could only be cultivated by those who would entirely eschew violence.  It is a force that could be used by individuals as well as by communities in political as well as domestic affairs.   For him, it was Universally applicable, and that was a proof of its invincibility.  It could be used by men, women and children.  It was also untrue to say, he explained, that it was an instrument of the weak as long as they were not capable of meeting violence with violence.  In fact he emphatically  declared that it was impossible for the weak to apply this force.  Only those who realise that there is something in man which is superior to brute nature and that the latter always yields to the former that he can be an effective passive resister.

According to Gandhi, this soul force was to violence and therefore to all tyranny and injustice, what light is to darkness.  At the substratum of politics  lies the immutable maxim that governance of people is only possible so long  they consent either consciously or subconsciously to be governed.  As an example he took the Asiatic Act of 1907 of the Transvaal.  The people did not want to be governed by it and this became such a mighty force that  it had to go.

Two courses were open–violence or to suffer the penalties prescribed under the Act and thus exhibit the soul force for as long as it took for the governors and the law makers to sympathetically accept the point of view of the people’s demands.  It took a long time he saidfor them to succeed because the passive resistance offered was not complete.  All passive resisters did not understand the value of the force and many did not refrain from violence through conviction.  Others were passive resisters only in name and came to the movement with mixed motives.  Even while engaged in the struggle, they would have resorted to violence but for the most vigilant supervision. This, according to Gandhi, prolonged the struggle as he felt that the soul force in its purest form would bring instant relief.  The use of this force required the adoption of poverty in the sense that passive resisters had  to be indifferent to whether they had the means to feed or clothe themselves  A perfect passive resister had to be  almost a perfect man.  It required prolonged training of the individual soul and people cannot  become perfect passive resisters all of a sudden.  It elevated and ennobled them to become better human beings and hence, the greater the spirit of passive resistance, the better the people.

For Gandhi, this soul force was a force which, if it became universal would revolutionise social ideals and do away with, despotism and militarises.  If even a few Indians, he thought, had learned from the struggle at Transvaal to  become as perfect as possible passive resisters they would not only serve themselves but also humanity at large.  He wanted every child to be educated to know what is truth, love and the powers latent in the soul. A child has to be taught very early that in the struggle of life he or she can conquer hate by love, untruth by truth and violence by self-suffering.

However, while Gandhi began by calling his movement in S.Africa, passive resistance, he was uneasy about the name.  Hence a prize was announced in the Indian Opinionto one who could suggest a more appropriate name.  The principles of passive resistance had already been explained in the Indian Opinion.  The name  suggested by Maganlal Gandhi was “Sadagraha” to connote truth that implies love, and firmness that is a synonym for force.  Gandhi modified it to bring it even closer to his concept of passive resistance and thus was born the term “Satyagraha”.

Gandhi was careful to distinguish Satyagraha from passive resistance and pointed to the great and fundamental difference between the two.  Passive resistance was associated with the suffragists who were seen as danger to person and property.  This was not true of passive resisters and so they were not credited with the courage of the suffragists.  Also passive resistance was seen to be the instrument of the weak and Gandhi felt that the power of suggestion is such that a person becomes what he believes.  If passive resisters continued to believe and also let others believe that they are weak, they would never become strong and at the earliest opportunity, they would give up.  On the other hand if they believed in their strength they would become strong and in turn their resistance would become strong so that they would never think of giving up.

Again, there was no scope for love in passive resistance while there was no scope for hatred in Satyagraha.  In passive resistance there was room for the use of arms when  suitable occasions arose, whereas in satyagraha, the use of force was forbidden even in the most favourable circumstances.  Passive resistance is offered to those who have ceased to be dear and become an object of hatred.  The intention of the passive resister is to injure the other party whereas a satyagrahi is willing to undergo any hardship and suffering but has not the remotest intention of injuring the other. 

So what was this soul force?  Scattered in Gandhi’s  writings are statements that define it and give its characteristics.  “Non-Violence” for Gandhi, in its dynamic condition meant conscious suffering.  It did not mean meek submission to the will of the evil-doer, but it meant putting one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant.  Working under this law of our being, he felt, it was possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire to save his honour, his religion, his soul, and lay the foundation for that empire’s fall or its regeneration.  At its not by the ancient Indian”law of self sacrifice”.  Gandhi laid great store by suffering.  “Suffering” for him was “the law of human beings; war is the law of the jungle.  But suffering is infinitely more powerful than the law of the jungle for converting the opponent and opening his ears, which are otherwise shut, to the voice of reasons.”  However, reason alone is not enough as its appeal is only to the head.  The heart also has to be moved and this can only be done through suffering that “opens up the inner understanding in man.”

On his return to India, Gandhi often talked of the establishment of Ram Rajya where there would be justice for all, fearlessness as taught by the Bhagwad Gita and the power of love.  “If the world believes in the existence of the soul, “ he had said in an address delivered before the members of the Emerson Club and Hampstead Branch of the Peace and Arbitration Society in London, “it must be recognized that soul force better than body force; it is the sacred principle which moves mountains.”

Gandhi laid down strict canons of moral discipline for the satyagrahi.  He must have an unshakable faith in god to be able to bear calmly the atrocities perpetrated on him by authorities having superior force of violence at their command.  He must not hanker after fame and wealth.  He must obey the leader of the satyagraha unit.  He should practise brahmcharya and be absolutely fearless and firm in his resolve.  He must have patience, single-minded purposefulness and must not be swayed from the path of duty by anger or any other passion.  Satyagraha can never be resorted to for   personal gains.  It is a process of love and the appeal is to the heart and not to the sense of fear of the wrong doer.  It is a process of personal purification.  The sense of purity, that Gandhi brought into political thought was his unique contribution to both thought and action.  It gave as much importance to means as to ends.

Satyagraha as propounded by Gandhi had a wide range.  In its mild form it is non-cooperation with the wrong doer.  In its strong and extreme form, it is civil disobedience of the laws of the state.  It can be individual or mass disobedience.  In the case of mass civil disobedience, it must be voluntary and spontaneous.  However, for this to happen, the masses have to be rigorously trained.  According to Gandhi, complete civil disobedience which implies refusing any and every order of the state can be a very powerful instrument.  It can even be more dangerous than armed rebellion because the suffering of the innocent has a stupendous power.  It brings to the  scrutiny of public gaze the evils of an autocratic state and thus even a despotic political order can be brought down.  Then there is fasting, which Gandhi saw as the highest expression of prayer of a pure and loving heart.  It is a means of resisting injustice and converting the evil-doer.  For this a living faith in God is indispensable.  It has no room for lack of faith, anger, impatience or selfishness as these make the fast violent.  Gandhi said “….in addition to truth and non-violence, satyagrahi should have the confidence that God will grant him the necessary strength and that, if there is the slightest impurity in the fast, he will not hesitate to renounce it at once.  Infinite patience, firm resolve, single-mindedness of purpose, and perfect calm must of necessity be there.  But since it is impossible for a person to develop all these qualities at once, no one who has not devoted himself to following the laws of ahimsa should undertake satyagraha fast..”

The question now arises how well did satyagraha work?  Even before this question is explored, it is astonishing to find Gandhi actually supporting the war effort and actively recruiting from India during the first world war.  Gandhi was homeward bound and hoped to spend some time in England before reaching India when war broke out.  When he landed in England, he called a meeting of Indians to raise an ambulance unit.  The argument that the war provide an opportunity to India in its struggle for independence did not impress him.  He ws out of touch with the Indian political scam and did not realize the full extent of the suffering of the people of India and felt that loyalty was the duty of the citizen at the time of British need.  There were faults in the British system or individual officers but he thought that these could be remedied through love.

However, when he landed in India he found himself isolated from mainstream politics as only the most loyal or those with vested interests supported the British.  In the Congress too, he was isolated as the Moderates found his methods of satyagraha extra-constitutional and the extremists disapproved of his loyalty to the British during the war.  Ironically, the rotary of satyagraha found himself travelling the villages of Gujarat often on foot or on bullock carts to recruit soldiers for  war.  However, at the same time he was not oblivious to injustice.  In 1917, he took up the cause of farmers against the European planters in Champaran, led the agitation of textile workers against mill owners in Ahmedabad and in the following year he agitated for reduction of land tax in Kaira district where crops had suffered for paucity of rains.  After the war came the Sedition Committee Report in which the government proposed to introduce legislation to further curb civil liberties.  Gandhi had been alone among the national leaders in his  support to the British during the war and he felt cheated by this.  This catapulted him into the fight against injustice.

But eventually Gandhi died a disillusioned man and felt irrelevant as independence came to India.  He did not want the partition of India but was powerless to prevent it.  In his last days he would say “I was once a big man in India.  No one listens to me today.  I am a very small person…Mine is a cry in the wilderness”  He realized that he had become more of a nuisance than an inspiring presence to those very people who had looked to him for guidance during the independence struggle.  Speaking on his only birthday in independent India on Oct. 2, 1947 in independent India, he said openly:

“This is a day for me to mourn.  I am surprised, indeed ashamed, that I am still alive.  I am the same person whom crores of people obeyed the moment he asked for something to be done.  No one listens to me today.  I say, ’do this’ and they answer back, ‘no won’t’…the desire to live for 125 years has left me… I am entering 79 today and even that pricks me.”

A few days later he asked the audience to join him in his day and might prayer to God to lift him from the earth.  What caused him so much anguish?  The answer came from Gandhi himself when he said, “Whatever is happening in India today that could make me happy?”It is to Gandhi’s credit that once the partition  became inevitable, he was statesman enough to accept it gracefully and do his best in the changed circumstances.  However, he was to be further disillusioned.  Savage violence erupted on the eve of independence.  It forced him to a tragic admission; that the freedom struggle had not been a unique non-violent struggle that he and the whole world had believed it to be.  If it had been what he had believed it to be, How could such violence erupt after decades of non-violence? From where had it come?  The answer came to Gandhi:

“Ahimsa never goes along with the weak.  It (the non-violence of the weak) should, therefore, be called not ahimsa but passive resistance…Passive resistance is a preparation for active armed resistance.  The result is that the violence that had filled people’s hearts has abruptly came out”. 

What was worse, it was the violence of the cowards and not of the brave.  “We”, he lamented, ”have become such rogues that we have started fearing one another.”

As Satish Chandra analyses  this disillusionment of Gandhi with the non-violence of the freedom movement and with his own people has implications for contemporary India.  The people had only abjured violence because they realized the futility of armed resistance against the might of Britain.  Once freedom had been achieved, they had no use for it.  “Today people say,” remarked Gandhi, “that Gandhi cannot show the way.  We must assume arms for self-defence…..No one had at that time taught us to manufacture the atom bomb.  Had we possessed that knowledge we could have used it to finish off the English.”

However, for Gandhi, non-violence was his dharma and he adhered to it till the end.  “I mayhave gone bankrupt,” he said, “but ahimsa can never be bankrupt…Violence can only be effectively met by non-violence.”  Retaliatory violence only leads to ever-renewing circles of violence.  Like a “skekhchilli,” to use the word Gandhi used to describe himself at this time, he rushed from one spot to another trying to quell the mad violence that had overtaken the country.

In the week preceding independence he left for Noakhali  but was detained in Calcutta where communal violence had erupted.  He had to undertake a fast unto death and the effect was instantaneous.  There were rich tributes paid to Gandhi both by Lord Mountbatten and by C. Rajgopalachari  for Gandhi’s moral strength and authority but, as Satish Chandra, points out what halted the violence, it needs further analysis.  When leading public figures came to persuade Gandhi to end his fast, he laid down three conditions.  First, that they must promise him that communal violence would never again recur in Calcutta.  Second, they must assure him that peace had returned to Calcutta because of change of heart which alone could prevent a recurrence of violence.  And third, he asked the Hindus to give their word that they would die to prevent any injury to any minority person rather than report failure to contain violence.  He wanted these assurances from them in writing.  This these people found it hard to promise but they also could not let Gandhi die.  Eventually they gave their promise but it was to no avail as violence broke out a fortnight later.  For four months Gandhi kept appealing to people’s reason but in vain.

So was Sri Aurobindo right when he said: “Purification can come by the transformation of the impulse of violence…  Gandhi’s position is that he does not care to remove violence from others; he wants to observe non-violence himself.”  And Gandhi himself realised that had not succeeded in transforming the masses.  They had only used passive resistance as a strategy and had not practised ahimsa the way he understood it.  He died a disillusioned man inspite of all his sacrifices and all his sacrifices and all that he had achieved. 

In fact Sri Aurobindo analysed Gandhi’s non-violence in some detail “I believe Gandhi does not know what actually happens to the man’s nature when he takes to Satyagraha or non-violence. He thinks that men get purified by it. But when men suffer, or subject themselves to voluntary suffering, what happens is that their vital being gets strengthened. These movements affect the vital being only and not any other part. Now when you cannot oppose the force that oppresses, you say that you will suffer. That suffering is vital and it gives strength. When the man who has thus suffered gets power he becomes a worse oppressor….

What one can do is to transform the spirit of violence. But in this practice of Satyagraha it is not transformed. When you insist on such a one-sided principle, what happens is that cant, hypocrisy and dishonesty get in and there is no purification at all. Purification can come by the transfoemation of the impulse of violence.”

Passive resistance felt Sri Aurobindo,  only made people strong and with that strength they began to persecute others with a vengeance.  He found satyagraha itself a form of violence.  He said, “That is one of the violences of the Satyagrahi that he does not care for the pressure which he brings on others. It is not non-violence-it is not “Ahimsa”. True Ahimsa is a state of mind and does not consist in physical or external action or in avoidance of action. Any pressure in the inner being is a breach of Ahimsa.

For instance, when Gandhi fasted in the Ahmedabad mill-hands’ strike to settle the question between mill- owners and workers, there was a kind of violence towards others. The mill-owners did not want to be responsible for his death and so they gave way, without of course, being convinced of his position. It is a kind of violence on them. But as soon as they found the situation normal they reverted to their old ideas The same thing happened in South Africa. He got some concessions there by passive resistance and when he came back to India it became worse than before.

Gandhi’s ahimsa not only failed with the masses but other disillusionments were to follow.  As Mahesh Chandra Dewedy points out when Nehru following the idea of transformation, tried to get China to change its  heart through Panchsheel he was to be humiliated in war by it.  Similarly Nehru could not solve the problem of Kashmir by idealistically referring it to the United Nations and left a festering wound.  On the other hand firm handling and threat to use force solved many problems like those of Hyderabad, Goa and Sikkim.

What has happened in contemporary India?  Everywhere there are strikes, gheraos, dharnas and more often than not, they take a violent turn.  They are undertaken in pursuit of money, government jobs, or in pursuit of power.  There is no satyagraha in the majority of them.  It is “duragrah”.  Being a student of Mahabharata it usually reminds me of Vyas anguished cry at the end of the war when with uplifted arms he says that Wealth and Desire can be obtained and fulfilled through dharma but no one listens and no one, he knows will ever listen to him.  That is the very nature of the world.  Hence darkness will come over and over again.  But Gandhi’s philosophy of ahimsa, which to him was truth and love towards all must remain at least an aspirational ideal otherwise humanity is doomed.  Gandhi seems so forgotten that we are in danger of fulfilling Einstein’s prophecy about Gandhi: “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this ever in flesh and blood walked upon this earth.”

It is truly a privilege and an honour to speak at the 150^th anniversary of Pt. Madan Mohan Malaviya, one of the leaders in building modern India.  He came at a time of transition, a period I did some reading on as he was also on the Board of Trustees of Hindu College, Delhi University for the first ten years after its founding in 1899.  Historians have analyzed the forces at work after the uprising of 1857.  It was a period of turmoil.  While the uprising of 1857 may have been seen as a ‘mutiny’ by many British parliament and English writers, Disraeli, speaking in the House of Commons on July 27, 1857, was quite clear that it, “was a national revolt and not a military mutiny,” recalls Tara Chand in History of the Freedom Movement in India (Vol. II).

He also points out that Justin McCarthy had said,

“The fact was that throughout the greater part of the north and northwest of the great Indian Peninsula there was a rebellion of the native races against English power. It was not by any means a merely military mutiny. It was a combination of military grievances, national hatred and religious fanaticism against the English occupation of India. The native princes and native soldiers were in it. The Mohammedan and the Hindoo forgot their old religious antipathies to join against the Christian.”

So the root of nationalism was planted at that time itself. Post 1857, the British Empire got firmly established as India came under the direct rule of the British Crown in 1858 but the counter movement of determination to be an independent country in spite of the 1857 defeat got strengthened. 

The events of 1857, however, left a scar.  One was heightened religious consciousness that was divisive.  Divisions developed not only between Hindus, Muslims, and Christians but also  among the orthodox Hindus, Arya Samajis and the Jains.  The British contempt for Indians, their religion and their culture did not help matters.  Apart from the missionary propaganda, many civil and military officers, too, seemed to behave like evangelists.  For example, Rev. M. Edmond issued a circular letter from Calcutta in which he stated:

The time appears to have come when earnest consideration should be given to the subject, whether or not all men should embrace the same religion.  Railways, steam vessels and the electric telegraph, are rapidly uniting all the people of the earth.  Christian religion is the only religion, which claims to have come from god by way of direct revelation.  This is the only religion, which can confer happiness in the world and in the other world whose conditions are revealed by it.  It is our wish to see the churches filled with Indians, where not only foreigners but the people of the country also will proclaim regularly the good news of the Christian gospel and where men and women will be required to seek repentance from their sins and to prepare themselves for meeting god; and where children will be taught morality and truth.

Such an attitude tended to be counter productive as it led to the desire to defend Hinduism and to strengthen it especially among the educated Hindus. It brought together like-minded influential leaders of Indian societywho thought of setting up institutions that could rise above narrow sectarian interests, serve the cause of nation building and provide education on the lines of Sanatana Dharma while combining it with the best in western scientific methods.  This they felt would provide “a broad liberation of mind and religious spirit” and this was the thought and vision that lay behind the establishment of Banaras Hindu University as behind Hindu College in Delhi. 

By 1890 organizations such as the Arya Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission and the Theosophists had heightened their activities. These movements made such good progress that a National Conference was held in 1900 in Delhi under the presidency of the Maharaja of Darbhanga. The aim was to unite the various Hindu organizations and this led to the formation of the Bharata Dharma Mahamandala in 1902 with Pt. Din Dayal Sharma as its Secretary. He played an important role in the establishment of the Banaras Hindu University and was also one of the first trustees of the Hindu College Education Society in Delhi.

It is notable that education was one of the important objectives of the Bharat Dharma Mahamandala because of the serious apprehensions caused by the proselytising activities if the missionaries especially through the mode of education.  The stated objects of the Mahamandala were to:

• promote Hindu religious education in accordance with the Sanatana Dharma, to diffuse the knowledge of the Vedas, Smritis, Puranas and other Hindu Shastras and to introduce, in the light of such knowledge, useful reforms into Hindu life and society;
• promote and enrich  Sanskrit and Hindi literatures in all the branches;
•  introduce such useful reforms as may be warranted by the Shastras in the management of the Hindu charitable and religious institutions and tirthas, that is, sacred places;
• establish, affiliate and control Branch Sabhas in different parts of India;
• support the existing Hindu colleges, schools, libraries and publishing establishments, and found new ones in consonance with the object of the association.

This period also saw an increase in commercial activities, and with it came “the extension of the means of communication and transport, large increase in India’s foreign trade and modernization of India’s economy….” India was drawn into international trade and was seen as an important trading unit. European-like business organizations came into being and profits rose benefiting the rich businessmen.

  However, amidst this progress, the country went through a series of calamities and millions died for sheer want of food. The unsatisfactory financial position of the Government resulted in heavier taxation, the decline of Indian handicrafts and lack of employment opportunities. This, with the dominance of the Europeans in civil and military services caused great discontent which became a major cause for arousing opposition to British rule. Tara Chand concludes:

“The analysis of the economy of India leads inevitably to the conclusion that basically the poverty of India was the consequence of foreign rule – the system of administration introduced by the British in India. It followed that no improvement in the economic conditions of the people could be expected in the character of the Government. It was necessary, therefore, to agitate for a change in government, or the introduction of a representative and democratic system, for the transfer of political power from the British to Indian hands. Important and urgent as the economic questions were, their solution depended upon the attainment of self-rule by India.”

Malaviya ji felt keenly the pain of India’s poverty and pauperization under British rule. He described the position of the country in the following words in his speech as president, Indian national congress at the Lahore session of 1909:

“The national income is low and therefore the national prosperity is low. People are dying with plague and malaria. Famines are calming a large toll and people are unprosparse and unhappy. That is the condition of the Country. On the other hand you find that this is the Country most richly endowed with natural resources. It is the country whose people are not lacking in intelligence and industry, and living most simple life. They are not addicted to crime as some of the most advanced country are. can there be anything more sad and disappointing than to find the people as still in such unfortunate condition that this country should be lie so low in the scale of nation? and if this is so what is our duty for the motherland?” (Zaidi, 1978, p475)

Malaviya ji advocated the promotion of technical education and indigenous industries as a remedy for India poverty.

The victory of Japan over Russia in 1905 in the first great war of the twentieth century arising out of the rival imperial ambitions of the two nations over Manchuria and Korea also had very important consequences in India. It gave emotional direction to the nationalist movement and its political demands. It also brought home the realization that the Japanese had succeeded because of their economic power and their high degree of scientific technical ability. This gave birth to economic nationalism and strengthened the Swadeshi movement originally initiated by the boycott campaign in Bengal. It not only became a political weapon but also led to the development of small-scale industries all over the country. Under the urge of this economic nationalism, large sums were raised for sending students abroad for technical education. It is therefore, particularly understandable why leaders like Vivekananda, Tagore and Malaviya ji all admired Japan and wanted to incorporate in India’s vision for its future Japan’s way of combining art and utility, its emphasis on technical education and its aesthetics.  With the fusion of political and economic demands, the trading classes who had remained largely aloof from politics, began to align themselves with the political class.

The First World War opened up further opportunities in India for industrial development and by the end of it, the Government had to yield to public pressure and appoint an Industrial Commission to recommend how Indian industries could be best financed and developed. When the legislatures were enlarged in the post-war period and more power was placed in the hands of the trading classes, demands were made in the name of economic nationalism which met with a degree of success that helped Indian industry.

Many leading Indian trading and business families began to adopt the British modes of commerce and exploit the new opportunities. With this, the colonial society provided mechanisms to rise socially. These became especially important for the aspiring new class of government officials, urban professionals, businessmen and publicists. The most efficient, which spanned both colonial and indigenous arenas of public domain, was philanthropy and patronage of charitable, educational and religious institutions. This class contributed to medical and educational philanthropy and supported public libraries, the latter being a new addition to the colonial state’s educational agenda.

In a period of rapid modernization when the religious identity was in the process of being negotiated, reformulated and asserted, the institution of caste was rediscovered and several associations were formed on that basis. This was in tune with the rising culture of the formation of associations, a natural outcome of networks formed through philanthropic, trading and professional activities. These were also invested with moral messages and so emphasized social service and reformist activities. Agendas of community uplift had a clearly patriotic thrust and were seen eventually as a means to uplift the Indian nation at large. In the modern public arena, caste affiliation came to be portrayed as, “an expression of citizenship and spiritually informed nationality which had the potential to fulfill and regenerate the modern Hindu”.

The culture of forming associations also saw a proliferation of debating clubs, scientific institutes and literary or reformist societies. With its focus on education, literature and social reform, this new form of organized indigenous agency grew out of and catered to the need of the educated Indian elite to debate the implications of colonial rule and participate in the process of the modernization of Indian. There were intersections of both synergy and conflict between various sections of people whether they were rising professionals, small-scale house owners, old service communities, religious grouping, merchants and others. Each of them attempted to establish local areas of influence. Gradually the grip of the influential old rais families over the social life of the city weakened and professional men and publicists gradually began to replace them as intermediaries with the local authorities.  An outbreak of ‘communal’ tension between 1909 and 1917 provides an insight into the shifts in local influence and power. While the members of the old rais families and some powerful new traders continued to play an important role in the maintenance of peace, but professional men and publicists were found taking a much more active part.  For example, during the outbreaks of 1917 and after, active lawyer-politicians such as Purushottam Das Tandon and Madan Mohan Malviya, consulted with the authorities and arranged bodies of conciliation.

Throughout this turbulent period of struggle for independence and the desire to ameliorate the lot of the people of India, national leaders were constantly preoccupied with the kind of education that needed to be given in India if country was to be freed and made into a prosperious nation.  This was because the foundations of higher education in India were laid by Macaulay who had a two fold aim: one, to produce cheap clerical labour to serve the needs of the colonial empire; second, to create a class of people who would perpetuate the legacy of the empire by looking down upon their own, cultural values and upholding those of the British ruling class.  As Amilcar Cabral points out, the experience of colonial domination shows that the coloniser provokes and develops the cultural alienation of a part of the population by the so-called assimilation of indigenous elites distancing them from the popular masses.  As a result, a section of the people assimilate the colonisers  mentality, considers itself culturally superior to its own people and looks down upon their cultural values.  This is the situation of the majority of colonised intellectuals and their position is consolidated by increase in social privileges.

The University system that was set up by the colonisers for their own ends has ironically been expanded and strengthened  in independent India rather than being adapted to meet the requirements of a newly emerging nation.  Why did this happen? Because no sincere thought was given to what was sought to be achieved through higher education. There was a turmoil of ideas, and perhaps our minds were too conditioned by the West and its institutions while being critical of our own heritage with some justification as these had degenerated for a variety of reasons to be able to achieve a clarity of purpose and base of our educational institutions on our own heritage.

Indian civilization and culture met the European at a time of social disintegration and political anarchy.  It was the evening of the past from which a new age had to start and the impact of the West with its new ideas and, in many respects, opposite civilisational values provided a challenge.  While it created in Indians a sense of great inferiority with regard to  their tradition and heritage, it simultaneously forced them to take a hard look at it, reassess it and to come to terms with it. In the process education became a dominant theme in the minds of many national leaders who attempted to make connections between the past and the modern knowledge and ideas coming from the West. 

The question arises what was the modernist agenda and what form did it take in India because of the European contact and British rule. The British highlighted the weaknesses of the traditional social order of the Indians, inferiorising their culture, epistemology and even the people as a race.  This provoked a reaction on two planes. On one, the traditional order was found inadequate to meet the challenges of Western modernity.  On the second, the cultural hegemonization by the colonial state was found unacceptable as it bred an anxiety about the survival of tradition itself hence the debates on tradition and modernity. 

For most, `modern’ became associated with `western’ and all the debates took place from the point of view of how to come to terms with modernity and westernization and its vision of progress and economic prosperity. What was `western’ provided the model and showed the way. It came to be believed that change could only be brought about in the western way; that the only possible route and finally acceptable model was the western one.  The total acceptance of this model of modernization created the relationship of the teacher and the taught between the west and the east. The idea turned into a conviction that to become modern, people must learn the knowledge system of the west, its life-style and behavior patterns.  In effect, the east must become the mirror image of the west.  Britain used this not only to strengthen British colonialism but also to project Indians as incapable of self-rule, the white man’s burden being to civilize India.

The contact with the west brought its difficulties but it also shook India out of its complacencies. The first generation of intellectuals arose with their western education.  They were intensely patriotic and impatient to see a transformed India, modernized completely in body, mind and spirit.  However, they realized that colonial education was not the answer.  Sri Aurobindo voicing his disillusionment with it said:

all that appears to be almost unanimously agreed on is that the teaching in the existing schools and universities has been bad in kind and in addition denationalizing, degrading and impoverishing to the national mind, soul and character because it is overshadowed by a foreign hand and foreign in aim, method, substance and spirit.

            Disregard of individual growth by the education system must inevitably lead to failure even in the collective or societal aims sought to be achieved.  As Sri Aurobindo tells us :

there are three things which have to be taken  into account in a true and living education, the man, the individual in his commonness and in his uniqueness, the nation or people and universal humanity.  It follows that that alone will be a true and living education which helps to bring out to full advantage, makes ready for the full purpose and scope of human life all that is in the individual man, and which at the same time helps him to enter into his right relation with the life, mind and soul of the people to which he belongs and with that great total life, mind and soul of humanity of which he himself is a unit and his people or nation a living, a separate and yet inseparable member.

Thus, the education of the individual is very important because the individual is the building block of society, nation and humanity.

Vivekananda saw education as a process “man-making.”  His ideas were moored in Vedanta as he emphasized the need to awaken man to his spiritual self though education.  The evil of present day education for him was that it had no definite goal to pursue and hence the teacher himself was floundering.  But education was a means of arousing men to the awareness of his true self.  The soul or the spirit, however, could not be developed in isolation from the body and mind.  Therefore a harmonious development of the body, mind and soul was required.  It is not “the amount of information that is put in your brain and runs riot there undigested all your life.”  It is a process by which character is formed, strength of mind increased and intellect is sharpened, as a result of which one can stand on one’s own feet.  While he advocated the use of mother tongue as the right medium of instruction, he also prescribed the learning of English and Sanskrit.  English was necessary for mastering Western science and technology, Sanskrit led one into the depths of our vast store of classics.  In his scheme of education, Vivekananda includes all those studies that were necessary for the all-round development of the body, mind and soul of the individual.  These can be brought under the broad heads of physical culture, aesthetics, classics, language, religion, science and technology.”  According to Swamiji, the culture of India has its roots in her spiritual values.  The time-tested values are to be imbibed in the thoughts and lives of the students thought the study of the classics like Ramayana, Mahabharata, Gita, Vedas and Upanishads.  This will keep the perennial flow of our spiritual values into the world culture.

Tagore too was completely unhappy with the colonial education that had been established in India.  He said,

“For us, modern education is relevant only to turning our clerks, lawyers, doctors, magistrates and policemen……  This education has not reached the farmer, the oil grinder, nor the potter.  No other education society has been struck with such disaster…  If ever a truly Indian university is established it must from the very beginning implement India’s own knowledge of economics, agriculture, health, medicine and of all other everyday science from the surrounding villages.  Then alone can the school of university become the centre of the country’s way of living.  This school must practice agriculture, dairying and weaving using the best modern methods… I have proposed to call this school Visva Bharati.”

“What would truly be Indian education?  “We must try to understand how Indian genius expressed itself..  Unless we try to put these together and discover the integrating factors behind these diverse streams of thought and make them a subject of study at our universities, we would only be borrowing knowledge from abroad.  The natural habitat for knowledge is where it is produced.  The main task of universities is to produce knowledge, its dissemination is its secondary function.  We must invite those intellectuals and scholars to our universities who are engaged in research, invention or creative activity.

While nations sought primarily to give their citizens a means of livelihood through education, Tagore believed that there was a more important aim – that of personal fulfillment and self improvement.  It was important to borrow knowledge and experience from abroad, but not to use them as the foundation for Indian education. Even so, if there was one European quality which Indian university students needed to acquire, it was `the desire to know, to find out about the laws of nature and to use them for the betterment of the conditions of human beings.’  It was fully realized that science and its applications in the form of technology had led to the power and prosperity of Western countries.  Unless India acquired the knowledge of science and technology through its universities and schools, poverty and powerlessness would continue.  To transform life and make it richer, healthier and more educated, it was imperative to accept to technology and science.  But Tagore wanted science to be taught along with India’a own philosophical and spiritual knowledge at Indian universities. 

As far as Gandhi was concerned, ‘no one rejected colonial education as sharply and as completely as Gandhi did, nor did anyone else put forward an alternative as radical as the one he proposed’, to use Krishna Kumar’s words.  Education for him not only moulded the new generation, but also reflected a society’s fundamental assumptions about itself and the individuals which compose it. He himself had been a beneficiary of Western education and while in South Africa, urged people to take advantage of it.  But gradually he became opposed to English education as he saw it as an instrument of subjugation of the people of India.  His experience in the freedom struggle and the fact that all official, legal and commercial interaction had to be in English which divided the elite from the masses, the ruler from the ruled, thus disempowering the vast majority of the people, made him firmly believe that education should be in the native tongue.  He did not blame the British for imposing English because he saw that it was logical for them to mould Indians into their ways of thinking and living as this was a way of consolidating the Empire.  Indians were to blame as they had accepted this situation.

To remedy the situation, Gandhi turned the education system on its head through his concept `basic education’ when he insisted that craft had to be at the core of learning.  Hence students had to be educated in the production processes involved in crafts such as spinning, weaving, leather work, pottery, metal work, basket-making and book-binding, that had up to now been the monopoly of specific caste groups in the lowest stratum of the traditional social hierarchy. This was in contrast to India’s own tradition of education as well as the colonial education system that emphasized skills such as literacy and acquisition of knowledge which was the stronghold of the upper castes.  Giving primacy to craft meant empowering the child belonging to the lowest stratum of society.  It was a way of restructuring opportunities and bringing about societal transformation.

Madan Mohan Malaviya was in the same line of thinkers on what kind of education India needed.  Banaras Hindu University was his attempt to give shape to what he thought would be education appropriate for on emerging independent nation.  The idea of the university was born out of his deep love for Hindu culture and its spiritual ideas but the scheme for the university was drawn up through discussions with his friends and the co-operation of Mrs. Annie Besant, the Maharajadhiraj of Darbhanga and the Maharaja of Benares. The importance that he attached to the economic development of the country made him combine the teaching of science and technology with that of religion. The Colleges of Agriculture, Engineering, Mining, Metallurgy and Geology, the Ayurvedic College and an Allopathic Hospital, which was named after Pandit Sunder Lal, the first Vice-Chancellor of the University, were started soon after the  University was established. This made the Hindu University pre-eminent among the then existing Indian Universities.

Paramanad Singh and Sunita Singh have analyzed the philosophy of Pt. Madan Mohan Malaviya’s educational vision.  He initially wanted the proposed university to promote the study of Hindu Shastras and Sanskrit literature generally as a means of preserving and popularizing, for the benefit of Hindus in particular and of the world at large, the best thought and culture of the Hindus, and all that was good and great in the ancient civilization of India; to promote learning and research generally in arts and science in all branches; to advance and diffuse such scientific, technical and professional knowledge combined with the necessary practical training as is best calculated to help in promoting indigenous industries, in developing the material resources of the country; and to promote the building of the character in youth by religion and ethics as an integral part of education .So these objective show Pt. Madan Mohan Malaviya’s vision of higher education.  On one side it was to reflect Veda, Upanishad, all ancient scriptures and texts and, on other side, reflect science technology, and integration of medical, engineering, agriculture and technical education. 

It made him dream of a new kind of curriculum taught by a new kind of school for a self reliant society.  To attain this end he provided the tentative patterns of vocational studies in which cultivation of initiative and self help were the dominant objectives.  The idea was to create an appropriate education system that could meet the urgent social and economic needs of a poor country.

That this was a revolutionary idea is evident from the Report of the Commission on Christian Higher Education in India and Burma.  The Commission pointed out that in the past the stability of the Indian society had depended on three factors: village communities that ensured adequate exploitation of land; the caste system which divided the society into units with specific and complementary functions organized on a cooperative basis; and a set of beliefs that embodied sociological transcendental values that gave meaning and direction to an individual’s life in relation to the society and the universe. As long as these factors remained intact, the Report pointed out, India remained unchanged and could face the challenges posed in turn by Buddhism and Islam. Even Christianity had not been able to make much of headway. However, the economic foundations on which Indian society were built were being modified in the nineteenth century and this was leading to fundamental and substantial changes.

One of these was the coming of science and technology, the symbol of which was the steel bridge linking the two banks of the Ganges in Varanasi. The alien forces, of which railways were a symbol, were disintegrating the material foundations of a village society of which Hinduism was the religion. But, said the Commission,

Hinduism and the railway bridge were coming to terms with each other. This could be seen in the untiring efforts of Pt. Madan Mohan Malviya that had led to the creation of a modern Hindu University, whose purpose among others is to stimulate studies in Hindu literature and culture, religion and philosophy. But what has it actually accomplished? The recognized and apparently outstanding achievement of the Hindu University has been the creation of an efficient department of engineering.

Therefore, the essence of Malaviya ji’s  vision was that if India had to be freed and made into a prosperous nation it was necessary to impart holistic education that could enthuse a transformative process in India.  For this industrial and technical education was necessary. 

His far reaching vision also made him realize the importance of commercial education as a factor in national and international progress. 

It had been recognized in the leading countries of the West that the leaders of commerce and business need to be scientifically trained just as a doctor or a barrister or professional man is… Modern experience shows us that business requires administrative capacity of the very highest type.  It needs not merely technical knowledge, but also the power of dealing with new situations, of going forward at the right moment and of controlling labour. 

These are just the qualities which universities have always claimed as being their special business to foster.

Yet India’s own cultural and spiritual heritage had to form the foundation of the educational vision because every nation had its own genius and could only grow according to it.  The prospectus of the proposed Banaras Hindu University noted

mere industrial advancement cannot restore India to the position which she once occupied among the civilized countries of the world.  And even industrial prosperity cannot be attained amongst all concerned, and these can only prevail and endure amongst those who are fair in all their dealings, strict in the observance of good faith and steadfast in their loyalty to truth.  Such men cannot be found in sufficiently large numbers to keep a society in an organized, efficient and healthy condition, when the society to which they belong is not under the abiding influence of a great religion acting as a living force.

The proposed university placed the formation of character in youth as one of its principal objects.  Malaviya ji said:

it will seek not merely to turn out men as engineers, scientists, doctors, merchants, theologians, but also as men of high character, probity and honour, whose conduct through life will show that they bear the hall-mark of a great university.  Such character can be most securely built upon the solid foundation of religion.

Religion enjoins truthfulness, integrity, fortitude, self-help, self-respect, self-control, abstinence from injury, forgiveness, compassion; philanthropy, hospitality, unselfish action for public good, reverence for age and authority, discipline and devotion to duty, and above all the service of God through the service of man and friendliness to the whole creation.  In short, all the virtues which elevate human character, support human society, and promote peace on earth and good-will among men are inculcated by means of solemn injunctions, touching anecdotes and eloquent discourses.  Hindu philosophy cooperates with Hindu religious literature in the task of leading man into the path of righteousness, in as much as it teaches him that every creature around him is his own self in another guise, and that he rises in the scale of being by doing good to those with whom he comes in contact and degrades himself by injuring his fellow-creatures.

Thus, it can be seen that Malaviya ji did not want to follow India of 5,000 years ago.  Dr. S. Radhakrishnan said: 

He adjusted himself to the spirit of modern times and did his level best to inspire his countrymen with progressive impulses and utilize science for the service of the man.  While preserving the imperishable treasures of our past, he moved forward with the times.  He was responsible to an extent for the renaissance of our spiritual heritage.  The renewal of those ideals and their application to the needs of our country is an important lesson which we take from the life of Malaviya ji. 

The Banaras Hindu University Bill was introduced in the Imperial Legislative Council on 22^nd March 1915.  In the discussion on the Bill, Malaviya ji answered the charge that he was creating a denominational institution that would encourage sectarianism and divisiveness:   

the University will be a denominational institution, but not a sectarian one.  It will not promote narrow sectarianism but a broad liberation of mind and a religious spirit which will promote brotherly feeling between man and man… I believe instruction in the truth of religion, will tend to produce men who, if they are true to their religion, will be true to their God, their King and their country…. Where the true religious spirit is inculcated there must be an elevating feeling of humility and where there is love of God there will be a greater love and less hatred of man….

In defence of the provision by which membership of the University Court had been confined to Hindus, he said that “the Hindus who might make benefactions in favour of the institution should feel satisfied that their charity would be administered by men who will be in religious sympathy with them.”  In the Senate which was the academic body of the university, he pointed out, one fourth of the members might be non-Hindus so that the cooperation of non-Hindus in the ordering of the academic activity of the university was assured.

Indian higher education today is in a crisis.  In spite of having the second largest higher education network in the world in terms of student enrolment, it is almost at the bottom in terms of quality and skills.  It is affected by global trends but is unable to deal with them.  A large part of the renewed enthusiasm for higher education and research stems from the purely utilisation motivation that it will lead to higher and higher rates of economic growth and more and more income for individuals who can use the new technologies. This has created unacceptable levels of disparity because developing countries like India do not have the necessary resources or the school education base of the developed world.  Therefore, for various historical reasons, mainly colonialism, research efforts are unevenly distributed between different countries and regions.  As Jen Revolds points out, it is only a few industrialized countries that conduct the greater part of world’s research.  Quite inevitably they deal with their own needs.  Applied to developing countries their solutions may not be appropriate.  Also, developing countries may not even have the level of competency in education, research and technology that is required to benefit from the knowledge developed elsewhere.  If development is the  practical end sought to be achieved through research and its applications, the universalistic scientific approach without factoring in the national, social and cultural dimensions, can lead to problematic and even tragic results.  Therefore scientific endeavours have to be linked to social concerns and scientists need to be aware of the societal impact of their work before their research and its applications bring collective well being and equity in society and salvage the Earth’s environment. For this expert knowledge has to become comprehensible and more widespread that is disseminated in simple terms in varied democratic spaces.  It would enable plural perspectives to emerge and increase informed awareness among citizens.  Without it, the growth of higher education will not necessarily reduce social and economic inequalities and may even widen the gulf. These disparities can develop both domestically within nations and internationally among different nation states. 

The process started with the move towards open market policies in the 1970s when greater emphasis was given to growth than to income distribution and social objectives.  This was the wisdom of North America and the OECD countries and finally it was followed by the whole world.  This brings us to what, Mahmood Mamdani speaking  in the context of Africa says, the central issue is that we are still dealing in the framework of the Western paradigms derived from the values of Enlightenment, whether we extol its virtues or critique it.  However, as he points out, while it may be vital to understand Enlightenment, but if it is an exclusively European phenomenon, it excludes Africa.  By the same token it also excludes Asia.  So the central question is whether universities in Africa and Asia can be founded on those values.

The implication of exclusively following the Enlightenment framework is, as Mamdani points out, that it presents a single model derived from the dominant Western experience and   reduces research to a mere demonstration of whether societies around the world conform to that model or deviate from it. This has to be challenged because discordant experiences, whether Western or non-Western, cannot be dehistoricized or decontextualised to somehow make them fit into the dominant Western experience. 

Higher education and science have to be more evenly distributed around the world and develop certain features that have largely been absent in the post-colonial and semi-colonial world.  Universities cannot just do science research that is neutral.  They must contribute to the building of a foundation of civic and democratic values for social cohesion and purpose.  They must create knowledge that  not only leads to economic growth but also to an understanding of how to overcome racial and ethnic tensions, dogmatism and religious extremism that often come with uneven growth and uneven distribution of fruits.  This requires immediate attention to cultural diversity in higher education and research within the framework of globalization.  This does not mean merely increasing the population of the under represented social groups in a campus population.  It means building knowledge systems that give an understanding of diverse values, policies, practices, traditions, resources and living knowledge systems outside the formal structures so that students, faculty and communities that have been excluded up to now can become part of the knowledge resource and provide keys and solutions that have eluded thought and policy.

As Brew says, teachers need to know how individuals experience the subject.  Both as researchers and teachers they are essentially involved in “meaning-making activity” or “making sense of chaos and translating this into culturally accepted explanations.”  But increasingly it is being understood that the learning process is also “meaning-making” or “constructivism” on the part of the learner. Therefore, teaching has to be a process of helping students to construct knowledge rather than simply transmitting it to them.  Hence the emerging pedagogical goals and emphases, cannot be “objective knowledge” which is outside the learner and which can be obtained through multiple sources “but the subjective processes of the learner” and the acknowledgement that “learning always takes place in a particular context.” 

This involves not only knowledge but also skills of self management, communication, team working and interpersonal skills.  Further, all disciplines are interlinked and have to be seen as a continuum.  Also, since teaching and learning processes are embedded in particular contexts, there has to be a commitment to local and regional knowledge production, rooted in relevant linguistic and disciplinary terms, with a critical and disciplined reflection on the globalization of modern forms of knowledge and modern instruments of power.  Rather than oppose the local to the global, the global has to be understood from the vantage point of the local.  Research will then have to try to understand alternative forms of aesthetic, intellectual, ethical, and political traditions, both contemporary and historical, the objective being not just to learn about these forms, but also to learn from them.  How is this analysis different from the vision of men like Pt. Madan Mohan Malaviya and is it not imperative to come back to it?  Modern higher education would have to be rooted in the cultural foundations of the place and people in which it is being transected to make it alive and dynamic.  This, in essence, is also the vision of Pt. Madan Mohan Malaviya and other thinkers of his time but which has got overlayed with pure utilitarianism in the hurry to catch up with the developed world.

Kavita A Sharma

Education is now a multimillion dollar industry.  In a globalized world, educational institutions like companies feel compelled to build world-class brands.  The need for branding is particularly felt by private higher education providers.  The proliferation of education institutions in the private sector makes it essential for them to carve out a brand as they have to attract students and compete with other institutions.  It becomes a question of their viability.  There are a number of factors which naturally draw students to a university:

• A historically established brand based on how long a university has been established, which includes the prior generations of a prospective student having graduated from that university;
• Attractive campuses in good locations;
• Internationally know faculty and researchers as well as well known products which can be attributed to the university or a faculty member;
• Public perception that large, established universities are best suited to educate the young. 
• Branding an established university is not difficult especially if it is a publicly funded university.  Private higher education institutions are more vulnerable especially because their fees are inevitably higher than those of public universities.  Hence the natural choice of students are the public funded universities.  Today, students are more aware of the educational institutions than before because of information available online, publications and other tools.  All this amounts to brand building.

For any major educational institution, there are four important stakeholders: faculty, students, employers and alumni.  In the long run a university is known primarily for its faculty and students.  Therefore, the educational institution has to make continuous efforts to focus on maximizing levels of satisfaction of these stakeholders.

Prospective students, like prospective customers, have a vast array of choices, private or public school, large or small, domestic or international, liberal arts or technical.  Like businesses competing for talented workers, colleges and universities compete for talented students.  In a gloablized world higher education is a broad marketplace and no college or university can rest on its laurels.  The business community recognizes that globalization is both inescapable and a golden opportunity.  Because higher education prepares students to enter the globalized world, it should be responsive to the same global market forces that effect business.  Specifically at least two things are needed.  One is the regular upgradation of curricula to reflect the needs of the changing job requirements of student population and the impact of globalization and second, improvement in the engagement levels and operational effectiveness of the institution to enhance the student experience and maximize the return on the money invested.  Further, the effects of globalization require not only new academic subjects but also fresh avenues of pedagogy.  Institutions must accommodate non-traditional students, an aging student population, more online and distance learning and broader spectrum of student needs.  Colleges and universities that manage these will strengthen their brand position.

However, educational brand strategy cannot be limited to marketing and advertising campaigns.  An effective brand management strategy can only be maximized if the brand carries a promise – and if every member of the academic community is committed to fulfilling that promise. 

However, brand positioning is not enough.  It is vital to have the brand experience which is the result of human interactions in an educational institution that boost students’ and employees’ emotional engagement or diminish it.  Educational leaders must play a key role in engaging students and the institution’s faculty and staff.  Student engagement depends largely on creating a feeling of belonging.  This depends on the interactions students have and the relationships they build, not first with fellow students but with faculty, staff and administrators.  All of them play key roles in delivering an institution’s brand promise.  Levels of student engagement correlate strongly to many of the outcomes institutions care about: retention, graduation rates, achievement gains, and alumni giving.  The most important is a satisfying undergraduate experience because that has the strongest impact and stays throughout life.

Academics and the student experience are foundational elements of any higher education institution and are key elements of its brand promise.  Institutions that want to actively manage their education brand must first consider  how they are perceived.  Tis is important because there are institutions that deliver far more than the public perception others far less.   

But institution alone cannot build a brand for the country.  There are other factors.  One is the core values of the country in which it operates.  Does the country provide an environment of personal and intellectual freedom, creativity and democracy?  For example, uncertain political situation, frequent rioting and violence, all effect student stability and impact on student enrolment.  Then, the governmental regulatory mechanism can help or hinder the institution in developing its brand by encouraging innovation and creativity or hampering it.  Issues pertaining to quality of education reliability of accreditation and others all depend on the credibility and flexibility of the regulatory mechanism. 

Many of the challenges that higher education leaders face are brand-related: student recruiting and admissions, alumni giving, community relations, faculty engagement, staff culture and the student experience.  In essence, the emotional and psychological dynamics of an educational institution as a whole influence and shape perceptions of its brand in the marketplace.  The brand image of an institution is created by and reflects all those institutional dynamics.  What is needed are innovative leaders who can take the best business principles and apply them to the best academic traditions.  Such leaders will help higher education preserve its heritage while creating a new legacy by changing the face of academe.

It is easy to say, build a strong brand, but difficult to deliver.  The brand promise is based not only on academics but also on emotional engagement and engagement derives partly from the institution’s leadership and partly from all the stakeholders in the institution.  The institution’s leadership has to be clear of the institution’s mission; its specific strategic objectives towards the achievement of its mission; and its capacity to reinvest itself.  All these issues are critically important and all are severely devalued of the brand promise is fragmented or delivered poorly.  For effective communication of the brand, there has to be first an internal awareness and conviction.  Therefore, everyone has a role to play from the groundsman to the chairman/ president/ vice-chancellor, from those who teach to those who raise funds.  that its staff, the administration and the faculty all need to know what the institution stands for, what makes it distinguished and in what lies its uniqueness.  A strong college or university brand can only develop from when the complete institutional community can understand and appreciate itself.

Now, the question is where should Indian Institutions position themselves.  I think they should aspire to be leaders in the developing world.  There is increasing consensus that if India has to emerge as a global leader, it must gain preeminence in the field of education.  Thanks to the groundwork done immediately after independence in establishing institutions for scientific, technical, agricultural, medical education apart from liberal university education and the subsequent rapid increase in the education system, India has emerged as a developed of skilled human resource.  What used to be lamented as brain drain is now seen as human capital.  Developing countries too look to India for help in developing their own human resource.  This was understood in post independence India and it led to the establishment of institutions like the India Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR).  The First Education Commission of India, popularly known as the Kothari Commission (1964-1966) stated that the destiny of India” was “being shaped in her classrooms.”

The Education Commission was also emphatic that knowledge was international and that there could be no barriers to obtaining it from anywhere in the world.  But India could not forever remain at the receiving end of the pipeline.  It had to make its own contribution as an intellectual and cultural equal in the human endeavours to extend the frontiers of knowledge.  This, as Kothari Commission pointed out, required a large-scale programme for the discovery and development of talent and the creation of centers excellence in higher education that could compare favorably with the best in the world.  It was through education that India could grow and find its place in the comity of nations. 

There is already a fair amount of cooperation with most of the SAARC countries except Pakistan.  Recognizing the importance of education in promoting regional cooperation, India had proposed the establishment of SAARC University during the last summit at Dhaka. It would be useful to accelerate the decision making process for early fruition of the idea.  Apart from this, India must take the lead in promoting student and faculty exchange programs with universities in SAARC countries.

Nepal and Bhutan already enjoy a special status in Indian universities.  Students from these countries, for example, are eligible to get admission in Delhi University even on scoring 5 per cent less than the basic eligibility for Indian students.  India’s being the education destination for the people of Nepal has played a positive role in their bilateral relations.  But it has not been possible to accommodate the demand of a large number of Napalese students particularly for professional courses.  Seeing this need the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) has opened a Medical College in Nepal.  Unfortunately its full potential has not been realized because of political turbulence there.  In a deemed university like MAHE, the Nepalese students could have been accommodated in India itself but excessive regulatory framework in India made Nepal a more attractive destination.  The institution in Nepal also attracts students from India and some other foreign countries.

India is the first choice destination for higher education for the Bhutanese who look to it to play a significant role in the development of human resources in their own country.  Bhutanese society is gradually opening up and education there is bound to grow.  It is essential that India play a key role in helping educationally in Human Resource Development and thus shaping attitudes towards India in a newly democratic Bhutan.

With regard to Sri Lanka, while education is playing a positive role in the development of bilateral relations between the two countries, its full potential has not been realized because of paucity of seats and institutions in India.  Apart from general education, Buddhist studies need to be paid greater attention.  A number of Sri Lankans come to study Buddhism in India.  It is necessary to remember that the Buddhist clergy plays an important role in Sri Lanka’s national affairs. Special attention should be paid to Buddhist studies also because of the large number of Buddhist countries in the world who expect India to provide the lead in areas of philosophy and Comparative Religion.  There is only one center of Buddhist studies in Varanasi but many more can be developed and departments of Philosophy need to be strengthened.

With the neighbours on the East and West of its borders there are little or no educational linkages.  There is some cooperation with Bangladesh in the field of  Higher Education but could be improved and strengthened.  Bangladesh sends a large number of students to India but India is unable to meet the huge demand for professional and vocational courses from Bangladesh students.  There is hardly any faculty exchange among universities in Bangladesh and Indian Universities and few if any joint research projects.  Such initiatives would not only enhance cooperation in the field of education but also help develop better understanding.  Because of linguistic commonality it should be possible to develop close linkages between academic institutions of the two countries especially with universities in West Bengal.  With Pakistan this areas has been a closed one.  As part of confidence building measures, it would be worthwhile to begin with small steps like faculty exchange in this field.

The greatest expectation of Afghanistan from India is help in creating human resource for the reconstruction of its war – ravaged country including education facilities.  The Government has realized the importance of education in promoting Indo-Afghan relations and has started special scheme for the training of Afghan students in India.  This is a challenge because was has interrupted the educational processes there and created imbalances in societal structures, but if India can meet it, it will be an important aspect of India’s cultural diplomacy towards these strategically important neighbours.  The Prime Minister of India has offered massive aid in human resource development to Afghanistan.  Even earlier, a number of Afghans have studied in India including President Hamid Karzai.  The impact of this educational experience in India was visible in the affection with which he remembered his teachers at the Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla from where he did his post graduation in Political Science. 

India’s cultural relations with Southeast Asia are one of the most fascinating fields of history.  This interaction goes back over two thousand years and has left a lasting impact on almost every aspect of life in a number of countries of the region.  The most unique feature of this interaction is that it has been entirely peaceful.  There is probably no other example in history of such cross-fertilization between deifferent cultures and people for over two millennia without any involvement of military force.  Former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s “Look East” Policy was a major foreign policy initiative in the post cold war era.  Relation with ASEAN in the cornerstone of the “Look East” Policy.  Recognizing the close cultural ties between the two regions, India had also taken the initiative of launching “Ganga-Mekong Partnership” with the ASEAN countries of the region.

Education too has played an important role in India’s relationship with a number of Southeast Asian countries since India’s independence particularly Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.  With the other countries of the region, stronger educational links can be built.  A large number of India teachers teach in Brunei but there is little or no educational contact with Philippines and Indonesia.  A few Indonesian students have come to India on ITEC and ICCR scholarships but keeping in view the large population of the country and its growing needs for skilled human resources, this relationship can be developed.

A large number of Malaysian students came to study in India till the end of the 1980s.  Many of them went on to occupy high positions in Malaysian society.  These students played an important role in the all-round development of Ind0-Malaysian relations.  Malaysian University Graduate Association (MAYUG) an association of university graduates from India has been active in promoting Indo-Malaysian ties.  They have made a mark in academics, law and engineering.  A large majority of doctors in Malaysia have been trained in India.  However, the number of students has been going down since the early 1990s.  A meeting with some alumni indicated several reasons for this.  One is that Malaysia has developed its own institutions.  Alternate destinations such as Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore have also emerged. With growing affluence bright Malaysian students have started enrolling in larger numbers in universities in the USA and UK.  Also, there have been problems of equivalence and recognition of Indian degrees, which have not been addressed by India.  On the contrary, because of pressures on Indian institutions, these have become more inward-looking.  The Indian regulatory framework has also contributed to these declines.  The consequence has been that institutions like MAHE have opened a campus in Malacca to overcome the difficulties created by the rigid regulatory framework of higher education in India.  However, discussions with a number of Malaysian academics and other members of the civil society make it evident that interest in Indian higher education remains.  Only a more proactive policy in India is required. 

There has been close cooperation between India and Thailand in higher education since Indian independence.  The situation in the recent years is somewhat similar to that of Malaysia.  Discussions with Indian alumni as well as their academics show it is possible to revive the relationship provided India pursues it.  People of Indian origin in Thailand have a particularly strong interest in quality education in India.  It is interesting that Shivanth Raj Bajaj has given an endowment of 1 million bhat to start an India Study Centre at the Thammasat University.

The International activities of universities have expanded manifold in volume, scope, and complexity since the 1990s. They enable students to study abroad and learn other cultures.  Branch campuses can absorb the demand that local institutions cannot meet.  Therefore, international initiatives cover a wide range from study abroad programmes, franchised foreign degrees, independent institutions based on foreign models, foreign language programmes, internationalization of curricula, programmes to provide cross cultural understanding.  All these activities constitute internationalization of higher education.  Besides, cross-border education is big business, earning considerable sums for universities and other providers in a world where higher education is getting increasingly more expensive.

Globalization and internationalization have often been used interchangeably but a distinction can be made between them.  Globalization in the context of education means economic, political, societal and other forces that are pushing 21^stcentury education inexorably towards greater international  involvement.  Why is this happening?  One reason is because of the rise of democracy.  The two are interlinked.

The Impact of Globalization and Democracy

The demand for higher education is being driven by at least two factors: globalization and democracy.  Globalization can be seen as, “The widening, deepening, and speeding up of worldwide ‘interconnectedness’. It is the “overarching international system shaping the domestic politics and foreign relations of virtually every country.  It involves the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies to a degree never witnessed before -– in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations, and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is also producing a powerful backlash from those brutalized or left behind.  We have gone from how big is your missile to how fast is your modem?  We have gone from a variety of economic ideologies to a choice between, free market vanilla and North Korea.” While the polarities may not be so extreme, but in today’s context as Henry Feignenbaum observes, it is taken as axiomatic that education and spread of knowledge are essential to increase international competitiveness because national and global economies are interconnected and based on information and its exchange.

Globalization is intimately connected to democracy and the empowerment of individuals who seek opportunities in an increasingly shrinking world. As Friedman points out, two major events have been responsible for this.  One is the end of the Cold War, which has also been a struggle between two economic systems -– capitalism and communism.  Second is the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.  Now there is primarily one system in the world and while there may be many variations of it keeping in view the local milieu, everyone has had to orient and adapt to it one way or another. With the spread of democracy, regulated or centrally planned economies have been giving way to economies being governed in consonance with interests, demands and aspirations of the people, that is, from ground up rather than by planning from top down. 

Friedman states there have been three great eras of globalization. 

1) From 1492 when Columbus set sail opening trade between the Old World and the New World, lasting until around 1800.  It shrank the world from large to medium.  Globalization was about countries and muscle.  The driving force was, “brawn how much muscle, how much horse power, wind power or later, steam power your country had and how creatively you could deploy it.”

2) The second era of globalization was roughly from 1800 to 2000 interrupted by the Great Depression and World Wars I and II.  This shrank the world from medium to small.  The key agent of change in this era, the dynamic force driving global integration, was multinational companies.  The multinationals went global for markets and labour, spearheaded first by the expansion of Dutch and English joint-stock companies and then the Industrial Revolution.  In the first half of this era, the impetus was given by falling transportation costs, thanks to the steam engine and the railroad; and in the second half, by falling telecommunication costs because of the development of technology.  The global economy matured because there was enough movement of goods and information from continent to continent to create a global market.  It also created a global labour market.

3) The third phase of globalization began  around 2000.   With it, the world shrank further from small to tiny and simultaneously flattened the playing field.   The new found power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally gives this phase of globalization its unique character.   The new information technology has made us all next-door neighbours.  It is now for individuals to ask themselves where they fit into the global competition and opportunities of the day as they can, on their own, collaborate with each other globally.  Individual empowerment is the most important new feature of globalization but companies, small and big, have also got newly empowered in this era and seek opportunities of growth and expansion for themselves.

Individuals push for higher education as they see in it an attractive personal investment, which can bring them rich rewards in terms of long-term income and employability in comparison to individuals with lower formal qualifications.  Both these have contributed to the promotion of market elements in higher education particularly through increased privatization, which has helped to meet the demand for massification, diversification, and the increased access it requires.  It has created heterogeneous and complex systems that are required to meet the new and diverse demand which has made it nearly impossible to maintain a pattern of detailed uniform regulation of higher education.  Hence, new forms of governance, financing, curricula and flexible delivery and evaluation systems are needed. 

Apart from an increasingly integrated world economy, new information and communications technology, and the emergence of an international knowledge network,  English language has gained in prominence as an international language of communication and work.  Without English, it is not possible to prepare students for the globalized world, the byproduct of which is internationalization of higher education. It includes enabling students to study abroad, setting up branch campuses overseas, and internationalizing the curriculum or engaging in international partnerships.

The use of English as a lingua franca of university education and especially scientific communicationhas led to growing integration of research and growing international labour markets for scholars and scientists. It is aided by Information Technology thatfacilitates communication, permits efficient storage of information, selection and dissemination of knowledge.  It has made it possible to offer academic programmes of all kinds through e-learning.  Multinational publishing, and technology and communication firms have all grown.  Global capital has become interested in higher education and knowledge industries and is investing heavily into it; not only in research but also in training programmes.  The emergence of the “knowledge society”, the rise of the service sector and the dependence of many societies on knowledge products and highly educated personnel for economic growth are a new phenomenon.

International Debate

Internationally there has been much debate and discussion on higher education.  October 1998, for instance, was a very significant year for the world of higher education as representatives of 128 nations who were responsible for education in their respective countries, including higher education, met for the first time in Paris under the auspices of UNESCO to discuss issues of common concern and to agree on the general direction that higher education must take in the twenty-first century.  The Conference was unanimously of the view that a renewal of higher education was essential for the whole society to face the emerging challenges.  These included intellectual independence of individual in creation and appropriate advancement of knowledge; and education and training to shape responsible enlightened citizens and qualified specialists, without whom no nation could progress economically, socially, culturally or politically.  The Declaration of the World Conference emphasized that since society was increasingly knowledge-based, higher education and research had become essential components of the cultural, socio-economic and environmentally sustainable development of individuals, communities, and nations.  The development of higher education, therefore, ranked as amongst the highest national priorities of nations throughout the world.  Without it, the required human resource could not be created. 

The Conference was preceded by widespread mobilization of partners, national policy makers, institutional leaders, professors, researchers, students, professional sectors and others.  Regional Conferences were held in Havana in November 1996, Dakar in April 1997, Tokyo in July 1997, Palermo in September 1997, and Beirut in March 1998.  Findings, declarations and plans of action of these conferences provided inputs for the Paris Conference of October, 1998.  These were complemented by studies and analyses undertaken by some fifty governmental and non-governmental organizations charged with preparing a series of thematic debates on important issues of higher education.  Twelve debates were structured around three main domains: 

1. Higher education and development as requirements for the world of work.  Under this were to be considered higher education and sustainable human development contributing to national and regional development; this was to be a continuous process. 
2. New trends and innovations in higher education that encompass students’ vision of higher education for a new society. These would include the use of new information technologies, challenges and opportunities in research, and the contribution of higher education to the education system as a whole. 
3. Higher education and its relationship with culture and society.  It would have under its umbrella, women and higher education; promoting a culture of peace, mobilizing the power of culture; autonomy and social responsibility.

At the Conference itself the delegates dealt with issues pertaining to the changing missions of higher education in the twenty-first century.  These included access to higher education, interaction of higher education with society; the impact of the change process on higher education together with its diversification; and increased flexibility of systems and promotion of lifelong learning; and access to higher education.  All these factors provided elements that went into the Declaration and Framework for Action that the Conference adopted at the end as “World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century: Vision and Action” and “Framework for Priority Action for Change and Development of Higher Education.”  The Conference resolved that, “Beyond its traditional functions of teaching, training, research and study, all of which remain fundamental”, higher education must “promote development of the whole persons and train responsible, informed citizens, committed to working for a better society in the future.”It has led to intense activity around the world as country after country has tried to assess the role of higher education in development and what needs to be further done.  

In the year 2000, the Task Force on Higher Education and Society was convened by the World Bank and UNESCO to bring together some of the world’s foremost education and development experts.  Based on research, intensive discussion and hearings conducted over a two-year period, the Task Force concluded that without more and better education, developing countries would find it increasingly difficult to benefit from the global knowledge-based economy.

Rise of Asian Countries

Just as globalization has tended to concentrate wealth, knowledge and power in the hands of those already possessing these, international academic mobility favours the well-developed education systems and institutions.  Significant elements of inequality exist in the expanding world of international higher education.  Initiatives come from the North and are focussed on the South.  Ownership of knowledge, and knowledge products,  and the information technology infrastructure, are emphatically in the hands of Northern institutions, corporations and interests.   Whilestudents flows tend to move from South to North, other initiatives and programmes flow from North to South. But the good news is that now increasingly South-South activity is taking place.  However, as of now, internationalization is mainly controlled by the North.

            Discussions on cross border education turn around the  growing number of mobile students and who study in countries other than their own and also the growing number of branch campuses emerging worldwide leading to the question, whether in the extreme case education all over the world eventually become mostly foreign.

            Asia figures prominently in these discussions because this region supplies the  largestnumber of mobile students.  China and India send the highest number of students to study abroad.  Last year’s  figures show 100,000 students left India to study in US alone.  Now they also go to Australia, UK, Singapore, Malaysia, Germany and France.  The outflow of foreign exchange is said to 20 billion dollars annually i.e. India imports education worth 20 billion dollars annually.  However, gradually Asia too seems to be adapting to and innovating in cross-border higher education to fit both local and regional needs.  Rather than merely supplying students to the west, they are beginning to  recruit students among themselves and integrating cross border provisions in their higher education systems.  Twinning programmes, joint doctoral programmes, branch campuses, satellite research centres are now found in countries as varied as Singapore, Vietnam and China.  In India they are largely outlawed.

            In this process of internationalization education hubs are being created that  stand out as large scale initiatives to transform a country, city or zone into an eminent higher education destination.  Several hubs have emerged in Asia in the last two decades.  An educational hub treats trans-border education as an instrument of its growth rather than as a supplementary activity.  These educational hubs encourage multiple forms of mobility of students, faculty, researchers, programmes and providers.  They actively recruit foreign students, researchers, training providers, and even multinational companies.  The most common discourse in these education hubs is of globalization and internationalization but the underlying rationales are many and varied.  Many observers assume that student fee and the earnings they bring must be the maintain motif and this is mainly there, but other rationale well beyond economic interests also cannot be denied.  These are talent development, educational capacity and soft power.  The economic motive may be germane to some of them but these other rationales too are equally strong.  Further, the rationales are not stagnant.  Policy rationales fluctuate according to on-going developments in local, regional and global political economy.  Educational hubs see cross border education as a critical plank of development and involve substantial participation from multiple individuals and institutions, both local and foreign.  In Asia, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong have emerged as important education hubs.

            The idea of an education hub emerged in the late 1990s in Qatar, Singapore and Malaysia.  These countries were also early pioneers in cross border education in terms of twinning programme, franchised programmes and branch campuses.  However, it took about ten years for  the hubs appeared in the first decade of 2000s.

Rationales

            The main rationales for developing education hubs are economic benefits, talent development, educational capacity and soft power.       Developing higher education and research hubs  benefits economies by  upgrading technology and providing better research facilities.  Industry grows and more patents are filed.  The education capacity of the country improves while the standards of the existing universities too rise.  Local students get a global environment which makes them capable of job mobility throughout the world.  Gradually, the universities can get more choosy about the students they enrols and sets their own standards.  Often universities augment their revenue by charging differential fee from foreign students.  Alternatively,  they may, as in Singapore, provide a fee waiver if after graduation a student is prepared to work for a specified number of years.  Finally, the city itself where the university is located benefits as large number of foreign students live there and are visited by friends and family.  Not only does its economy improve but it becomes more cosmopolitan.  Of course, what goes without saying are the soft power benefits that internationalization brings.  Students from different parts of the world, when they live and study together develop bonds that last a life time.  They also spend  the best years of their life in that country and have a special place for it in their hearts making it a lifelong point of reference.

Regional Groups

            Not only individual countries, but also groups of states are creating educational hubs.  For example, when organizations like the Association of Southeast  Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Southeast Asian Ministers of Education Organization (SEAMEO) were established in the 1960s, their prime objectives were to achieve political confidence and facilitate collaboration among themselves.  The rapid expansion of trade and economic activities in the region, increasing globalization, accompanied by the influence of the Bologna process, made nation states in these organizations to collaborate in a wide range of activities including education.  Collaboration in education has also grown between Southeast Asian countries and East Asian countries.  In 1989 the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) was created with 12 Asia-Pacific economies.  Three more – China, Hong Kong, and Chinese Taipei – joined in 1991.  Since 1997, ASEAN has undertaken various collaborative activities with three East Asian countries – China, Japan, and South Korea – to foster educational collaboration.  This has led to the emergence of a new regional organization, ASEAN Plus Three (APT or ASEAN+3). 

            It is significant that since the early 1990s, East Asian countries too have placed great emphasis on developing close linkages and collaborations with their partners in the region.  This is especially true of China, Japan, and South Korea.  In 2010, the three countries jointly launched the Campus Asia Project, a regional responses to globalization and worldwide competition in higher education.  The aim was to make universities in Japan, China, and South Korea places where students and professors from diverse cultural and regional backgrounds could come together and realize the merits of each other’s universities.  Particularly, the Campus Asia Project also aims to stimulate the regional mobility of students, faculty, and researchers to enable further collaboration in higher education.  Within the framework of this program, the three countries have formulated national policies and strategies to further integrate their education systems.  These initiatives include the provision of financial support to build intraregional university networks, design joint curricula and joint degree programs that combine the cultural and academic strengths of the three countries, and provide more English-taught degree programs.  Currently, major universities in China, Japan, and South Korea are expanding their English language lectures and degree programs for undergraduate and graduate studies to attract more students from the other Northeast Asian countries i.e. not only from China, Japan and South Korea but also from North Korea, Mongolia and the eastern regions of Russia.

            As a consequence, the region has seen a growth in personal movement.  With respect to student mobility, according to UNESCO statistics for 2013, approximately half  the students from Asia and the Pacific studying abroad actually do so within the region, compared to 36 per cent in 1999.  In some countries and territories, such as Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Macao, students from Asia and Pacific accounted for more than 90 per cent of their foreign students.  In China, Japan, and South Korea, the lists of the top five countries of origin of foreign students comprise, in addition to the United States, countries of the region, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Mongolia, and Taipei, China.  Parallel to the rapidly increasing numbers in student  mobility, there has been corresponding growth in regional mobility of academics.  A gradual increase in the number of full-time foreign faculty members from neighbouring countries who are recorded as being employed in higher  education institutions in China, Japan, and South Korea.  For example, the number of full-time faculty members from Asia, especially from China and South Korea, at Japanese universities had grown considerably by 2013.  Also, by 2009, of the 345 full-time foreign faculty members in the University of Tokyo, 212 were from Asian countries.  This means that the largest percentage of  fulltime foreign faculty members are from Asia.  Similarly, the number of full-time faculty members from China and Japan at Korean higher education institutions haw tripled between 2003 and 2012.

Singapore

            As Jack T. Lee has pointed out Singapore realised in the 1980s that its manufacturing sector had severe limitations because of its small size and cheaper production emerging elsewhere in Asia.  At that time economic growth depended on manufacturing and services and Singapore continued as a manufacturing country till the recession of 1985-86.  This forced it to  identify 11 promising service industries through which it could diversify its portfolio.  Education was one of them but the government could not commercialize it  because of socio-political sensitivities.  Then came the Asian Financial crisis in 1997, making policy makers revisit  the idea of commercializing education.  The aim was to make Singapore, the “Boston of the East”.  Looking at the state of education in Singapore at that time, the idea was met with great scepticism both at home and abroad.  Undeterred, Singapore launched its World Class University programme in 1998 to attract at least 10 internationally reputed universities to set up campuses there.  It also divided its education sector into six segments: 1) elite world-class universities, 2) local universities, 3) applied research, 4) corporate training, 5) primary education and 6) testing services.  While capability development and talent attraction were presented as rationales, the chief motive was revenue generation.  Over the following ten years, Singapore consolidated the initiatives taken and added some more.  The key actors in developing Singapore as an educational hub were its Economic Development Board and then the agency for Science, Technology and Research.  The Ministry of Education was only peripherally involved.

Malaysia

            Malaysia too used the idea of educational hub to solve its chronic problem of trade deficit in the service sector.  Malaysia’s aspired to be a high income country at least since the 1990s when Prime Minister Mahathir launched his seminal blue print Vision 2020.  It was realised that one important factor that was contributing to the service deficit of  Malaysiawas the large number of studentsleaving Malaysia to study overseas.  The country’s Malay majority was economically disadvantaged compared to Chinese and Indians and so affirmative action in terms of ethnic quotas were put in place led to an exodus of students who now could not find place in the local universities.  Although quotas were abolished in 2002, enrolment data continued to slow skewed ethnic enrolment

Private universities emerged rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s to absorb the unmet demand from the public universities.  These began to partner with foreign universities to deliver twinning and franchise programmes.  The 1997 Asian crisis hit this sector badly and as a result few Malaysian students could go abroad to study as part of their training programme requirements.  Hence the private universities entered into agreements with their foreign partners to allow them to deliver the entire programme in Malaysia converting the twinning into a franchise programme.  This fuelled the idea that Malaysia could become an education hub-by opening its private education sector to international students and marketing the country’s low cost of living.  The plans of the educational hub idea can be prominently seen inthe New Economic Model 2010 and the Economic Transformation Plan 2010 and the  National Higher Education Strategic Plan 2020, – The main driving force in Malaysia, unlike in Singapore is the Ministry of Higher Education.

Hong Kong

            Hong Kong began implementing the idea of emerging as an educational hub later than Singapore and Malaysia.  In the late 1990s, some references are found in policy documents that show a desire to enrol students from Mainland China.  Gradually the idea of making Hong Kong an education hub had begun to appear in policy documents,.  In 2004, the Chief Executive  of Hong Kong named Education as one of the potential industries that could contribute to the city’s economic growth to make it “Asia’s World City”.  However, visible strategies to attract more non-local students appeared only in 2007.  The worldwide recession in 2008 motivated the government to undertake an economic review and it was proposed that Hong Kong expand its expertise beyond financial services.  Six industries were recommended for this: medical services, education services, environmental industries, innovation and technology, testing and certification, and cultural and creative industries.  A large number of Mainland Chinese students began to enrol motivated by the city’s high quality universities as well as civic freedoms that Hong Kong gave them.

National Initiatives

            In parallel with the regionalization of higher education in Asia, many countries have developed strategies of internationalization in higher education to respond to the challenges of  globalization while there are individual differences, in general, the main objectives of these policies and strategies are concerned with a further expansion of personal mobility across borders and incorporation of international perspectives and content into teaching and research.  They also include the provision of joint-or double-degree programs, establishment of branch campuses in partnership with foreign institutions, delivery of English-taught programs, building of a regional hub, and supporting several selected universities or disciplines with enlarged budgets to become world renowned institutions or departments. In East Asia before the mid-1990s, internationalization of Chinese higher education mainly meant sending students abroad and attracting international students to Chinese campus, as well as implementation English-taught degree programs.  Since the mid-1990s however, the Chinese government has implemented new national policies.  The first document as a result  was issued in 1995 “Contemporary Regulation on Operation of Higher Education Institutions in Cooperation with Foreign Partners,” and the launch of Project 211 and Project 985, were launched. The two projects have been carried out tobuild several world-class universities in China in the near future.

            The Japanese government made conscious efforts to enable the acceptance of international students from the 1980s to 1990s.  It developed the national policy, which was implemented in 1983, to host  100,000 overseas  students by the year 2000.  More recently, internationalization in higher education in Japan has entered a new phase with new characteristics.  They include the following two aspects.  First, the Japanese government has begun to revise the legislation concerning the approval of foreign institutions in Japan and to adopt new strategies for recognizing cross-border or transnational branches and programs.  This approval makes it possible for foreign educational activities or services to be recognized by Japanese universities and allows Japanese students to apply to foreign educational programs or institutions in Japan.  Meanwhile, more and more Japanese institutions have attempted to export their educational activities by providing transnational  programs in other countries.  Second, in June 2001, the Japanese government set the goal of fostering its “Top 30” universities toward the attainment of top global standards.  Later, the program was changed into a scheme of cultivating Centers of Excellence in the 21^st Century (COE21).  It focused on nine key disciplines, exemplified as life sciences, medical sciences, chemistry, material sciences, mathematics, physics, earth sciences, information technology and electrical and electronic engineering, and the central government expanded the budget for them.  The government hopes that the quality of research activity in Japanese higher education can be enhanced and increased international dimension can be integrated into campus research activities.

            In 2009 the Japanese government launched a new Global 30 program.  Its primary aim is to attract 300,000 foreign students by 2020, tripling the current number.  In order to achieve that goal, 13 universities, including 7 national and 6 private universities, were selected to play a central role in implementing the program.  They were required to accept many more international students and to provide at least two English-taught degree programs.  In 2012, the Japanese government issued another strategy to develop global human resources.  In Japan in response to the demand of big enterprises in the context of increased global economic competition.  Although there is still some debate about the meaning of  the phrase “global human resources,” and the interpretation of the term varies among individual universities, industry, and stakeholders in Japan, according to the government report the aim is to develop  soft skills of their people.  They are to acquire the ability to think independently, be more easily understood by their colleagues, customers and acquaintances make their minds more supple so that they are able to understand multiple points of view and use that to build synergies.  The effort is to understand different perspectives from different cultures and create new values.

            Shortly after China and Japan announced their plans, the Korean government announced its first national plan on internationalization of  higher education in 1996.It was the Initial Plan for Opening the Higher Education Market to Foreign Countries, and was a response to the upcoming WTO negotiations.  This plan was based on the idea that importing higher education services, in close collaboration with overseas partners, would be an efficient and practical way to meet the challenges of internationalization.  In 1999 the Korean government started the Brain Korea 21 project for the purpose of building world-class graduate schools and nurturing the development of research personnel.  The second stage,  began in 2006.  Although the Korean higher education has already moved to a stage of a near universal access to higher education it has very few research intensive universities.  Many Korean academics believe that only two or three universities are really research-intensive, and the huge majority of their universities are teaching-oriented.  Therefore, the objective of the Brain Korea 21 is to establish the research focused university system and attract expert personnel, including academics who are internationally recognized in their disciplines and researchers with an international reputation.  In 2008 another national strategy called the World Class University Project was implemented.  Several strategies have been developed to build world class Korean campuses and research institutes to attract some of the best scholars in their fields in the world.  It is expected that these inbound top scholars will be able to undertake joint research and co-author with local professors and researchers and therefore raise the ranking of Korean universities in major global university ranking systems, to help Korean universities improve the quality of their teaching and learning, as well as research activities, and to provide both Korean faculty members and students with more international learning and research environment.  Similar policies can also be found in other Southeast Asian countries.

            In South Asia, perhaps the South Asian University comes nearest to bringing students of all the SAARC countries together in one University.  Established by all the SAARC countries in 2010, it stands out as an effort of regional cooperation.  Tertiary education including vocational, professional and academic is a key factor in building the economies of developing nations like ours.  Priority has to be given to the reduction of poverty through sustainable economic growth for which higher education is critical.  However, in most of our countries, higher education is far from what it should be.  The challenge is to make the system more inclusive for the disadvantaged and improve the quality.  This requires large financial outlays. 

In most of our countries in South Asia, the GER is very low ranging from 5-6 per cent to about 17-20 per cent.  That Higher Education holds the key to prosperity both of the individual and society, has also been emphasized by all UN Bodies since 2000.  However, developing countries like ours are caught in the dilemma of competing globally simultaneously addressing the local concerns with inadequate resources, usually huge populations, poor school infrastructure, inequitable distribution of opportunities and resources, social stratification and stultifying cultural norms.  These are interrelated issues.

Today South Asia is embroiled in all kinds of conflicts and hostilities.  However, we can only prosper through cooperation.  We need to remember our shared geography and rich cultural heritage, philosophy, the synergies in arts and crafts, music, poetry and theatre, mythology and folklore, the living knowledge systems coming to us from the past and ways of life.  We need to take a long view time stretching back to the centuries gone before us rather than the see the short and the immediate in which are present conflicts of our own making and those caused by the divisive colonial heritage of some of us, not including Nepal and Bhutan.  For this, while we need academic excellence, we also need to inculcate in our students, democratic ideals, tolerant world views, multicultural perspectives and critical, thoughtful and compassionate minds and hearts.

We live in a globalized world in which survival and progress depend on creating a knowledge in which universities have to play a vital role.  We have an abundance of talent in South Asia but paucity of resources and opportunities.  We lose a lot of out talent and skilled human resource to the more developed economies of the west.  Thus we not only lose in terms of human resource but also end up subsidizing the more prosperous economies.  We need to create opportunities at home so that people return or stay to make a more equitable society in which there is economic growth and progress for all.  Together with opportunities at home, a passion for nation building has to fire the imagination of our young people as only then will there be a determined resolve to make the country and thereby the region progress.  Men and women have to be educated in a way that they acquire human values, a commitment to social justice and are imbued with a critical and scientific outlook. 

The mission is to develop a regional consciousness among its studentsand , to go beyond the horizons of knowledge and learning by inculcating values of togetherness among students.  In a globalised world which, is unable to break away from the shackles of the nation state, SAU strives to dissolve borders in a region that has a shared common history and create leaders of tomorrow who will strive to work to fulfil the aspirations and needs of the region.

Indian Education

What is the situation in the Indian Universities?  The Indian education system is vast but fragmented in which different sectors have little or no conversation with each other.  For example, there is no `awareness bridge’ between the school system, institutions of higher education, vocational training and skill development and professional education.  This lack of dialogue is also very evident in the various sectors in which educational institutions function—private, public and public private partnerships.  In fact, there often seems to be hostility between them. Each works in isolation and often at cross purposes and so is neither able to capitalize on its individual strengths nor can it collaborate with others.  The sufferers are the students and the quality of education they receive.  The results are for all to see in every sphere.

In India, access to higher education is said to be anywhere between 13-29 per cent, which is very low. Statistics vary and that is a real challenge in policy making.  In any case, the target is to double the GER by 2020 so as to reach a figure of 30%. There will be increasing demand for higher education as primary and secondary education becomes more widespread and the drop-out rates fall. This can be seen from the trends.  The student enrolment increased from 8.4 million in 2001-01 to 14.6 million in 2009-10.  The estimated increase up to 2022 is at a compounded rate of 11-12% per annum. This means that about 26 million seats will be required in the next decade.  Vast expansion of institutions would have to take place but for them to be meaningful they would have to be of global standards to produce competent and employable graduates.

However, enrolment is only a fraction of the story.  According to the Narayana Murthy Committee Report, although India has one of the largest higher education institutional network in the world, the majority of them are understaffed and ill equipped.  There is an acute faculty shortage.  Forty five percent of positions for professors, 51% for readers and 53% for lecturers were vacant in Indian universities in 2007-2008.  According to the statistics of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, this is when the student-teacher ratio is 26:1 when it should be 15:1. This compares adversely to national and international benchmarks. The ratio is 11:1 for the Indian institutes of management and, according to The Princeton Review, is 7:1 for Harvard University and 5:1 for Stanford University.

There is deficit infrastructure as a study by UGC reveals with 73% of colleges and 68% of universities falling under medium or low quality.  The curricula are outdated and libraries are ill equipped. There are only 9 books per student in an average higher education institution in India, compared with 53 at IIT Bombay and 810 at Harvard University.  The number of accredited institutions is few, there being only 161 universities and 4,371 colleges having gone through the process up to March 2011.

The strains on the public sector system are more than evident as there are only a few research universities at the top and the bottom does not adequately fulfill the requirements of demand and so has little time to devote to relevance and quality.  The skill formation is inadequate and too dysfunctional to meet the requirements of a growing and diversifying economy.  While IITs and IIMs may be internationally competitive, they are only niche institutions which cater to a very small percentage of student population.  One of the fundamental causes of malaise is, perhaps, as Prof. Altbach says that the mass of institutions of higher education have no clarity of vision about their purpose and aim.  The universities are neither provided resources nor do have the mandate to build a distinctive and innovative profile which is essential for successful academic systems. So they continue as an undifferentiated mass repetitively producing more of the same.  If there was clarity on what different institutions are attempting to deliver, then their funding sources and patterns could also be diversified.

The accountability in the system is so diffuse and distributed that no one can be held responsible for delivery and outcomes.  This leads to mediocrity.  It is only natural because most academic arrangements in India have been derived from British colonialism and were not meant to be effective or encourage quality. The most affected is undergraduate education as the affiliating system puts the undergraduate colleges under the universities with their highly bureaucratized and controlled environment. It impedes innovation as they have to follow the common centralized policies without any autonomy.  The universities, in turn, receive their funding from the government.  So while they have formal autonomy they too are basically under the control of central or state governments.  Also, they have been politicized which makes them ideologically blinkered and contentious.  All this has made issues of quality assurance very ambiguous.

The responses playing out in the world to meet the twin challenges of globalization and democracy are also being reflected in India.  Obviously the public higher education system will have to cope with it but it is not likely to be able to meet the huge demand for higher education.  Also education and employment having got firmly linked to higher education, questions are becoming insistent about its relevance and quality.  The need to simultaneously expand to increase access, create equity and tackle the issues of relevance and quality by upgrading existing institutions and establishing new ones,  has put a strain on the resources available for the public funding of higher education and given rise to private education.  Even the government has allowed elements of private education to enter the public sector universities and colleges through mechanisms like `self financing courses’ that run concurrently with public funded programmes.  Self financing institutions have also been affiliated to public universities and they now far outnumber the public funded colleges. Most of them are in the southern states of India. Many private deemed universities have emerged which indicates that the government seeks private help and, lacking a transparent policy or legislation, has taken this route to enable private institutions to flourish. There are another group of private institutions in the non-university sector that are run by private and corporate initiatives like NIIT and APTEC.  By law they can’t award degrees but they attract students because of the quality and relevance of their programmes and training that they offer. 

However, the acceptance of private higher education will essentially depend on the role of the government. The government has to be clear, and build a national consensus on the issue.  Right now there is divergence and the public perception is negative with a fair justification.  At the same time, paradoxically the private sector continues to grow while policy lags behind.  Therefore, benign negligence of the private sector or allowing its covert entry will not do.  The government has to decide whether it needs the private sector for resource mobilization and its other strengths.  If yes, it has to facilitate it and see it as complementary to its task of discharging its responsibility of expanding the higher education base.  The first and most important step is appropriate legislation because it will embody the will of the state and bring about clarity on the rules of the game. It will prevent perpetual litigation and help in insisting on quality private participation. Regulation implemented with integrity can lead to open and transparent policies that can attract big corporations with enough funds to establish quality institutions and staying power to not expect immediate returns.  Lacking a national legislation many states have already enacted for the establishment of private universities, sometimes with disastrous consequences as in Chhattisgarh. Hence state legislation is not enough, and the national policy must be spelt out clearly with its three basic components: promotion, facilitation and regulatory control. 

Right now Indian higher education seems to be stuck in a quagmire.   It is clear that India is affected by global trends but is unable to deal with them.  If it has to meet the challenges it has to systematically create an internationally competitive academic system.  For this it will have to rise above ideological biases and politics to reform its outmoded structures of academic governance structures and delivery systems and build a national consensus by a continuous center-state dialogue on higher education both in the public and the private sectors. A tall order perhaps but without it the Indian higher education system cannot   deliver either nationally nor can it compete globally.  It is imperative for not only India and competing with the best to think and act both locally and globally.  They must create an eco-system of education which is inclusive, diverse, flexible, striving for excellence, but for all Asian countries this is the Asian imperative.

Introduction

The first question that arises is why should an individual be educated at all?  One possible answer is that it is a means of social and material transformation making the physical life of an individual easier through the creation of both societal and individual material wealth.  This is mainly achieved through science and technology and made available through trade commerce and economics which also attempt the equitable distribution of wealth.  This is accepted as human progress and hence the emphasis in higher education is on disciplines like trade commerce, management, information technology, bio-technology, micro-biology, genetics and other allied subjects.  Progress is measured by national and international agencies through parameters like GDP, per capita Income, education and health standards, and consumption.

Individuals and society have a symbiotic relationship with each other and not a confrontationist one which has been the trend especially within the human rights movement.  Individuals are the building blocks of a society and hence individuals and society ought to complement each other so that progress may be achieved.  When the individual and the society are at odds with one another two view points or tendencies emerge.

The first advocates a collective reorganization, something, which could lead to the effective unity mankind.  The second declares that all progress is made first by the individual and insists that individual should be given the conditions in which he can progress freely.  However, both are equally true and necessary, and our effort has to be directed along these lines simultaneously.  Collective progress and individual progress are interdependent.  Before the individual can take a leap forward at least a little of the preceding progress must have been realized in the collectivity.  A way must, therefore, be found so that these two types of progress may proceed side by side.

How is this to be done?  One of the most important tools is `education.’  To `educate’ means to train, to rear, or to raise.  Higher education is predominantly concerned with the training of the mind.  

It must necessarily have two broad aims: “a collective aspect and an …. individual aspect.”  The collective aspect requires, as P.B. Saint Hillare points out, that an individual be turned into a good citizen who has harmonious relations with other members of the community, who is useful to society and who fulfills his obligations as a good citizen.  The individual aspect demands that through education, he develop a strong and healthy body, build up his character, attain self mastery and get opportunities to discover and develop his natural abilities harmoniously.  Both aspirations are justified and education must fulfill both needs at all levels.  However, it is true in particular in the field of higher education as after this individuals assume decision making and leadership roles in society.

The collective aspect of education pertains to societal requirements. By the need of society is meant what society thinks it requires.  Temporary necessities may arise (war, new discoveries, geographical or political changes) which may for some time reflect themselves on education.  But it is clear that the formulated requirements of any society, as far as education is concerned, depends on its aim as conceived largely by the ruling class at the time.  It may be general culture and adornment of life – artists of all sorts will be encouraged and become the favourites of the princes.  It may be military aggrandizement and adventure – then soldiers and sailors will be needed.  It may be industrialization as a means towards material well being – the need will be for engineers and technicians.  This brings about the change in education programmes that answer to the growing demand for what the society perceives it needs like Scientists, Engineers and Technicians, and by the numerous institutions that are created to satisfy this demand.

Background of Higher Education

The foundations of higher education in India were laid by Macaulay who had a two fold aim: one, to produce cheap clerical labour to serve the needs of the colonial empire; second, to create a class of people who would perpetuate the legacy of the empire by looking down upon their own cultural values and uphold those of the British ruling class.  As Amilcar Cabral points out, the experience of colonial domination shows that the colonizer provokes and develops the cultural alienation of a part of the population by the so-called assimilation of indigenous elites distancing them from the popular masses.   As a result, a section of the people assimilate the colonizers’ mentality, considers itself culturally superior to its own people and looks down upon their cultural values.

This is the situation of the majority of colonized intellectuals and their position is consolidated by increase in social privileges.  The university system set up by the colonizers for their own ends has ironically been expanded and strengthened rather than being dismantled in independent India.  From twenty universities and five hundred colleges at the time of independence, there are now almost 450 universities and 20,000 colleges.   88% of all college and university students are in undergraduate course, 9.8% being at the Master’s level and a very small proportion, i.e. 0.9% in research.  Only 1.4% are enrolled in diploma or certificate courses.  88% of undergraduate students and 55% of all postgraduate students are in affiliated colleges while the remaining are in the universities and their constituent colleges.  In the case of diploma/certificate courses too, university departments and university colleges have an edge over affiliated colleges.   

Since the majority of students are in colleges, the foundations of higher education are laid there and their functioning have far reaching implications.  Of the undergraduate students, the highest number is pursuing liberal arts and commerce in colleges of uneven standards.  The colonial system of education is mechanically churning out unemployable graduates with poor skills and little development of mind or personality.

Why has this happened?  Because no sincere thought has been given to what was sought to be achieved through higher education.  At the time of independence, India lacked every kind of material prosperity.  There was an immense desire to catch up with Western standards of living as soon as possible.  Factories and dams were hailed as the new temples of India.  However, no thought was given to how the skilled human resource was to be produced to achieve the material prosperity desired through industrialization and technical advancement.  Obviously an integrated plan was required from the school to the university level.  The report of the First Education Commission or Kothari Commission came in 1964; the First National Policy of Education in 1968, and then in 1986 and 1992.  Lacking a coherent vision, pockets of excellence developed that competed with areas of great neglect. 

Role of School

In India, access to higher education is about 11% which is very low.  Not only that the number of students who drop out at the school level itself is very high, being over 65%.  This shows that only a very small percentage manage to have access to higher education. The drop out, and the failure rate even at the tertiary stage for those who do manage to enter collage indicates that for any meaningful access, the school education system must deliver.  It is the real base for human resource.  No changes in higher education will provide a satisfactory outcome unless the schooling improves.  Pratham a leading NGO in education has pointed out that only 16.5 percent of rural children in Class 1-8 can read and only 25.75 per cent can recognize numbers.  Further the high dropout rates at each level of the education system, has resulted in a majority of the work force lacking in education. The others have to contend with an outdated system that involves rote learning rather than learning skills, understanding information and solving practical problems.  Hence the relevance of education at the tertiary level has also to be looked at.

Thus, a large number of students are left out of the system as a study by Dr. Sudhanshu Bhushan in 2004 shows.  The study divides the left out students into three categories; left outs at the school level, pre-college and college levels.  In all these areas combined, there are about 30 million students with little or no alternatives. They need to have a well developed tier of vocational education that links with school education on the one hand and higher education on the other. Vocational education is available in the form of Polytechnics, Industrial Training Institutes and, more recently, Community Colleges.  However, all of them suffer from lack of resources and poor implementation.

The NSSO 61^st Round states that while 70 per cent of the population completed primary education in the 18-22 age group, only 6 per cent completed a diploma course and 97 per cent of the work force in the country, in the 15-60 age group has no technical education. The inability of the system to provide continuation of education leads to fewer students going to next levels of education resulting in an inability to meet the needs of the job market, lower employability and an accumulation of people with low skills at the bottom of the job pyramid.  Similar findings can be seen in the Report on Condition of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector (2007).  It states that the average number of years of schooling of workers in the rural, unorganized non-agricultural sector was found to be 4.6 as compared to 9 years in the organized sector, and for the unorganized agricultural sector it was 2.8. Mean years of schooling among casual workers in the unorganized non-agricultural sector was 3.5, thus denying workers access to jobs in the organized sector and confining them to casual labour.

Moreover, with the commercialization of agriculture, crop diversification and introduction of new technologies, education has become a key input even for development and modernization of agriculture and the welfare of the people dependent on it. Levels of illiteracy are such that it is almost impossible for them to assimilate new information on better agricultural practices.

Why Access

Now, why should there be focus on access to higher education when the school system obviously needs so much strengthening?  Obviously because one of the aims of higher education is empowerment through economically productive employment.  It has been argued in the case of SC/ST that even economic empowerment does not necessarily mean social empowerment.  However, in simplistic terms while empowerment can be social or economic but if one has to choose between the two, the latter is more important than the former.  With economic empowerment, social gradually follows or even if it doesn’t its effects are not so terribly debilitating.  However, the existing system of higher education in India is not conducive to providing skills necessary for employment and a majority of Indian graduates are actually unemployable.  The vocational sector of education is woefully lacking and the academic sector is not delivering the way it should.  The problems have assumed serious proportions and there is an extreme urgency to introduce a skill or career orientation into tertiary education which is available together with the academic stream and between which points of convergence can be created. 

The Indian Labour Report 2007, by TeamLease Services states that while poverty is declining in India, inequality is rising and 57 per cent of Indian youth suffer from some form of skill deprivation. Corporate India cannot find skilled employees and much of the labour force consists of the `working poor.’  Despite the large human resource available in the country, employability remains a key challenge. Pressures on employment arise from several factors including shift in the demographics of the population, the inability of an ailing agricultural sector to support labour and an educational system that is not in sync with the requirements of business and industry. The inadequate interaction between the academics on the one hand and business and industry on the other results in a lack of focus on the skill development of individuals. The decision of most individuals to continue with education depends on their receiving adequate returns for the efforts made, and the current system does not enable them to do so, resulting in dropouts, under-trained and under-skilled labour. Globally, two approaches are followed to achieve better employability – educational reforms followed by a focus on lifelong learning opportunities.

Although the number of colleges and universities has mushroomed in the country, they lack the ability to impart career-oriented knowledge and training; curricula are out-dated; there is little interaction between industry and educational institutes, and only  about 10 per cent of the colleges show good academic achievement. The poor quality of colleges means that students passing out of them would earn low incomes or would be unable to find jobs relevant to the courses pursued by them. This is also one of the causes for the high levels of dropouts in higher education. When future prospects are not attractive, the better option appears to be to drop out, particularly for the deprived sections of society.

Further, there is a wide range of income divergence within the same stream depending on the quality of skills. Though higher education levels can help an individual reach the desired employment, sustainability depends on how well the skills are adapted and improved over time. It is thus the quality of the institute that imparts the education or training which is the most important determinant of the income earning potential.  For instance, only 30 per cent of IT graduates are actually employable in the IT sector.

A GHRDC-Competition Success Review Survey 2006 reported that out of approximately 1100 Business-Schools in India only 400 met the minimum eligibility criteria. And while the top institutes usually registered 100 per cent placements, the bottom ones barely managed 25 per cent.  This was true for all streams of education in the country, emphasising the fact that good infrastructure, instruction and other inputs were essential to ensure high standards of education, liberal or vocational, and this was lacking in the majority of educational institutes.

An analysis of data available from the NSSO 61^st Round shows a surprisingly paradoxical finding.  According to it, greater education levels can lead to greater income but they also bring with them a lower probability of being employed.  The situation was aggravated because formal vocational training had no impact on incomes or the likelihood of being employed, because of its poor quality.  On the other hand, informal vocational training not associated with formal certification, such as training in household occupation settings, had a positive impact on the likelihood of being employed, but did not affect income levels significantly  This highlighted the importance of having a formal, well-designed vocational training system and the poor quality available in the country.

Resistance to Vocational Education

There has been resistance amongst students to vocational education in India, as there is a perception that it is meant for those who are not good at academics.  But with the opening up of the economy the demand for skills has gone up manifold.  To meet it,  provision has to be made from the school level.  It can be argued that vocationalisation of education has been attempted before and it has failed.  It is necessary to analyze why this has happened.  One reason and which continuous till today is that if a student opts for a vocational subject at the school, he/she has no opportunity to pursue it or an allied field at the tertiary level.  In the existing colleges and universities no credit is given for the vocational subject studied at the school level and so it actually becomes a disadvantage to do so.  Also, at the time vocationalization was attempted in India, the economy did not have the capacity to absorb skilled human resource at different levels that it has now and the demand can only grow.  Another detriment which still persists is that a person in the vocational stream has little or no opportunity to join the academic stream at any point in his/ her life without starting totally afresh.  In other words, no credit is given for either the vocational knowledge or the work experience acquired.

While universities may prepare engineers, scientists, industrialists and social leaders of a country, a second-tier educational level is essential to produce the middle-level technologists who can manage and maintain the industrial infrastructure.  Without such an educated and technical workforce, there can be no progress.  Steps were taken during the early 1980s to introduce Application Oriented Courses (AOCs) within the framework of the graduate courses and in the 1990s several self-financing institutions sprang up, with the approval of universities and state government, to run job-oriented programmes in fields such as electronic, computer science, accountancy, food science, hospital, and hotel management and others, which have been popular with students. The University Grants Commission also introduced vocational courses as part of the three-year bachelor’s degree courses.  The curriculum was restructured to integrate the vocational angle.  Add on courses oriented towards skill development were also allowed outside the time table.

This appears to be confused thinking as academic colleges are not oriented towards vocational education and do not have the wherewithal to do so.  Heads of academic educational institutions have difficulty in identifying industries for practical application work and funding agencies to finance the training.  There is still a considerable gap in what the industry wants and the colleges are able to provide.  The country needs different levels at the tertiary education system so that a bouquet of options is available.  This will bridge the gap between what the students are taught and the demands of the work force.  It will also provide opportunities for training to the large unskilled work force available in India.  There is also a backlog of school dropouts who are over the school age of sixteen and work as unskilled workers.  According to an ILO report, 95 per cent of the Indian workforce has no marketable skills. This vast need for productive skills cannot be achieved only through the formal sector especially if it is as rigid as it tends to be in India. A parallel informal, flexible system is also required to identify and develop local talent for local needs.

Industrial Training Institutes

Vocational and technical training as a means of empowerment is not a new idea.  It has been recommended and tried but there has been only limited success.  Technical and vocational training was considered very important for the underprivileged and marginalized groups to improve their productivity, particularly as they were usually first generation learners.  Traditionally too, they had been engaged in skilled and semi-skilled work and were likely to perform better in those areas.  Also there were more opportunities for their employment in the newly established industries where jobs are reserved for them. The major vocational institutions imparting training for middle level technical personnel were polytechnics, Industrial Training Institutes, junior technical schools, crafts and handicrafts schools, and other industrial and technical schools.

The Secondary Education Commission, in 1953, had recommended the setting up of technical schools, as separate institutes or as part of existing institutes, in industrial areas which would work in collaboration with industries.  When the Commission reviewed the situation in 1964-66, it found a shortfall of middle level technical personnel and recommended an increase of part-time and full-time vocational and professional courses at the lower secondary level and after Class 12. It also reported that semi-skilled and skilled workers were primarily trained in the ITIs, while technicians were trained in polytechnic.  A doubling of ITIs, was recommended.  Even then it was stated that the courses should allow for students to move to the academic stream. This, however, has never happened and there are no enabling structures or systems to date. 

Further, the Working Group on Technical and Vocational Education recommended in 1978 that the ratio between graduates and technicians should be 1:2, but the output ratio dropped to 1:1. The main reason for this was that students belonging to different backgrounds found it difficult to adjust, facilities were not fully utilized, there was shortage of operating funds and lack of motivation in both teachers and students. The Working Group emphasized that it was necessary to consolidate diversify and improve quality in existing institutions before attempting further expansion. The Sixth Five Year Plan, 1980-85 made similar recommendations, and also stressed that  ITIs had to be revamped to orient them towards self-employment. 

The thinking persisted well into the 1980s that technical and vocational training was specially useful for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the most disempowered sections of society as it could provide skills for the job opportunities that wer continuously expanding.  A Study of Five States on `Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in Industrial Training Institutes’ was conducted by the National Institute for Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) in the early 1980s.   The study indicated that while the utilization of the facilities in the ITIs was good for scheduled castes (SCs), there was a considerable gap in the case of scheduled tribes (STs), even in the special ITIs set up in tribal areas, that were well equipped, but lacked motivated personnel. Their enrolment rates were far below those of other groups and much less than their proportion in the population, with large-scale state-wise variations, despite reservations. Several studies have shown that the reserved quota is seldom fully utilized, mainly because the number of qualified students are inadequate. This is particularly true for the STs. One solution recommended has been to make district-wise reservations rather than course-wise.  Wastage in terms of failures and dropouts was high. Most ex-trainees worked as apprentices and self-employment was minimal. Further, the waiting time to get a job was higher for the SCs/STs as compared to others and the special incentives for them were found to be inadequate and the implementation of schemes was defective.

Polytechnics

Polytechnics were set up to build up the technical education system and there are about three hundred institutes which had an annual intake of around 30,000 students. About 70 per cent of the polytechnics were run by state governments and the rest by private agencies or autonomous bodies. The institutes have three and two year full-time courses and sandwich courses. However, there is inadequate machinery for the systematic evaluation of their work and progress and hence there was little feedback on performance.

A National Expert Committee Chaired by S. S. Kalbag was set up in 1987 to appraise the status of community polytechnics in the country. It stated that for a balanced development of the country, human resource for all sectors, organised as well as unorganized, had to be prepared by the technical education system. The All India Council for Technical Education had recommended as early as 1978 that a few select polytechnics that had shown initiative in promoting interaction with the rural community at large and had the necessary capacity to undertake rural development work, could be used as focal points to promote transfer of technology to the rural sector and make contributions to rural development. These polytechnics were designated as Community Polytechnics.

Community Polytechnics were to make a socio-economic technical survey of adjoining villages to determine the needs of the people. They were then to develop human resource and training through a wide variety of trade courses, non-formal training programmes, and entrepreneurial development programmes.  Further, they were to facilitate technology transfer to rural areas and provide technical support service to ensure the sustenance of rural technologies.  They were to also assist local entrepreneurs in various aspects of enterprise building by disseminating information, creating awareness about various developmental schemes and by applying science and technology to find solutions for specific problems.

However, these met with limited success because of the shortfalls in implementation.  There was little attempt to integrate the curricular activities of regular and community polytechnics.  Scant attention was paid to costing in most of the projects undertaken by them.  In some cases the training courses organized for rural youth did not reflect the skill and potential of the polytechnic either in content or in methodology.  This was aggravated by a weak information system that limited technology transfer.  Besides, since the entire institution was not involved in this activity, the efforts did not have the expected multiplier effect. It was, therefore, felt that the whole scheme needed to be reoriented.  The main objective of the polytechnics should be to develop the human resource in the rural areas through the development of technical skills.  A scientific methodology needed to be used to identify the opportunities in the economic environment of the region and exploit them. This required that the polytechnics as a whole had to raise the science and technology level of their own staff and students by solving live rural problems.  This meant that Community Polytechnics, needed to be strengthened and guided in the selection of projects so that they could perform more effectively as agents of change in the rural areas.

Since the level of technology in village society was low, polytechnics could be very useful in rural transformation.  They could select a village institution, preferably a secondary school, to act as its village extension arm, where they could build training facilities for multi-skill programmes relevant to the village environment or of educational significance. Trainers could be developed from amongst the village youth including school teachers within the village centre and all training had to be multiskilled, oriented towards self-employment.  In addition the students had to be given the ability to read, write, communicate and also some computational skills.  

However, little progress was made as is evident from the experience of a team from the Community Colleges for International Development (CCID) that visited India in the late 1980s to explore the possibilities of collaboration between the community colleges in USA and the polytechnics of India. CCID is a consortium of colleges that aim to pursue formal higher education with economic development, and take up skills development in developing countries.  It found a severe mismatch between the industry’s requirements and the skills learnt at polytechnics because of lacuna in planning and implementation.  There was limited specializational and very little interaction between the polytechnics and the industry.  The equipment was obsolete, faculty development was poor and teachers had no incentive to make use of the Technical Teacher Training Institutes (TTTI) established in the country.  Hence the faculty did not keep abreast with the latest changing technologies within the local industries.

The team recommended that the present and future employment skills, knowledge and abilities required by industry had to be identified for curricula development and purchase of relevant equipment.  Further, faculty had to be constantly upgraded and needed to maintain close contacts with industry so that obsolescence could be continuously taken care of in all areas like curriculum, equipment and pedagogy. 

A Special Committee for Reorganization and Development of Polytechnic Education was set up in 1991.  It agreed with most of these comments and recommendations of the CCID accepting that even earlier there had been serious criticism of polytechnic education in the country by educationists, industrialists, professional bodies and employers.  It had been pointed out that the diploma courses in polytechnics were mostly theoretical.  Being a poor imitation of degree courses,  they did not serve the purpose of training middle level technical personnel.  There was little attempt at specialization and the industry linkages were weak.  Also, faculty development and better academic infrastructure was required. 

A survey of industries made it clear that while diploma holders remained unemployed, a significant proportion of technicians’ positions went to persons without formal qualifications but with job experience at the craftsman level. Further, students of polytechnics did not and could not fit directly into job situations in industry, because there was insufficient application orientation to the education and training imparted by polytechnics.  The Committee found that the academic organisation and control did not permit flexibility and freedom to experiment and innovate in collaboration with the industry. Therefore autonomy for polytechnics was essential to allow for innovations in curricula and pedagogy and for establishing meaningful industry linkages where this had been allowed, the quality of the institutions had improved.

Skills for Progress

Lacking effective skill development institutions, several private initiatives were being taken to meet the ever expanding job requirements of the country.  For example, Skills for Progress, an all India association of private technical and vocational training institutions describes in its annual report of 2005-6, its collaboration with the Community Colleges for International Development (CCID), USA.  CCID and SKIP are working on programmes focussing on curriculum and workforce development, communications and electronic education resources.  The programmes aim at capacity building of institutions to stay relevant to the changing needs of vocational and technical training so as to enhance employability of the students.

Skills Development Initiative of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII)

The Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) took the Skills Development Initiative in 2004, to provide social inclusiveness and bring the marginalized sections of society into the mainstream economy through empowerment by skill development. The main features of the initiative are its localized and need-based approach, practical hands on experience, training and testing, accessibility, quality, cost-effectiveness, and centralized certification.  Most training facilities as well as trainers function for 8-10 hours per weekday and they can be used for the remaining periods of time, to save costs.

Geographical areas and target groups are identified, following which the relevant skills – localized and marketable – that need to be developed are identified. The curricula are worked out in collaboration with the local industries. Panchayats and other local bodies are also consulted.  Trainees are selected on the basis of their motivation and abilities and the programmes are flexible in scheduling. Constant monitoring and assessments of trainees are undertaken and unsuccessful candidates can reappear for assessments and can even join another batch for additional training. Certification is important as it indicates a certain minimum standard acceptable to industry throughout the country to allow for mobility of workers.

Weaknesses pointed out by the Working Group on Higher Education – Eleventh Five Year Plan

The Eleventh Five Year Plan which has come to be known as the Education Plan because of its emphasis on education also accepts that there are several systemic challenges posed by tertiary education in India.  It recognizes that there is an abundance of talent in the country, which is mostly un-nurtured.  There is lack of flexibility in the system leading to a mismatch between school and employment hours.  Knowledge resources are not easily available and there are inadequate opportunities to use even what is there.  The quality of teaching is questionable and there is a gap between the demand and supply of knowledge and skills together with lack of collaborative learning.  There is little or no personalized monitoring and long-term tracking of learning, skill upgradation and performance. And finally the situation is being aggravated by a growing digital divide.  Most of these issues pertaining are not new. 

Changes were introduced in the Indian system that led to the creation of new types of institutions but the implementation has left a lot to be desired.  For example, when vocational/technical education was to be introduced, the 10+2+3 system was formulated, with the intention of bifurcating students to academic or vocational/technical education at the +2 stage. As a consequence, Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and polytechnics were created, but very little attention has been paid to the way these operate.  Hence, as has been discussed their poor quality  Also the UGC formulated a scheme in the 1990s to introduce B.A (vocational) in which one vocational subject is taught together with other academic subjects.  However, lack of faculty and proper academic and physical infrastructure did not allow it take off with any degree of success. The result is that there has been no appreciable shift of students to vocational streams in the existing institutes nor has the education impacted the students or the economy.  An attempt has been made to rectify both access to education and to strengthen vocational education in the Eleventh Five Year Plan.

The Eleventh Five Year Plan and Open and Distance Learning  (ODL)

The Eleventh Five Year plan envisages increasing the enrolment from the current 11% to 20% in the coming five years that is by 2012 the last year of the Plan.  One of the strategies is to strengthen the open and distance learning system that provides higher education to about 25 per cent of learners.  The Eleventh Plan expects this figure to increase to 40 per cent. It has an impressive track record of providing quality education and training to a large learner population, by using ICT to create access and opportunities through the length and breadth of the country. The learner profile includes the employed and the unemployed, those seeking to upgrade skills and knowledge while working, and the disadvantaged and the marginalized rural youth. The system has developed a wide delivery network.

The National Open University which is also the nodal institution for distance learning programming in the country is the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), which was established in 1985 to promote distance learning.  It has widened access to higher education by adopting integrated multimedia instructions increasing its reach considerably through the use of Gyan Darshan, an educational TV channel and Gyan Vani, FM channels. It has a delivery network of 53 regional centres, 1,400 study centres and about 25,000 counselors providing learner support. It has 28 FM radio stations and 6 TV channels, including three interactive channels. It has been given the responsibility to develop an additional 15 FM radio stations.

The focus of Open Distance Learning during the Eleventh Plan period would be on professional, vocational and career oriented programmes at certificate, diploma and degree levels, concentrating on skill development, vocational training and community development programmes. Skill development has so far been underdeveloped, but two-way interactive platforms like EDUSAT have created a vast potential for short-term training and there has been a shift from enrichment programmes towards curriculum-based learning programmes. The system however, needs inputs in terms of research, innovations, development of resource material and dedicated networks for efficient delivery and system upgradation.

The Eleventh Five Year Plan’s Working Group on Higher Education and Community Colleges

Apart from enhancing the distance learning system of education, the Eleventh Five Year Plan’s Working Group on Higher Education has recommended the setting up of community colleges.  It has recognized that there are significant disparities in the GER for rural and urban areas, being 5.58 per cent and 21.74 per cent respectively in 2000, as per Census figures.  Growth of higher education can be viewed from both the supply and the demand side. From the supply side it needs to be ascertained that those who have passed the senior secondary level and are eligible to join higher education must have access to it.  At the same time higher education must not only grow but also diversify to meet the growing needs of the economy and society. This means that higher education should have backward linkages with school education and forward linkages with the economy to supply the relevant human resource along with well qualified teachers for the education sector itself.  For this to happen, the contents of higher education must have continuity with the earlier levels of education. Care has also to be taken to ensure that students do not take particular courses and subjects, in an ad hoc manner as that may lead to wastage, while at the same time the system has to be made flexible enough to enable them to choose their courses according to their own talents and inclinations. 

The Eleventh Five Year Plan accepts Community Colleges as an alternative system of education to help the poor, the tribal population and women to find gainful employment in collaboration with local industry, business and the community. It states the importance of Community Colleges as they provide education for a livelihood; and eliminate exclusion from the formal system.  They also reduce the mismatch between education and employment and can thus be an important means of reducing poverty, unemployment, under-employment, un-employability and dropouts. It states further, that Community Colleges have the unique record of empowering the socially, economically and educationally backward sections of society during the past ten years wherever these have been started. 

The Working Group on the Eleventh Plan recommends the national recognition of the Community College system; and the vertical mobility of the Community College student through open and conventional universities with a three-tier system of diploma, associate degree and degree.  Community Colleges need to be set up in educationally backward regions to correct regional imbalances in higher education with emphasis on the development of soft skills.  Also, central placement cells can be set up in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industries and Chambers of Commerce.  The reach of Community Colleges can be further strengthened through distance learning for those students who cannot commute to college or stay in hostels. 

Community Colleges

The Community College or the people’s college was developed in the US, and could well be adapted to the Indian system of education to offer quality education, with technical and vocational training, in order to create competent career-oriented individuals. 

American Community Colleges are designed as comprehensive institutions combining liberal arts, vocational, technical and adult education. They have two-year duration courses and students accumulate credits that are transferable to colleges of higher education. A majority of students complete the first two years of junior college at such institutions.  They have an open-door policy that enables almost anyone seeking higher education or the enhancement of vocational and technical skills to enroll. Today, in the Indian system, barring open universities and schools, and those offering correspondence courses, this is difficult, if not impossible.

Community Colleges can be linked to specific universities and colleges, so that credits gained in them can be used to enter mainstream higher education. Typically, students of Community Colleges would be older to ‘traditional’ students, would not have parental financial support and would most likely be part-time students, who are holding down jobs. Additionally, Community Colleges can work in partnership with business organizations, thereby ensuring that skills are kept up to date and meet the requirements of the job market. Courses could include agriculture, engineering technologies, communications, healthcare, office occupations, computers, data processing, trade, tourism, hospitality, and others.  These could be part-time or full-time; short duration courses of 10-15 weeks, or long ones of up to two years.

Community Colleges link education with technical and vocational training, developing skills in the emerging or sunrise industries.   They conform to some concepts enunciated in the National Policy of Education of India such as open access, continuing education and vocational training. These have better chance of success in the current environment than before because there is a growing trend to reject ‘liberal’ higher education which is seen as elitist and to view higher education as a source for trained human resource.  The technological explosion has created a need for highly educated theoretical scientists and experts in the service and other industries, supported by a strong structure of technicians and middle-level staff.   Community Colleges also provide motivational programmes and help the disadvantaged students to develop self-esteem together with realistic career options.  They are locally controlled and are responsive to the needs of the local community, industry and business.  Their aim is to provide students with relevant, quality job skills instituted in consultation with local industry and business.  Teachers work in industry and industry too provides teachers from its personnel.  Finally Community Colleges act as cultural and intellectual centres for the entire community and as catalysts in development.

These are all important aspects in the Indian context, with its vast range of cultural and linguistic diversity, differing educational requirements and economic development. An educational institution located in a particular region, responsive to regional needs and aspirations would mean better, low-cost education, resulting in improved economic development opportunities for the people.

There are three types of courses that such colleges can offer which could suit Indian requirements.  First, vocational and technical courses. Second, is a two-year programme that prepares students for transfer to a three-year bachelor’s degree in science, arts or commerce at a traditional college. The third is a remedial programme that brings students up to the required levels in reading, writing, mathematics and communication, so that students can pursue further education. This is eminently suited to the Indian environment, with a large number of first-generation learners, who do not have home support for their studies and lag behind, frequently resulting in dropouts; those who have already dropped out of the education system, and could have even reverted to illiteracy; and adults who may not have had an opportunity to study. 

Further, it has been proved beyond doubt that several Indian children are not academically prepared to compete for entrance to institutions of higher education.  This applies to a diverse body of students but especially to many who have had low quality schooling.  These are usually the poor and other marginalized sections of society. On several occasions it has been seen that these students are unable to cope with the courses they have entered. This is where remedial colleges, with an open-door policy would bring significant benefits, even though it means that the period of study may increase. For this, however, the government needs to show sincere commitment and provide the required resources.

Since these institutions would all have a general education component, students who originally joined a vocational or remedial course, have the opportunity to prepare for higher college courses, if they come up to the required standards.  Courses could be designed to give diplomas, certificates, and, as in the case of the US, associate degrees, that could equal a certain number of credits, enabling entrance to traditional universities. These could be designed for skill upgradation in collaboration with industrial houses, or for the development of new skills, particularly in the ‘sunrise industries’.

The philosophy of a community college is an institution that provides transfer to higher education and prepares a student for an occupation. Being locally based and supported by the community, it is expected to link the aspirations of the community through an education that provides employment or higher education. It accommodates over-achievers and under-achievers.

Fulfilling the Constitutional Provisions of Access, Equity and Relevance in Higher Education

Community colleges appear to be the ideal solution to fulfill the constitutional provisions of access, equity and relevance in higher education as they give an opportunity to all those seeking tertiary education but are unable to qualify for the university.  They provide the much needed skills for employment while simultaneously  facilitating lateral entry into academic courses.  As the community itself is involved in the colleges, there is a greater commitment to their success.  It also enables linkages with the industry and this minimizes obsolence in curricula. 

Many of the existing institutions can be transformed to suit the educational requirements of the communities they serve. If the Community College programme of two year duration provides a comprehensive education to students it opens opportunities for those aspiring to higher degrees and graduation, to step into the traditional formal universities and colleges. At present, those students who opt for vocational/technical training at the +2 stage have no opportunity to move to universities at any stage in their lives. Therefore, the Indian educational institutions at the lower levels of higher education need to be transformed to be more receptive to local community needs, while providing adequate comprehensive education and maintaining links with formal higher education institutions and bodies.  The latter have to also develop flexible structures to accommodate those coming from the vocational stream.

Community Colleges are needed where there are an adequate number of school pass-outs to make use of them and no such facilities are available.  These can be both urban and rural areas.  In rural areas which are remote and backward, community colleges could immediately provide the much needed access.  Urban areas have a perennial shortage of educational institutions and community colleges could share some of that pressure.  Of course, it would help if within a reasonable distance there were large scale industries and businesses which would enable an adequate number of learners to get absorbed within the area.  Where facilities such as polytechnics, arts and science colleges are available but are not being properly utilized, these can be converted, partially or wholly to community colleges.  Of course, communities have to be aware of and amenable to supporting such ventures.

The UGC needs to recognize Community Colleges and sensitize and motivate the academic to allow for more flexible structures in educational systems.  Not only students of Community Colleges but also the left out students and those who have entered the vocational stream in different kinds of educational institutions, all need to have options shifted to their needs to enable them to enter and improve their qualifications at different points of time in their lives.  That is, there have to be opportunities for life long learning.  For this a bouquet of quality educational institutions has to be created that would give students options to continue their education, exercise options best suited to them and have opportunities to improve levels of academic performance. 

                                                                                    (Kavita A. Sharma)

However, when the state proposes to change its policy concerning the boards, it will have to meet, at least two basic challenges.  In the absence of national or state board examinations what will be the state policies which will hold schools more accountable so that the process of teaching and learning does not decline even further; and how will the state deal with the diverse student population  and the learning opportunities available to them to ensure a measure of equity between them.  There are some thoughts. Achievements have to be measured but not merely of students but also of teachers and management. That is, the school itself has to be constantly evaluated and improved because if the learning environment improves, the students will also do better. This involves an analysis of how goals, perceptions, motivations and strategies are structured by institutional arrangements because instructional leadership must come from the schools themselves who must set their goals and targets of learning achievements. It means that issues have to be identified and prioritized; competing policies considered, and key participants have to be taken on board as educational reforms are usually politically sensitive. They succeed only when there is readiness to accept, organizational capacity to meet the challenges and the power to overcome resistance.

The first question to be asked is what is the purpose of the board examinations? Presumably it is to ensure a minimum learning outcome among students by getting it evaluated by an impartial and objective examining body.  But for it to be a truthful and meaningful assessment the playing field has to be reasonably level. Otherwise it will breed feelings of inferiority and alienation. Huge disparity among schools is one of the factors for high failure and dropout rates. It condemns children to inequities because of exigencies of birth and economics. These feelings only get exacerbated by board examinations which only give marks for the `right’ answers according to a predetermined marking scheme.  It encourages rote learning as every school concentrates on achieving a particular pass percentage. The concentration is on giving the students the right examination techniques and thus the whole teaching learning process gets vitiated to focus only on examinations. Rote learning rather than actual learning becomes the goal.  Since schools stake their reputation and define the worth of students by marks and pass percentages their goal shifts from ensuring thinking, learning and comprehension to ensuring that the children pass the exam.. In any case the class X board exam is used primarily for streaming the children into commerce, science and humanities as usually no cognizance is taken of it when they enter institutions of higher education.

Therefore, the abolition of board exams is not enough.  It is only a first step as must be accompanied by attention quality.  What is the goal of schooling? Is it certification or learning or both and which has primacy? If it is learning, then learning outcomes must be improved.  They depend on a variety of factors like the physical infrastructure available in a school, its academic and pedagogical practices, access to teaching learning tools, quality of teachers and their motivational levels, cultural and social milieu, home background of the student and parental support. There are many more. 

There is a wide gap in the quality of schools in different parts of the country and often even within the same city.  For example there is not only the  rural-urban divide but also disparities in even the basic minimum school facilities in different parts of a city.  There are issues of gender and of inclusiveness for certain sections of society.  There are matters related to affordability.  Hence, before the Boards can seek to measure the learning outcomes of students, there must also be a process of measuring the learning infrastructure and facilities of schools and strengthening them.

While education has to be child centred the teacher is the pivot in its delivery. Hence, the qualifications, motivations and training of teachers has to be a matter of immediate concern. Further, the self-worth and self-esteem of teachers has to be improved by societal recognition of the vital role they play in the delivery of education and the lives of their students. This cannot be done by symbolic gestures alone. Teachers have to given a say in setting goals and missions for the school, in curriculum formation and pedagogical practices and encouraged to innovate while spelling out for them the over arching desired leaning outcomes. Also their relationship with parents and wider community are powerful determinants in student learning and they can create a sense of ownership in the community for the school which is absolutely essential for success.

The community must feel that they it has a stake in maintaining a good school as the education of children depends on it. Hence, a decentralized school-based management with appropriate community involvement is conducive to change and innovation so that teaching-learning processes improve. This can be done by incorporating local resources in the different spheres: physical infrastructure, curriculum formation, and knowledge delivery system, both formal and informal. After all, the best learning takes place from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the near to the far.  India is equipped to put this in practice as it is rich in crafts, dance, music, theatre, puppetry, and narrative traditions. All these can be both studied and used to study sociology, history, economics, politics, literature, science, mathematics, and other subjects.

Many other transformational changes can be discussed.  But if the abolition of Board Exams can simultaneously reduce stress on the students and become a springboard for far-reaching improvements and innovations in the teaching-learning processes leading to improvement in schooling, a much awaited new beginning would have been made.      Otherwise, it will be just another tinkering with the system.

                                                                                    KAVITA A. SHARMA 

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Higher Education systems, policies and institutions are being transformed by gloablisation, which is “the widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide `interconnectedness’.  Higher Education is most open to globalization because knowledge has never shown much respect for international boundaries.  Now worldwide networking and exchange are reshaping social, economic and cultural life.  In global knowledge economies, higher education institutions are important for a wide range of relationships and continuous global flows of people, information, knowledge, technologies, products and financial capital.

Higher Education has been facing significant and persistent pressure towards expansion in recent decades which has led to the emergence of mass higher education even in countries where till recently only a small percentage of young were enrolled in this sector.  This had created academic and economic challenges both for the governments and higher education institutions.   the challenge becomes significant because in many countries, higher education has traditionally been dominated by public provision.  Now higher education is being asked to cater to an increasingly diverse population and to do it more economically and efficiently.

One response of the system has been to promote market elements in higher education particularly through increased privatization.  One effect of privatization is the transfer of ownership and or financial responsibilities from the public to the private sphere.  It could also mean development of private providers concurrently with public provision, the diversification of funding mechanisms, and the use of private management in public organizations.

Private higher education is not new.  Many of the earliest universities were the product of non-governmental initiatives in Europe during the second half of the Middle Ages.  Even if set up by a royal or a papal decree, they were normally set up as autonomous institutions.  But they had a public orientation and were accountable to religious and secular authorities.  In any case the separation between the public and private sphere was less clear in medieval times and hence the dichotomy between public and private institutions was also less clear.  Today, private institutions are more accountable to public authorities because they have to face the same regulatory authorities as the public ones.  Historically, the role of public authorities has become increasingly pronounced.  Till the 19^th early 20^th centuries when the modern state explicitly expanded its functions to include higher education.  By mid 20^th Century private institutions became largely absent world wide and even when they existed, their size was relatively smaller than those in the public sector.

The higher education sector was mainly developed in Europe and most universities around the world followed the European model.  The first universities in medieval Europe were established under the patronage of secular and religious authorities and their support was vital for their material subsistence and survival.  Gradually the involvement of national and local authorities grew and strengthened universities role in training local and national social elites.  Since the late 1600s, the more modern state began to emerge and came to regard the university as the supplier of qualified labour and its control of the university grew.  Higher education institutions were increasingly regarded as an instrument for training elites whose usefulness was growing.  To train new members of administration, European states started to either establish institutions or to visibly regulate the existing ones.

By the turn of the 19^th C., there was a growing state bureaucracy aiming to regulate in significant detail the organization of the universities, syllabus, teaching staff and student recruitment.  Thus the autonomy of universities was impacted.  In the last decades of the twentieth century, the steady process of persistent State control over universities has started to be questioned and in some cases reversed.

The control of the State over the universities forged a strong dependence of universities on the secular authorities at all levels – financial, administrative, educational and political.  The growing role of the government funding of universities was accompanied by a much greater oversight over them.  It led to the establishment of the Ministries of Education or similar public administrative structure that would develop a detailed control of university life.  In Europe this took place throughout 19^th C while in Britain it happened after the Second World War.  With increasing accountability to the government, the universities had to ask for governmental authorization for a wide set of organizational procedures which led to the model of rational planning and control so that government defined standard curriculum and syllabus for higher education institution providing training in a specific field  this, of course, meant that the training would be such the government officials deemed most appropriate keeping mind the role of universities in public administration.

The expansion of the government’s economic and social role after the Second World War created significant needs for qualified personnel.  This demand was already present in the 19^th C for example for some type of legal training and also for some engineers.  But with the emergence of the social welfare state, there was need for highly qualified people like teachers, social workers, doctors, muses, accountants and others.  Expansion of economics led to the demand for individuals with economic training.  Expanding governmental structures in these fields sought to accomplish this either in the syllabus or even in the types of programs available.  It was reflected in expansion of government expenditure on education and gradually became a political and budgetary priority, what was required was a poet of skilled labour, and achievements in scientific research for military, economic and social life.  All these factors led to mass higher education in N.America, Japan and then in Western Europe.

By the early 20^th C. there were very few universities outside Europe and the Americas.  Although many parts of the world had a long history of learning the dissemination of university-like institutions outside Europe was linked with the European influence around the world.  Universities were modeled on and deeply influenced by those existing in Europe.  N. America diverged from the European model because of the development of a federal state and its limited role in higher education.  The `North American’ model has also been initiated in different parts of the world.

Both in Europe and outside Europe, because of a large government control over higher education institutions, the number of private institutions was insignificant in the early twentieth century.  By the end of the twentieth century, however, higher education systems increasingly included some type of private higher education institutions.

In parts of the world even where higher education was a twentieth century phenomenon, it was seen as a state responsibility.  It was also seen as an instrument for training elites especially for civil service and public administration.  Private higher education was either presented from being established or not allowed to continue to function.  This trend continued till the 1980s and 1990s when the emergence of massive growth in the demand for higher education and strained the ability of the state to meet it.  This led to the emergence and rapid increase of private universities and institutions the world over.

One of the major forces promoting higher education has been the access to it in countries where it was restricted to a small minority.  The demand has been fuelled by societal and individual forces.  At the policy level, governments have increasingly regarded the advanced qualification of human resources as a key factor in promoting national economic competitiveness.  The view is that accumulation of human capital can improve economic prospects.  Hence Governments are interesting in enhancing higher education as it enhances national economic performance.  This is especially relevant in times of globalization.

Individuals have also pushed the expansion of higher education as a higher education degree is seen as an attractive personal investment because of the high private rates of return that it bring.  This has led to the view that higher education graduates must look forward to enviable prospects regarding long-term income and employability in comparison to individuals with lower formal qualifications.  This has led to the massification of higher education both in terms of growing rates of enrolment but more heterogeneous and complex higher education systems.  To meet the diverse demand, higher education systems have developed have developed new and diverse programs and institutions.  Thus diversity has become an increasingly important dimension in higher education policy.  But massification also makes it nearly impossible to maintain a pattern of detailed regulation of higher regulation.  Hence new forms of steering are needed that would be effective in the new context of mass higher education.

Further, recent expansion of higher education has coincided with a period of increasing constraints on public expenditure that has affected education too.  In the case of richer countries, the sustainability of traditional financial reliance of higher education on public funding has been challenged.  In case of poorer countries, the resources available for public funding of higher education have been a significant obstacle.

Also, the political mood that has affected western countries since the 1980 because of the economic turmoil of 1970s had led to an increasing debate about the type and degree of government intervention.  The pendulum has swung between increasing liberalization and market regulation and restrained government regulation.

There has been mounting pressures towards greater efficiency in the allocation of resources and in the management of public institutions.   Although higher education institutions are recognized as peculiar type of organization, policy makers have been keen to promote a more managerial behaviour by higher education institutions. 

The argument favouring the development of private higher education were not only related to issues of internal efficiency but also to external efficiency.  Private higher education was supposed to demonstrate an increased capacity for exploring new market opportunities and occupying market niches by using its higher administrative flexibility and financial motivation.  They had the potential to promote better balanced supply of higher education from a geographical and disciplinary perspective.  Also, they could be innovative and supply qualifications more suitable to labour market needs.

One of the most significant aspects of private higher education is its diversity.  Unlike a public institution it is not required to have homogenizing rules of staff policies, funding, student recruitment and others.

Then the size of private sector institutions is often not more than one-third of a public institution.  Usually there are small institutions in large numbers.  Further, although historically private institutions were established as not-for-profit institutions like the old private universities in the united, recent growth of private provision has introduced increasing shades of profit-seeking behaviour.  The for-profit sector has in some cases attained reasonable success regarding enrolments.  Even when for-profit institutions are not allowed many private institutions have behaved as if they were for-profit.  The regulatory powers have found it difficult to deal with these type of institutions.  the government has to play a crucial role in providing reliable information and ensuring quality.  Some developments in for-profit private higher educations is international collaborations.  These can take the form of collaborations, acquisitions of local institutions, establishment of new campuses.

Most private higher education institutions are not universities.  They are usually specialized institutions that provide higher training in one or a few fields of study.  The role model of the university as an institution with a research mission is largely mitigated in the private sector.  Although some attempt to gain legitimacy by a certain amount of research, this is not a common situation.  The US experience with prestigious private not-for-profit research universities.  Often cited in policy circles as the example to follow, in the development of the private sector, remains quite unique.  There is nothing similar in even countries with a sizeable private sector.

One important characteristic of the recent expansion of private higher education is that in many countries with very different levels of income, governments alike have allowed the private sector to develop rapidly in order to fulfill objectives of higher levels of enrolment.  This is because either the governments are unable to financially support a massive expansion of higher education or because they attempt to mitigate the effects of massification of higher education. 

This pattern of expansion is called the demand absorption theory.  It is normally the result of strong social demand and tax regulation by political decision makers.  The tax regulatory framework often stimulates opportunistic behaviour.  Private institutions are allowed to mushroom and rapidly expand the number of programmes and size of enrolments at times outpacing the expansion of the public sector.  The private sector may move from an almost non-existent to a prominent role in the mass sector.  This kind of evolution may end up giving preeminence to quantity over quality in the development of higher education institutions.

The relationship between policy makers and the private sector may often be ambiguous.  On the one hand governments may create conditions that lead to the rapid expansion of the private sector through tax regulation, but on the other, they may seek to maintain tight bureaucratic control over private institutions.

There are risks involved in treating private institutions as demand absorbing sector.  The government may use the private sector to absorb demand and prevent the uncontrolled expansion of the public sector, but once the demand stabilizes, mainly due to demographic reasons, the private institutions may become vulnerable.

Families regard a higher education degree as a good long term investment due to the high private rates of return.  These increase significantly when the average level of schooling is low and when a small portion of the population has attained higher education.  Individuals and families are willing to take a small short-term financial burden because they expect the long term return will compensate that.  But these have to be carefully managed because they are not always fulfilled.

Another expectation from the private sector would be that it would contribute to external efficiency of the higher education system as it would be more responsive to the labour market demands.  It would also make the supply of higher education system better balanced both from its reach in the geographical area and from the disciplinary perspective.  But its demand absorption expectation dampens the above.

Further, in reality the private sector has had a negative effect in diversity of higher education system.  This is because these institutions tend to get concentrated in the region of the capital city and in major urban areas and that too in the healthiest and most highly populated areas.  It is the public sector that is more geographically diverse because of the influence of local and regional authorities.

With regard to disciplinary diversity too, private sector institutions tend to concentrate on low cost social science programmes or in those that have good employment prospects or in more technical costlier areas.  Therefore, the popular areas are social sciences, low, economics and business.  Programmes that require very high tuition fees are hardly viable as they do not attract the required student enrolment.  Thus, the regional concentration of the private sector is coupled with strong concentration also on the disciplinary distribution of enrolments.

The issue of quality has become a burning one with private institutions since the latter find it hard to compete in terms of fees with public institutions.  One of the most contentious issues in the private sector is the scarce research activity.  Unlike the US experience, usually the low priority given to research in private institutions is basically because of financial and administrative reasons.  Research activities especially basic research have a very limited short-term economic return in spite of their high social value.  Private institutions generally do not have access to public research funding and cannot find alternative sources through philanthropic institutions.  they have to find their own funds which they can only do from cross subsidization from teaching funds and mainly to enhance social prestige as well as to gain legitimacy.  But as the system matured, more attention could be paid to research to gain social and political recognition as well as to get quality assurance labels. 

Also, these institutions face staff issues.  Many of them have to rely on part time staff especially in the early phase of the development of the sector.  This leads to `moonlighting’ that creates tensions between public and private institutions and places a question mark over quality.  The main rationale is cost advantage.  Not only does part-time staffing cost les, but it also provides a more flexible cost structure that may help the institution to adopt to changes in student demand.

Most private institutions remain focused on undergraduate programmes designed to serve the short term needs of labour market.  Traditionally, private institutions have a less qualified staff and the better qualified staff includes a number of retired professors from the public sector.  Not only is there a problem of quality faculty but also shortages in sheer numbers which increases the ratio of faculty to students and dilutes quality.

Although private higher education has a long historical significance, until recently its role was rather small in many higher education systems.  However, during the last decades this situation has changed significantly, mainly due to the massive and continuous expansion of higher education worldwide.  Pressed by increasing financial constraints and by an increasing cost-burden due to the massive expansion of the higher education sector, governments searched for ways of coping with this paradoxical situation, redefining not only their financial role but also their administrative and political roles.  In many parts of the world, the promotion of private higher education has emerged as a viable policy alternative to the often over-stretched public sector.

Although in some cases it has been seen as a transitory phenomenon, the evidence seems to suggest that private higher education is becoming a permanent feature of the higher education landscape. As discussed earlier, the resilience of private higher education is strengthened not only in developing countries where the limitations in resources prevent governments from major expansions of their public higher education systems but also in many developed countries, where fiscal constraints  conflict with the rising cost of (largely subsidized) public higher education.

In future, private higher education is likely to become a necessary part of the higher education landscape.  This is because higher education is likely to persist as an important priority in policy terms.  This will push private higher education.  There will also be financial challenges on how to expand the supply of higher education.  The likely response will be through the strengthening market mechanisms which can only be through increasing the privateness of the system.  It is likely to be a complex and controversial issue especially in countries where private institutions remained minimal.  Further, private education will get a boost because of massification.  Initially they will tend to focus on absorption of unfulfilled demand but gradually may position themselves as high quality/ high cost alternative to mass/ low cost public higher education.  The acceptance of private higher education will also depend on the role of the state.  As the market orientation of higher education strengthens, the government may increasingly see itself as contractors of higher educational services from autonomous institutions which may be publicly owned rather than as a provider of higher education.

In the post massification phase, the demand absorption pattern is likely to give way to niche institutions which present alternatives to mass higher education rather than reinforcing it.  Private institutions tend to position themselves as an elite alternative to a mass public system rather than as a second choice for whose who did not get a place in the latter.  The former situation will not disappear but the latter alternative is likely to emerge.

Private institutions will gradually also start paying more attention to research.  Up to now the teaching element has been dominant but they will focus on research for legitimacy.  They will attempt to improve their academic pedigree with better qualified staff, increase the number of research centres affiliated to them and develop good post graduate programs.

Private institutions will seek greater legitimacy.  The first endeavour will be to strengthen their teaching mission both in terms of programs and faculty.  They will improve research and develop strong student support mechanisms.  Governments will increasingly develop accreditation and evaluation mechanisms often as an instrument to curtail private institutions.  this will gain relevance as for-profit institutions emerge and even the not-for-profit behave like for-profit ones private institutions too will seek accreditation. 

After initial disconcertion, there is a growing recognition (Kim et al, 2007) that private higher education will become a more integral part of the reality of mass higher education.  The main force contributing to an acceptance of this realization may be the blurring division of blurring division of public and private higher education sectors.  The growing pervasiveness of market elements in many higher education systems, namely the growing privateness of the public sector, has been slowly making it more difficult to distinguish between public and private institutions.  although this will make life more difficult for private institutions, who face more proactive behaviour from public institutions, it will also contribute to eroding resistance to including them as part of the higher education system.

Overall, one cannot help but expect that the role of private higher education in mass higher education systems will be strengthened in the coming years.  Although the recent privatization has often been characterized by controversy and some mismatches between expectations and results, private higher education may play an important role in mass higher education.  This includes major aspects such as the expansion of higher education to respond to growing demand, the broadening of access and the development of some innovative programmes.

This strengthening of privatization and marketisation forces does not mean that governments will retreat from any kind of regulation.  On the contrary, as in any other market, some kind of regulation is needed, and higher education is no exception to that.  The more governments strengthen the role of markets and private initiative in higher education, the more they will need to give attention to issues such as the quantity and quality of the information available in the system, the consequences of enhanced institutional competition and the level of equity (either at the individual or at the institutional level).

The challenges for policy makers will be to learn how to use this rapidly expanding sector in the best possible manner, to steer it in a way that will contribute to social welfare and to fulfil the social expectations regarding the higher education sector.  This will only be possible if governments are able to develop an integrated view of the higher education system in which different types of institutions could coexist.  Easier said than done, this will be one of the major future challenges in higher education policy in many parts of the world.

The boom in higher education is the demand of a better educated workforce.  Universities are central in the race to provide workforce with skills to make them competitive in the global knowledge system.

Higher education is the key to development.  India realizes that there is a need to expand to higher education system to build world class research universities at the rap of a differentiated system.  In 2006, India enrolled approximately 12% of its university age population.  With its 13 million enrolment, it ranks third after USA and China.

Selective quality problems exist in less selective colleges and universities.  According to a McKinsey report, upto 75% of India’s engineering graduates are too poorly education to function effectively in the economy without additional on-the-job training.

Higher education has become a policy priority.  The importance of expanding higher education access and improving quality has been recognized for decades but only recently have significant resources been allocated after the recommendations of the Knowledge Commission and subsequent government commitments.  Current plans call for expanding the member of top-tier higher education institutions. 

The future of higher education policy depends on several factors.  Demand relates to continuing expansion of the middle class with resources to pay tuition and other fees and educational qualifications for admission. Other population groups also have interest in access to higher education but the middle class is the largest force.  It has dramatically expanded in recent years, being about 50 million and likely to go up to 500 million in 2025.  a significant member will then demand access to higher education, creating huge stains on the system.  Government policy regarding founding of higher education and supporting research universities and the elite sector of the system is a key factor shaping higher education prospects.  World class universities are important to compete globally.

For higher education systems, history plays a role.

India was a British colony for more than two centuries, ending with independence in 1947, and this experience shaped higher education and continues to influence it.  The British did not give much support to higher education in their colonies.  Higher education first expanded mainly due to the initiative of the growing middle class in the mid-19^th century and recognition by the British that an educated civil service was needed to administer India. In 1857, the first universities were founded in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. T he Indian colleges and universities were British in organization.  These institutions, teaching exclusively in English, displaced the few traditional schools left, which simply withered and died.  Higher education was based on an organizational pattern where the universities constituted examining bodies more than teaching institutions.  Most of the teaching took place in undergraduate colleges affiliated to the universities, examinations and curriculum were by and large controlled by the universities.  This structure enabled centralized control over the colleges.  A small number of British academics were recruited to teach and lead the universities and colleges.  Indians had an opportunity to study in Britain, and most returned home to serve in the administration, including in the colleges and universities.  Moreover, many became involved in nationalist organizations that eventually played a leading role in bringing independence to India (Basu 1974).

From the early 19^th century, almost all higher education in India was entirely in English, no Indian language was used for instruction or examination. The curriculum was largely limited to fields useful to the administration and to India’s emerging professional classes – such as law, the social sciences, and related fields.  While the academic system remained quite small – at the time of independence with 369 000 students studying in 27 universities and 695 colleges (Agarwal, 2009) – it succeeded in educating a cadre of graduates who provided the leadership of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and later Bangladesh.  As late as 1961, only 1.5% of the relevant age group participated in postsecondary education (Agarwal, 2009).  There was little research capacity at India’s colleges and universities at the time of independence, as there had not been interest in spending money on research there and since higher education was in English, more than 90% of the Indian population was excluded from access (Agarwal, 2009).  India’s higher education system at the time of independence was small, highly bureaucratized, restrictive on academic freedom, provided in a language most Indians did not understand, and had a restricted curriculum.

Despite many reports and much criticism, higher education expanded between independence and the end of the 20^th century although there were few structural changes.  Enrolments expanded from little more than 100 000 in 1950 to 9 million by the end of the century (Agarwal,2009).  Annual growth sometimes was 10%.  Most observers agree that overall quality declined and that the basic structure of the system remained quite similar to the colonial period (Kaul 1974). While India expanded higher education, it made few structural changes.  This made the universities less than effective in meting the needs of Indian society.

The system was dysfunctional characterized by little self-governance and strong.

            The paradox of India in the recent years has been that although it has had unprecedented material growth and its international standing is good, it has also been going through a series of crises whether it is arson, communal riots, shooting in public spaces, false encounters, attack on the parliament, bomb explosions, killings by Naxalites and Maoists, caste and creed conflicts, and other such terrifying events, not to speak of individual neuroses manifesting in conflict and violence.  The latest incidents of 26/11 when Mumbai witnessed unprecedented terrorist attacks only served to emphasize how utterly weak, confused, inadequate and chaotic our preparations to face strife and terror have been.  The citizens have not been found wanting at moments of crises but the governing class and structures have been, as always, in at least the last decade or more.  The violence in society both from within and without is a symptom of a more deep seated malaise and we as individuals too cannot escape our responsibility for it:

            Turning and turning in the widening gyre

            The falcon cannot hear the falconer

            Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

            Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

            The blood-dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. ¹

Change must therefore come, whether we will it or not, but if it has to be for the better then there must be a sincere aspiration for it.  Also, there has to be clarity of vision about what kind of change do we want and where and how it is to be brought about. 

Confusion in Values

Any change has to begin with the individual as societal systems and structures are operated by individuals and reflect their modes of thought and action.  However, evil and good today have got so inextricably mixed up that there is an obvious lack of norms, values and ethics. Without these neither the individual nor society can progress. Nor can there be peace and harmony. When Krishna cursed Ashwatthama in Mahabharata that he would wander over the earth, living in inaccessible forests and dreary moors, without any companion, and without being able to talk to anyone, weighed down by all kinds of diseases while blood emanated from him, his quiet reply was: “Within thyself among all men, O holy one, I shall live! Let the words of this illustrious and foremost of men become true!”² And Ashwattmama seems to have had the last laugh as he still wanders together with Krishna among all men.  Dharma and adharma have got bewilderingly intermingled and all has become endless war, confusion and bloodshed.

            It can be argued that one reason for this is that human beings have become so utterly self-centered and self-seeking that they are willing to sacrifice any larger good for their own petty gains.  This manifests itself in different aspects of society and creates conflict.  The fruits of material progress have been distributed unevenly resulting in the constantly widening chasm between the rich and the poor.  There is unabashed conspicuous consumption by the affluent indifferent to surrounding deprivation and even grinding poverty.  Corruption of every nature has seeped into the very entrails of society and the rot it has to be accepted, begins from the top.  But while we point fingers at the politicians we have to also accept that all of us who form a part of the influential civil society are also responsible in varying degrees for the current state of affairs.  We either work the system to our advantage because we know how to, or are passive spectators to what is going on or have just opted out of it.  This is seen in even very small day to day things.  We have learnt to look after our needs irrespective of whether the government functions or not. We do not, for example, demand that the municipal authorities perform their duties, but provide water for ourselves through our tubewells, install generators for electricity, dispose of our own garbage and make our own security arrangements.  We do not use government schools and hospitals and now increasingly, not even the government institutions of higher education if we can help it.  This is not a value judgment, because there is ample justification for it and it can be argued that we have been forced into this situation.  However, the net result is that we have actually ceded from the polity of the country leaving it free to deteriorate.  It is a frightening situation where we, who are opinion makers, are either in collusion with a corrupt and inefficient system or passive but frustrated spectators or on the margins because we have opted out.

            We may think that we desire a real change but it may be frightening because we may have to give up our own privileges that are not equitable and this may hurt us and those close to us. Can we do it? Can we sacrifice our narrow self interests for the larger good?  Yes, but only if we have true aspiration, not vague desires or transient aims.  As Sri Aurobindo has pointed out,

Aspiration should be not a form of desire, but the feeling of an inner soul’s need, and a quiet settled will to turn towards the Divine and seek the Divine. It is certainly not easy to get rid of this mixture of desire entirely—not easy for anyone; but when one has the will to do it, this also can be affected by the help of the sustaining Force.³

Our aspiration has to be something beyond desire because “Desire often leads either to excess of effort, meaning often much labor and a limited fruit with strain, exhaustion and in case of difficulty or failure, despondence, disbelief or revolt”.⁴  Mere desires can become unhealthy and turn into passions and obsessions.  These prevent us from liberating ourselves from the bonds of matter and arising to a higher consciousness. However an assertion can be made that a desire or passion for or even an obsession with a great cause motivates a person towards it.  But it is important to remember that the aim may be good and a desire for it may propel a person towards it, but to really achieve something what is actually needed is an aspiration.  This is because, “a true change can only be brought about by an aspiration…it carries within it calm discrimination, detachment”.⁵  This is “very important, for their opposites impede very much the transforming action.  Intensity of aspiration should be there, but it must go along with these. No hurry, no inertia, neither rajasic over-eagerness nor tamasic discouragement—a steady and persistent but quiet call and working.” ⁶  

Self Interest and Conflict

            As the Mahabharata points out, the pursuit of wealth and pleasure is a dominant fact of human life.  Self interest is the spring of all human actions and also at the root of all human conflicts. The Shanti Parva states quite unequivocally that everybody adopts whatever means are required to serve self interest.  Neither is friendship permanent nor is enmity; it is self-interest that makes somebody now a friend and then an enemy.  The material world is shot through with self-interest and no one is beloved of anyone.  The affection between brother and brother, between man and wife is based solely on self-interest, there being no love or affection without reason.  Reasons are altered by time and so is self interest.⁷ 

            However, as the Mahabharata shows us, the problem is that since most people have a very limited view of self interest, they live in a state of perpetual conflict as their interests keep colliding with those of others.  A larger view of self interest does not necessarily end all conflict because conflict is an inevitable part of human life.  What it does is to change one’s attitude towards others and therefore towards the problem of conflict. 

            There is conflict and violence in human relationships not because there is absence of selfless love from the generality of human affairs but because there is not even serious self love.  But is selfless love anything more than an idealistic sentiment?  A moment’s thought, however, would make it quite obvious that our self interest, at least to a certain extent, can only be served by serving the interest of others.  The two are inseparably bound. For instance, we can enjoy freedom only if we are willing to let the others enjoy it too.  Again, acquiring wealth is one of the aims of life but wealth is also a source of conflict.  However, the solution is not poverty because that would not be either in individual or societal interest.  Therefore, intelligent self-interest would make us clearly realize that wealth has to be generated, earned and enjoyed but to do so would require the conditions for social peace and harmony.  These cannot be created without the pursuit of dharma.  Hence the pursuit of wealth must necessarily be subject to dharma.  That is why the Mahabharata says that wealth and its pursuit is not adharma.  Only that wealth which is acquired and enjoyed through adharma is improper and leads to conflict.⁸  

Knowledge and its Power

So it follows that it is in our enlightened self interest to ensure that the gains of material progress are more evenly distributed than they are at the moment and that all human beings are treated with respect and dignity. Bertrand Russell has analyzed the far-reaching effects of modern knowledge on the growth of our mental life that infuences our way of thinking, willing, and feeling.⁹  The three are interconnected because knowledge has given us the kind of power unimaginable before and made us thus capable of both great good and bad.  We have, on the one hand, created instruments of mass destruction like the nuclear bombs but we have also, on the other hand, made medicines that can affect miraculous cures. 

            We can mould life on earth or put an end to it because science has vastly extended human power.  We have the power to control the weather, cause drought and flood, change the tides, raise levels of the sea and alter climates.  As Russell points out that hitherto man has not been to do too much harm because of his ignorance and his inefficiency but at the bottom, unless molded by civilization and educational influences, he is a ferocious animal.¹⁰ Tyrants and bigots in the past have pursued horrifying objectives and if the working of the mind is not transformed, human beings will continue to do so with even worse consequences.  We will perish as the dinosaurs did in spite of once being the lords of creation because now our objectives can be followed more efficiently, completely and ruthlessly due to the increased power that enhance knowledge has put in our hands.

            As Russell has pointed out that increased command over the forces of nature derived from scientific knowledge may lead to all kinds of progress but by itself it does not ensure anything desirable without being accompanied by moral ideas.¹¹ Hitherto, the harm that we could do to our neighbor by hating him was limited by our incompetence, but in the new world of science and technology there will be no such limit, and if we indulge in our hatred we can only land into disaster.

            How prophetic are Russell’s word is borne out by what Stuart W. Twemlow has to say about the psychology of a terrorist.¹² A terrorist, he points out, is an offspring of the prevalent social system which he perceives to be unjust and against which he feels it is his mission to revolt so as to destroy it.  The characteristics of terror are fear, horror and shock.  He takes the example of a woman who escaped from a husband who had kept her chained to a chair for four years.  Even after she got her freedom, she remained terrified that he would kill her.  Twemlow points out that there is widespread domestic violence in the world.  In  U.S. alone, it prevails in 18,000 out to 100,000 families.  Then there are school shooters who are called “anarchic terrorists” by the FBI.  However, what is vital to understand is that these are products of the system.  They see themselves as humiliated because of incompatible political, religious or personal ideologies and want to avenge themselves.

            Twemlow points out that labels are misleading and damaging.  It can be counterproductive to call people terrorists.  In any case, one man’s freedom fighter is another’s terrorist.  For example the Japanese suicide bombers or kamikaze pilots during Word War II were heroes to the Japanese.  They did not see their actions as suicide, but a mission to be done with a messianic zeal.  Mostly the young are involved because it is easier to sway their minds and arouse their courage.  Referring to the psychoanalyst Volkan, Twemlow explains that the perpetrators of violent terrorist acts see themselves as “avenging victims” for past injustices.  Besides no one can really be labeled a  “terrorist” because often ‘today’s terrorist’ may be ‘tomorrow’s hero.’  The example of Bhagat Singh, a ‘terrorist’ from the British point of view, comes to mind. Or again, the Maoists in Nepal who were declared ‘terrorists’ now form the government.  Twemlow describes a terrorist as a “bottled-up activist with the idealism gone wrong.”  He usually has a great sense of injustice which gets reinforced when the justice system itself denies him his rights.  What is actually needed is to deal with the ‘terrorist’ as a human being with a cause however misguided it may be and not as an enemy.  Animosity only makes him feel more grandiose and important and reinforces his feelings of self-righteous anger at perceived injustices.

            We are quick to deal with others but, we fail to look within and see how our own actions and attitudes may have contributed to an environment of injustice and cruelty.  Hence it is also important to simultaneously take a dear look at ourselves, our own motivations, integrity and sincerity of purpose.  Not to do so is to be hypocritical and dishonest which can be destructive.  No transformation can take place only by blaming the others.  In any case our motives and actions have to be honest.  There is no time left to play political games for selfish interests. 

In the past our capacity to do both good or bad was limited but not now.  Every increase in knowledge has meant an increase in a human beings capacity to act.  Science and technology have ensured that good men can do more good and bad men more bad than our ancestors could have dreamed possible.  Hence knowledge, and the power that it brings, need to first influence feelings because it is feelings that decide  what an individual will do with power.  As Russell has pointed out, feelings too, have evolved through the struggle for existence.  The natural feelings are one of competition and group rivalry but today they do more harm than good.¹³ As humankind formed itself into a society, it grew large groups with two opposite systems of morality: one for dealing  with one’s own social group; and the other for dealing with outsiders.  It came to be considered as ‘moral’ to support members of one’s group while waging wars against the other.  The fame of many ‘so called’ heroes of history rests on their role in helping their own group to kill other people’s groups and to steal from them.  This has now become disadvantageous.  Previously, when a tribe killed the other tribe and occupied its lands, it acquired greater prosperity and lived more comfortably.  But now the consequences are the opposite.  Two nations that cooperate are more likely to achieve economic prosperity than those who compete. 

            However, the faith in competition continues as we are conditioned from the past and cannot make our emotions grow at the same rate as our skills.  We see everyday that in a technically developed world what is done in one region has enormous effects in other regions but as long as we feel for only our region, conflicts will remain because we will go on acting in our narrow self-interest unmindful of the consequences on others in spite of knowing intellectually that the is interconnected. 

Conclusion

            Today the interdependence in the world is becoming as close as that which exists between the cells of a body.  What one eats nourishes every part of the body but the mouth does not say why it should take so much trouble for the entire body. Similarly the hands cannot be in conflict with the feet and the stomach cannot be at war with the liver.  Human society is becoming more and more like the human body and so feelings of welfare towards the whole society will have to become necessary for human being to be able to live and enjoy the fruits of what they have created. We will have to realize that it is in our enlightened self-interest to forgo short term gains to achieve long term goals.  This requires an expansion of the mind and vision not anger, hatred and feelings of revenge.   But will this happen?

            At the end of the great Mahabharata war, Vyasa cries in anguish, “With uplifted arms I am crying aloud but nobody hears me.  From Righteousness is wealth as also Pleasure.  Why should not Righteousness, therefore, be courted”?¹⁴  What Vyasa is saying is that the pursuit of wealth and pleasure is essential but it must be done righteously otherwise it will defeat its own purpose and inevitably create conflict, violence, war and bloodshed.  So will the cry from the forest be heard or go in vain?  It will fall on deaf ears and darkness will come again and again unless there is a true aspiration for change and a movement towards a more ethical world order.

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1. W.B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. PeterAllt and Russell K. Alapach, 6^th edn. “The Second Coming,” New York; Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. 1973, pp 401-402.

• Mahabharata, “Sauptika Parva,” Section XVI, Vol.VIII, p.37, Kisari Mohan Ganguli, trans, The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, New Delhi: Munshiram Manohar Lal, 1970, 5^th edn.1990.  See also, Rajmohan Gandhi, Revenge and Reconciliation, New Delhi: Penguin Books India 1999, pp 1-35.

• A.S. Dalal, Compiled and Introduction, Looking from Within: Gleanings from the Works of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1995, 2^nd edn.1996, p.114.

• Ibid.

• Ibid., p.115

• Ibid

• Chaturvedi Badrinath, “Resolution of Conflict: Potential of Dharmic Methods,” Dhama, India and the World Order, pp.50-51

• Ibid.

• Bertrand Russell, “Ideas That Have Helped Mankind,” Unpopular Essays, London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., p. 162-283.

1. Ibid.

1. Ibid., see also, Bertrand Russell, “Causes of the Present Chaos,” The Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell, New York: The Modern Library, pp. 242 –262.

1. Rakesh Shukla’s interview of Stuart W. Twemlow, “The `terrorist” is no fir-beathing dragon,” Himal Southasian, December 2008, pp. 66-67.

1. Bertrand Russell, “Deciding Forces in Politics, “Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell, pp. 295-300

1. Mahabharata, “Swargarohenika Parva,” Section VI, Vol. XII, p.12