India’s feudal culture and nanny state have inflicted grave damage upon the education system. At the primary level, the problem is poor enrollment and high dropout rates; at the secondary stage, the system has mutated into a Darwinian struggle in which students and their parents are routinely hassled and humiliated by high-handed teachers and malevolent administrators. Higher education is a cesspit of politics and corruption compounded by quotas and capitation fees.

As such, the higher education system transformed into a gulag from which many middle class youth escaped in the 1960-70s to the United States. Those who stayed behind became cannon-fodder for political parties. The luckier ones got PWD-type jobs or were recruited by the public sector to fill quotas mandated by the government. What is left unsaid is that those who visited such horrors upon the higher education system had their own children safely ensconced abroad in Oxbridge, Harvard and Yale.

However, there is a positive side to the migration of the middle class intelligentsia to points west, especially the United States. In the early 1980s, cataclysmic events saw the emergence of Rajiv Gandhi as the leader of the Congress party. He was just 40 years old when he became prime minister. He talked sense about the economy and foreign policy. Many of us who had escaped from the gulag began to take another look at India.

That was the start of India’s transformation from the world’s basket case to the country most likely to succeed in the 21st century. It set off an economic boom that was magnified by Manmohan Singh’s massive economic reforms programme in 1991. Freed from the dead hand of socialism, the economy took off, empowering the existing middle class and expanding as never before. This set off a huge challenge to the elitists who controlled all aspects, not just the economy but culture, education, almost every dimension of public affairs.

In the realm of higher education, several things happened. The upper middle class found it was affordable to send their children to undergraduate schools in the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia. More important, universities in these countries found they could offer courses in India at much lower prices and so tap a huge market of students who had a hard time getting into the better local colleges and universities.

Sensing a rent opportunity, many politicians started up colleges and universities with state subsidies, offering mediocre education at inflated commercial prices. In Karnataka, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and elsewhere, colleges and universities promoted by politicians and lobbyists sprouted in response to market needs. Many ministers in various state governments, especially Maharashtra and Karnataka, were complicit in such scams. So were many businessmen except they focused on tying up with dubious foreign institutions to attract those in the middle class who could not or would not, send their children abroad.

The chaos in the higher education system has drawn the attention of reputed colleges and universities in the United States and United Kingdom. Well aware of the prowess of Indian students and faculty in their own systems, these institutions have sought to establish a presence in India.

They have made their views known to the government. Their desire to start joint ventures with educational institutions in India will feature as part of the agenda of talks when British prime minister Tony Blair visits India next month and when US President George W. Bush comes calling next January.

Meanwhile in the kafkaesque education bureaucracy, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has emerged as a major stumbling block to the advent of foreign universities. Last May, AICTE succeeded in introducing its rules for approval in Parliament. But soon it was clear that AICTE’s grab wouldn’t work. So the moles in the higher education system have sought to introduce legislation that makes foreign universities accountable to the University Grants Commission.

Under the proposed provisions, foreign universities are subject to a punitive regime that includes huge down payments, financial penalties and jail sentences, depending on the whims of bureaucrats and politicians. Which respectable foreign university will agree to such conditions? Can you imagine the presidents of Harvard or Stanford bowing to safari-clad bureaucrats who live in Grade II quarters in R.K. Puram, Delhi?

This entire farce would be laughable except that a key item on the agenda of the burgeoning India-US partnership is the prospect of joint ventures between Indian educational institutions and American universities. In the realm of secondary education, it’s already happened. Today students and their parents have a choice. Many schools offer certification by the University of Cambridge, the International Baccalaureate and various Indian boards. At the university level, however, because of politics and bureaucracy, students have to face uphill climbs to get a place in mediocre institutions run by government, politicians and failed industrialists.

I, for one, am glad that my children don’t have to flounder in this miasma.

(Rajiv Desai is chairman and chief executive of Comma, a Delhi-based public affairs consulting firm)

Also read: India’s Foreign Students Great Expectations Belied