The well-intentioned Right to Education legislation seems to have pitted with a number of controversies. There are two basic reasons why it seems why experts feel that it’s not a viable solution. First, it hands public funds over to private hands, and secondly, it does not address the causes for the rot in the Indian education system. In fact, educationalists feel that the system is inherently perverse. The system which was imposed by British imperialists with an intention of bringing in clerks and coolies still seems to exist. Post-independence, the educationalists taking care of Indian educational system has internalised ideas about distribution without worrying about production, quality or excellence. This is the very reason why Indian education after independence was not able to produce people of global calibre. In fact, this is worse than the imperialists did to the Indians.
To a certain extent, the IITs and IIMs can be called the achievement of Indian education, which has known to produce best talents. However, the problem is these are limited institutes with very few seats. Hence students from the class 8 or 9 seem to enter in the rat race of getting into these institutions. Memorising and cracking the JEE exams have become the key objective of these students. This has therefore resulted in cramming children’s head with useless facts, and killing every spark of creativity, innovation and thinking outside the box among these students. The irony is that, when you see the rest of the world has moved on, the people governing our country are still trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. And the answer is not to clone IITs and IIMs, as has been the case, but to rethink higher education altogether.
Mohd Ziyaullah Khan
Nagpur, M.S