[Assam] Parallel institutions damaging public education systems (The Assam Tribune, 17.11.2007)

[Buljit Buragohain]

Parallel institutions damaging public education systems
By A City Reporter
 GUWAHATI, Nov 16 – “To achieve a remarkable success in the field of education in our country, we need to engage every single person of the society in the process or else we will never be able to create a civil society and gradually loss faith in the public education system,” remarked Prof Ved Prakash, Vice-Chancellor, National University of Education Planning and Administration (NUEPA), while delivering the tenth Foundation Day Lecture of the Assam Higher Secondary Education Council (AHSEC). 

Speaking on the topic of ‘Educational Development in India: Positioning Secondary Education in Policy Planning’, he said that the most prominent factor hindering the progress of education in India is the hierarchical values and attitudes that are entranced in our society. 

“There is a deep-rooted thought in our society that education is not everybody’s cup of tea and we still believe in the superiority of intellect, which is more prevalent in the elite, upper middle and middle class people,” he said. “After independence, we created different layers of educational institutions in the society, which classified the public education on hierarchical basis”. Elaborating his point he said, “When the Sainik Schools were created for the children of soldiers, the officials of higher rank sought for Army Public Schools for their children. Similar divides were made in Air Force and Navy also.” 

“In the same way,” he continued, “the so called babus in government asked for Kendriya Vidyalaya.” He further added that instead of strengthening the public education system, a chain of parallel educational institutions was created that demolished the public education system.

“It is important to keep in view that we need to learn much about our secondary and higher secondary education so as to rightly position them in the policy planning process. The starting point, therefore, is to create comprehensive database and undertake diagnostic studies on different aspects of secondary and higher secondary schooling to feed into our policy planning process,” he added. 

Blaming an inappropriate centre-state participation for further deterioration, he stressed that getting a major share of the total revenue collection, the central government should play a major role in the field of education. “Only ten per cent of the total expenditure on education is given by the federal government and rest 90 per cent is spent by states. On the other hand only 3.56 per cent of the total GDP is spent on education in the country, where there is a need of spending more than 6 per cent of total GDP on education,” he maintained. “Though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission MS Ahluwalia have declared to establish 30 more central universities, 7 IITs and IIMs, 20 IIIT and 346 more colleges, the country strongly lacks a serious exercise of manpower training to teach in these institutes,” he added.
(The Assam Tribune,17.11.2007)


       
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