“Actually, hard work is more powerful than Harvard.”
-Narendra Modi
The above comment made by the prime minister in 2014 was a dig towards a Harvard educated political rival. In the wake of the University Grants Commission(UGC) showing green signal to foreign universities for setting up their campuses in India in 2023, the above comment has simply not aged well. The UGC move follows the diktats of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, a policy that was pushed through without due democratic process by the Modi-led BJP government in the middle of the first lockdown. Earlier, in 2010, Congress led union government also proposed to allow foreign universities in India. And very interestingly, it was opposed by the then opposition Bharatiya Janata Party. Now that the BJP government is in power with absolute majority, all policy suggestions in NEP 2020 are turning to reality swiftly, like ‘…selected universities e.g., those from among the top 100 universities in the world will be facilitated to operate in India. A legislative framework facilitating such entry will be put in place, and such universities will be given special dispensation regarding regulatory, governance, and content norms on par with other autonomous institutions of India.’ So, ‘top universities’ in the world have been allowed to bring their ‘world class’ education to a ‘developing’ nation like India. As the document states, these universities will have a free pass regarding rules and regulations. This translates to them being able to decide on anything and everything on their own such as the selection process of the students, their fees, hiring of teachers, curriculum, affirmative actions etc.
Many may think that this is a very ‘super’ move in the process of India becoming ‘VishwaGuru’. But if the state truly wants people to get quality education then why is it not increasing the overall education budget, directing it towards the proliferation of public educational institutions (from KG to PG), research institutes, and teachers’ training institutes to impart quality education to the Indian masses? The standard of education has been quite backwards for a long time in our top universities. Now, it is falling every year. It is more pathetic in other smaller universities or those run by the state governments. In most cases the teacher-to-student ratio is abysmal, classes are irregular, infrastructure is poor, students finish their 3 year courses in 5-6 years because of irregularities in exams. Now, if the foreign universities set up their campuses in India, their hefty fees would mostly be siphoned off to their parent corporations. The graduates would also get absorbed by foreign corporations or their Indian offices as seen in case of most IIT passouts(1). It has also been seen elsewhere that the external campuses do not impart the same quality of education as the parent campus and are also used to subsidize it. Hence, reduction of the number of students going abroad for higher education seems unlikely(2). So how practical is it to invite foreign universities by channeling a chunk of the education budget to serve that end while this fund can be better used to strengthen the indigenous universities?
On the other hand, in the last few decades the public school system in India has been systematically destroyed by successive governments through willful negligence. This has forced a large chunk of the population to move towards private schools. Most major cities and towns in India now host a bunch of ‘international schools’ where fees go up to 12 Lacs per annum sometimes. Presently, the government schools only see footfalls of children belonging to the most economically backward sections of the society. The majority of them belong to Dalit, Adivasi, religious minorities, and other backward communities. Even if foreign universities set up their campuses in India, students from these sections would hardly be able to enter those places except as tokens to maintain ‘diversity’. As per the recent Oxfam India report ‘The top 1% in India now owns more than 40.5% of total wealth in 2021 while the bottom 50% of the population (700 million) has around 3% of total wealth.’ Only this top ‘1%’ would be able to afford entry into these campuses.
Is this sharpening of inequality in access to education a sudden development? Not really; these all started almost three decades back when India opened the doorways to foreign investment in education as well as other public sectors, converting those to commodities. All the checks and balances that were in place to prevent runaway profit-making by private parties were taken away in the name of liberalization, privatization and globalization. This neoliberal system wants more and more people to remain as cheap workers who can be easily exploited to build the empire. The setting up of foreign universities will exacerbate this already existing inequality
- Human Development Report of the UNDP (2000) estimated that India loses $2 billion every year by providing cheap university education to professionals who migrate
- Indian students spent $7 billion or around ₹ 45,000 crore per year on foreign education according to a study by industry body Assocham and Mumbai-based Tata Institute of Social Sciences done in 2015
