Is IIT entrance a linguistic issue?

Bharatkumar Raut, Shiv Sena leader in the Rajya Sabha, recently said that students from English-medium schools in urban areas have an advantage when it comes to admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). The party demanded that the entrance exam should not be conducted in English alone. This led regional parties across India to voice their concerns over the growing gulf between ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ in the education system.

What these entities have failed to realise is that the real barrier is not the English language but the decline in the standards of teaching mathematics and science in government schools. It is this decline on the one hand and the mushrooming of hi-profile tutorials in metropolitan cities that seems to have put students in urban areas at an advantage. A student in Mumbai, enrolled in an English-medium school and able to pay Rs10,000 per month per subject to tuition classes, will always have an edge over his/her counterpart in rural Maharashtra.

State education minister Rajendra Darda admits that the knowledge of a student in any year of schooling in a government school is not at par with his/her counterpart in a good, private school. The problem, he believes, lies not in the student’s intelligence but in the standards of teaching. NCP chief Sharad Pawar expressed his anguish a year ago over the inability of a Std VIII student in Marathwada to write a grammatically correct sentence in Marathi. If the teaching standards for one’s mother tongue are so poor, how can we expect the faculty to prepare the students for the IITs?

In some way, the concerns raised by the likes of Raut should prove to be an eye-opener for the state and central governments.

Today, higher education is the focus of our education system when it should be primary education. Merely enforcing the Right to Education Act will not help. There is a need for a curriculum upgrade. Compared to the CBSE and ICSE, the state board does not have the kind of syllabus necessary to prepare students for competitive exams.

What one forgets is that, far from harbouring regional biases, the IITs’ policy has in fact been governed by a regard for regional balance. How else can one explain the presence of an IIT in cities like Roorkee or Guwahati? Today, there are 15 IITs across the country, opening up the gates of higher learning to more than 17,000 students. Yet, the big question remains: Why are the IITs becoming a distant dream for students from small towns and rural areas?