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| Concern about the status of higher education in India | | |
Vijay Garg
If students from a small, underdeveloped country move to other countries due to the lack of facilities for higher education in their country, then it is understandable, but Indian students go out for studies and that too in such a large number, in many ways. I don’t hug. If there were sufficient number of medical seats in the country, then our children would not have to go out and the country would have a good number of qualified doctors.
Concern has been expressed time and again about the state of education in India. Whether it is schooling or higher education, we are still far from the ideal situation in both. After the continuous reports of Indian students being trapped in Ukraine, the question arose in the minds of many that the students of the world’s second largest country in terms of population, thousands of people like Ukraine with a population of 45 million for medical studies. Why do you go to the country? People have also found the answer to this question because studies there are much cheaper than in India.
Admission is also relatively easy. We should be thankful that all our students have now returned to their homeland from Ukraine. War is a different matter, but it has given us the opportunity to think on many other subjects. One of these is the situation related to higher education in our country.
On the occasion of the completion of seventy five years of independence, we are celebrating the Amrit Mahotsav of Independence. We have achieved many milestones in this vast period, but we are still not able to ensure that every child in the country goes to school. On the one hand, the number of schools equipped with expensive and modern facilities is increasing, on the other hand, there are government schools in the village and countryside which do not have even a roof or do not have basic facilities or there is a severe shortage of teachers. For higher education, the number of private universities has increased significantly in the last two decades, but the question of whether the situation of higher education as a whole has improved.
One cannot disagree that every gifted student with a passion for reading should have the opportunity to pursue higher education in the subject of his/her choice and the cost involved should be within the reach of a common man. But unfortunately we have failed on both the fronts. Take medical science education only. There is no doubt that admission to courses like medical science cannot be given blindly, but it should not be the case that even those students who are deserving of this education in all other respects should be disappointed because of lack of seats.
Today the situation is that only those who have a very high rank in the examination called NEET for MBBS in the country get admission, but even if the rank is not good and money is plentiful, then some students get admission through management quota. There is also a lot of custom of donation in private medical colleges. In such a situation, the limited income group looks for other avenues to make their children doctors. One of these ways is to send them to countries like China, Russia and Ukraine for studies.
India is one of the countries in the world from where maximum number of students go out to study. If the students of a small, underdeveloped country turn to other countries due to the lack of facilities for higher education in their own country, then it is understandable, but Indian students go out for studies and that too in such a large number, many In no way embrace. If there were sufficient number of medical seats in the country, then our children would not have to go out and the country would have a good number of qualified doctors.
The US, UK, Australia and Canada are among the countries that attract a large number of Indian students. Talking out of the specific context of medical studies, those going abroad for studies can be broadly classified into three categories. There is a section of the rich, for whom teaching their child outside is associated with prestige and prestige. The second section goes to study in those areas of specialization which are not easily available in India or in which we are a little behind. Another section is of people who do not want to return to the country after studying outside, then finding a job or work there.
There are many excellent institutions providing higher education in India, from where there is a great demand for those who study outside. Be it Microsoft or NASA, there is a lot of Indian talent in all of them. Our IIMs, IITs are respected across the world. The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has been ranked as the world’s top research university in 2021. But the number of such quality institutions is very less in proportion to the size of our country. Even if it were okay, the standardization of higher education in general and the commercialization of education are far more worrying.
Most of the universities established by the government have maintained at least their average standard, but the same cannot be said for many private universities. Even though these universities charge exorbitant fees, they have splendid buildings and infrastructure, but they do not live up to the real work they do. Several reasons can be counted for this. The quality of teachers is equally important for the quality of education, but in the present situation, teaching is not a preferred profession. Most of the people choose to become a teacher when they are left with no other option.
Then, the exploitation of the teacher class is also getting plentiful. Regular teachers in government educational institutions get decent salaries, but in many private universities and colleges, they get paid much less. In many private colleges in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, lecturers are working on seven-eight thousand rupees per month. In the education world, such instances have also been heard in which the signature is done for some other amount, while the payment is made for a lesser amount. Charging more and more fees from students and paying less to teachers is becoming a new model of profit making for many institutions.
There is no harm in linking education with employment, but when a purely mathematical approach is used to calculate how much time spent on education will be recovered, it can lead the learners away from their real purpose. You must have also been affected by such cases in which the real focus of the doctor is on recovering maximum money from him and his family instead of treating the sick well.
Even in the matter of selection of subjects, we have kept higher education in a bind. It needs to be liberalized with the changing times. Similarly, unnecessary and redundant content has to be removed from the courses so that neither the learners nor the teachers lose their energy and time. |
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