The as yet unresolved Common Entrance Test (CET) imbroglio in Karnataka has caused untold misery to students aspiring to enroll in medical, dental and engineering colleges in the state. It has inspired unprecedented chaos, confusion, anguish and even the suicide of several students and once again highlights the importance of extending the logic of economic liberalisation and deregulation to the education sector.

The root of the problem is the unrelenting resolve of the Karnataka state government to control and regulate student admissions and fees in all medical, dental and engineering colleges in the state — privately promoted, unaided colleges included. Unfortunately this dirigiste control and command obsession of state governments has been encouraged by the judiciary and the Supreme Court of India in particular. Despite Article 30 of the Constitution of India very clearly conferring a fundamental right upon minority communities to “establish and administer educational institutions of their choice”, several judgements of the apex court and particularly its ruling in Unnikrishnan’s Case (1993), sanctioned government micro-management in the administration of even wholly independent privately promoted colleges of professional education.

Fortunately in 2002 over a decade after the historic initiative to liberalise and deregulate the Indian economy was taken by the Narasimha Rao government in July 1991, in TMA Pai Foundation vs. State of Karnataka & Ors (2002 8 SCC 481), a full-strength 11-judge bench of the Supreme Court overruled its own judgement in Unnikrishnan’s Case. By a majority, the apex court not only reaffirmed the right of minorities to establish and administer education institutions of their choice, but also expanded it to citizens of the majority Hindu community on the perfectly rational ground that there is a grave shortage of institutions of education, especially of professional education. Accordingly the apex court permitted private sector managements to charge “reasonable” tuition fees and administer themselves by devising their own admission processes subject to the proviso that they are fair and transparent.

But this eminently sensible and uncomplicated judgement of a full bench of the Supreme Court was not acceptable to the subsidies-addicted great Indian middle class and indeed to some judges of the apex court itself. In August 2003 in the Islamic Academy Case a five-judge bench of the court passed a majority judgement ‘clarifying’ the TMA Pai Case verdict. In the process it mandated the establishment of two permanent committees to supervise admissions and regulate the fees of professional education institutions in every state. Presumably encouraged by the Supreme Court’s intervention, the Karnataka government has insisted that 75 percent of admissions into private colleges should be of state students dependent upon their performance in the CET. The reasonable demand of private colleges that the CET quota should be limited to 50 percent of capacity has not only been rejected but legislation mandating observance of the 75:25 quota has been enacted in the state’s legislative assembly.

At the root of this standoff between the state government and the managements of private colleges is the adamant refusal of the Karnataka government to concede the right of self-administration and self-governance to private colleges. With the Supreme Court having upheld the 50:50 ratio proposed by private college managements, the Karnataka government has petitioned the Central government to legislate admission procedures, quotas and fees of private colleges. Even if such ill-advised legislation is enacted, the temptation to decree micro-management of private sector colleges which will have the effect of discouraging private sector fund flows into higher education should be resisted in the broader national interest.

 

The revenge of neglected rural india

The rural regeneration thrust of the recently inducted United Progressive Alliance Congress-led coalition government at the centre has come not a day too soon. Decades of neglect of the rural hinterland and in particular the conspicuous failure to develop a viable marketing infrastructure for village India has prompted massive and continuous migration into the nation’s towns and cities which are being levelled down to become urban replicas of India’s dusty, unplanned and unhygienic villages steeped in corruption.

Evidence in support of the proposition that India’s major cities are on the point of collapse is not difficult to find. The proportion of slum-dwellers in urban India now averages 50 percent with the result that hygiene and sanitation standards are perhaps the lowest in the contemporary world; public schools and colleges are overcrowded and healthcare institutions are almost dysfunctional; city roads are choked with traffic as municipal corporations packed with first generation learner-migrants struggle to apply failed village solutions to unfamiliar urban problems. Now first and second generation rural migrants constitute the majority of voters in almost all cities across the subcontinent.

While such rural-urban migration is a necessary condition of economic development, the continuous neglect of education in rural India has resulted in the influx of a huge population of illiterate or quasi-literate peasants who have imported the casual lifestyles, customs and mores of village India which have had the unfortunate effect of levelling down standards of governance, habitation, hygiene and probity to those on a par with backward rural India. And even as following the failure of metropolitan India to pay any attention to rural and small-town development the mass movement towards the nation’s cities continues, rural parvenus are voting their own representatives into state legislative assemblies and municipal governments. Hence the continuous and uninterrupted deterioration of post-independence India’s cities which are being transformed into mirror images of the dusty, crowded and lawless hamlets of village India, steeped in casteism and corruption.

This is the revenge of chronically neglected rural India upon the cities of the plains. The overwhelming majority within post-liberalisation India’s new mall-hopping urban middle class believes it can divorce itself from the nation’s malnutritioned and benighted rural majority, and enjoy the good life in their urban enclaves. But this is a foolish aspiration. Unless the benefits of liberalisation and deregulation are shared with the too-long-neglected rural majority, they will assert their right to share the privileges hogged by urban India through continuous migration into metropolitan enclaves of relative privilege. 

It’s for this reason that right-thinking people need to support the rural bias of the newly inducted United Progressive Alliance government in Delhi. Enlightened self-interest dictates that privileged city dwellers voluntarily share the benefits of shining India with rural Bharat. Or else they will swamp the islands of urban privilege, levelling them down to village India standards.