Money spent by Indian students in the US is more than India's entire higher education budget
Indian higher education budget at Rs 30,000 cr; Indian students spend Rs 44,000 cr in just US
Indian students
spending $6.54 billion in 2016-17 in the US should do a lot to assuage
president Donald Trump who is worried about the $20 billion trade deficit his
country has with India. More so when you consider that, in 2016, Indian
tourists spent another $13 billion in the US—over the last decade, a US
government fact sheet points out, Indian students contributed $31 billion to
the US economy. This is only the US, when you add up what Indian students spend
overseas each year, it adds up to more than $10 billion.
That number should,
however, set off alarm bells in the Indian establishment since such spending is
not just a huge drain on the country’s forex reserves, it is several times
greater than the central government’s budget for higher education for all
universities and colleges. In 2016-17, the period in which 1.9 lakh Indian
students went to the US, the central government’s budget for higher education
across all universities across the country was a mere Rs 29,703 crore! Just
imagine what the money Indian students spend abroad would do for Indian
colleges and universities if it was spent here, apart from the obvious impact
on the economy.
That children should choose the best option is hardly
surprising given the impact of education on salaries. In 2013-14, for instance,
PRICE’s all-India survey had shown that while a family headed by an illiterate
person earned Rs 80,759, this rose to Rs 181,123 if the head of the family was
a matriculate and to Rs 335,174 in the case of a graduate—a similar order of
magnitude was found across most caste groups as well.
While there is no
doubt there is a lot to be gained by studying overseas, especially in top-rung
colleges, the real issue is that Indian students are badly starved for choice
when it comes to good universities in the country. For one, the number of
globally recognized colleges/universities is quite low. If you go by the
Shanghai Rankings, India had three colleges/universities in the Top 500 in
2003, and one of them was in the Top 300. By 2017, this was down to just one
institution in the Top 400.
And if a limited number of quality colleges is not
bad enough, there is the reservation in both the admissions of students as well
as in the faculty. With a 49% reservation, and several states are trying to
exceed even this, the number of seats left for the general category of students
is limited. And the fact that students getting admitted under quotas then need
quotas to be able to get jobs is testimony to the fact that the quality of
teaching is quite poor.
Of course, blaming
everything on reservations is unfair, but as many committees have pointed out
over the years, the AICTE-UGC regulatory system is stifling education since all
curriculum have to be approved by them, among a host of other constraints.
Despite talking of freeing up education from stifling regulation, the
government—and not just the present one—hasn’t done much on this front.
While
education minister Prakash Javadekar has talked of a graded autonomy
framework—institutes that are graded higher will get greater autonomy first—the
government went a step further and promised a different governance architecture
to 20 world class universities, equally divided between the public and the
private sector, in the budget last year. The fact that the policy on “world class
institutions” said they would “have complete flexibility in fixing of
curriculum and syllabus, with no UGC mandated curriculum structure” means the
government acknowledges the havoc UGC has created.
Even this policy,
however, has not yet come into force. For one, it continued with the
reservations policy for the 10 government-owned universities. So, one of the
problems being grappled with is that, if there is a 49% reservation for
SC/ST/OBC and these universities can take a maximum of 30% foreign students,
what’s left for the general category will be really limited. And while these
institutions are supposedly free to hire whoever they want, in the case of the
10 government institutions, the policy of faculty reservations still holds. How
you can have world-class institutions along with reservations is something that
makes sense to only India’s political class.
There are to be no
reservations for the private sector world-class institutions, but even here,
the stipulation that at least one member of sponsoring organisation must have a
net worth of at least Rs 2,000 crore unnecessarily tilts the balance in favour
of industrialists as compared to professionals of the sort that, say, set up
Ashoka University. And it shows just how much power the UGC bureaucracy has
that these 20 institutions that are supposed to represent the best that India
has by way of education “shall not use the word ‘University’ suffixed to
(their) name but may mention the words ‘World Class Institution Deemed to be
University’ within parenthesis suffixed thereto”—if you find that hard to
believe, read the regulations at goo.gl/ZCTqeK. The amount Indian students
spent rose 30% in 2016-17 from $5.01 billion in 2015-16—with the government
unwilling to fix India’s education system, expect that to keep jumping every
year.
