Increasing the Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) and youth employability is one of the key objectives in the National Education Policy 2019 draft, and the same was mentioned in the finance minister's budget speech for the year 2020. The government policy to realise this objective is not through establishing new colleges, institutions and universities or by reducing the tuition fees which can make the higher education accessible to all, but through online degree programs. For example, last month, IIT Madras launched the country's first online degree programs, BSc in Programming & Data Science and Diploma in Programming/Data Science with flexible exit/entry options.
Over the recent years, MHRD has been aggressively pushing online platforms supposedly for improving the educational outcomes in schools and colleges. More recently, this is being done under the false pretext of the COVID-19 lockdown. Online education is projected as the inevitable tool, particularly in higher education, to enhance the GER to 50% before 2030. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) report, the current GER is around 28%. To really achieve the 50% GER, the government needs to spend several lakhs of crores in infrastructure for education. But, the government follows the diktats of the international financial institutions, World Bank and IMF, and does not want to spend on public education. To overcome the limits on social spending imposed by these foreign institutions, MHRD has proposed Information & Communication Technology (ICT) based solutions to increase the GER. This will further intensify the commercialisation in higher education due to the lack of infrastructure and poor access to the internet and electronic gadgets. India's spending on education is already the lowest (around 3% GDP) among the BRICS nations. During the Modi regime, this spending was further reduced from 4.14% to 3.4% of the total government expenditure. On the other hand, households which have students going to higher education spend 18.4% of their total expenditure on average in urban areas and 15.3% in rural areas.
In the 2020 budget, the finance minister announced that online courses could be started by the top 100 institutions in the NIRF ranking. Despite the tall claims by the government on GER and employability, the main intention behind the online degree programs is revenue generation. Since the BJP-led NDA government came to power, the centrally funded institutions are forced to generate revenue to meet their expenditure and encouraged to borrow through HEFA for infrastructure developments. There are 46 Centrally Funded Institutes (CFI) institutions in the top 100 rankings and the rest are private and state institutions. As per the government guidelines, these institutions are eligible to start an online degree program, preferably market-driven courses, and the fees will be very high and exclusionary. For instance, IIT Madras has fixed 2.5 lakh rupees as the fee for its online B.Sc. Program. Each institution can come up with several such online degree courses with high fees that may help the institution to meet its expenditure without government funding.
This explains the government's affinity towards the commercialisation of education both in school and college level. Now, with the help of technological development, the government rolls out further commercialisation and its exclusion agenda. Certainly, supplementary technological tools may help to enhance the educational outcomes, but regardless of the technology, until we destroy the commercialisation agenda, we cannot provide quality and free education to everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment