The enactment of the Right to Free and Compulsory (RTE) Education Act, 2009 and the Supreme Court’s substantial validation of its provisions by its judgement delivered on April 12, has belatedly focused national attention upon vitally important primary and upper primary education — the foundation block of national development worldwide. Despite newly independent India having adopted Soviet-style detailed central planning to ensure balanced growth in all sectors of the economy and inter-sectoral linkages, early childhood and elementary education for the masses proved to be a blindspot of India’s central planners. The price of this neglect of primary education the country has had to pay in terms of rapid population growth, poor agricultural and industrial productivity and mass illiteracy, has been very heavy. Therefore the belated acknowledgement of the fundamental importance of qualitative elementary (classes I-VIII) and vocational education, as prerequisites of national socio-economic development is as welcome as it is overdue.

 

But at a press conference in Bangalore on April 26, officials and members of the Education Promotion Society of India (EPSI) — an association of private colleges and universities in tertiary education — expressed alarm that the outcome of huge outlays required of the Central and state governments to implement RTE (which EPSI estimates at Rs.70,000 crore per year) will be that “higher education will end up having lesser resources”.

 

The fears of EPSI and other academics in higher education highlight the imperative to radically reform India’s obsolete tertiary education system driven by massive subsidisation of higher education. Tuition fees in Central and state government higher education institutions — which constitute the great majority of the country’s 31,000 arts, science and commerce colleges and 611 universities — are among the lowest worldwide, being frozen since 1950 at Rs.15-50 per month, even in the country’s top-ranked colleges and universities. According to one survey, tuition and development fees etc contribute less than 5 percent of the annual expenditure of Central and state government colleges and universities. And shockingly, subsidisation of higher education is indiscriminate and universal, which means students from the country’s richest households pay the same tuition fees as from the poorest.

 

Quite clearly, universal over-subsidisation of tertiary education is iniquitous and contrary to the national interest. It’s high time therefore, that tuition fees in higher education are raised to at least 25 percent of the actual cost of education provision, indiscriminate subsidisation of higher education is abolished in favour of targeted subsidisation of needy merit students, and a system of long-term, low-interest loans for students introduced.

 

The national interest demands that government allocations for higher education are steadily reduced to release resources for primary foundational education. In the final analysis, elementary education is a public good while higher education is a personal benefit.