You have done your homework well, Kapil Sibal

The Union HRD minister - Kapil Sibal, who is at the vortex of the educational reforms currently sweeping the country was in Ahmedabad last week, delivering the keynote address at the justice PD Desai memorial lecture.

Kapil as he prefers to be called and not Mr Sibal or hon minister, made some lucid points about the changes being sought in the field of education. Education should have a threefold objective -- for the sake of imparting knowledge, for self-employment and for employment. In India our education system is concentrating mostly on passing on information while employability of the students is a distant objective.

He clarified that the education reforms are based on four pillars, namely expansion, excellence, inclusion and autonomy.

Based on the figures currently available, only 12 out of every 100 kids who graduate from high school make it to college, there is therefore a need for 1000 new universities and nearly 40,000 colleges within easy reach of all areas of urban and rural India. He harped on the need for private participation in the creation of higher institutions of learning, since such a large outlay of expansion would be impossible for the government to undertake.

His point about the first pillar of expanding the reach of educational institutions is well accepted, but it poses several implementation road-blocks especially in the delivery process.
Qualified faculty is so scarce these days that even if private participation provides the much needed infrastructure, imparting quality education would still remain a challenge.

His second pillar refers to the fact that the human resource crunch in India still continues, where many private jobs are going vacant due to lack of quality manpower; this goes to show that the education degrees awarded by universities, do not meet industry needs. Excellence in education is the crying need of the hour. Our syllabi are clearly outdated and few industry professionals are willing to teach in colleges, thereby new technological practices remain remote from curriculum; until there is heavy duty industry interface with education, we cannot achieve the acceptable norms of excellence.

Inclusion in education, the third pillar, is a purely western concept, where all socio-economic and special learning groups study within the walls of a normal class room.

Instead of specialised schools for the mentally /physically challenged or municipal schools for the poor, the normal class should have a mix of all the groups. While the concept is widely followed in the west, it will take a few years before the academic fraternity gears up to the learning challenges of all these special groups and is able to deliver education equitably for all.

The fourth pillar is the autonomy of kids to learn subjects that they wish to. For example, a medical student could take a couple of credit courses in law or even engineering and commerce student could dabble in graphic design or instrumentation design if he so wished to.

It is often said that Kapil Sibal is a man in a hurry. Hearing him speak, I must say that he came across as having done his homework well, he has visited classrooms, interacted with students and teachers as well as administrators and policy makers, he has understood the pain points remarkably well and above all, he has the courage to face the outcomes that such reforms may bring, both in the form of bouquet of flowers and brick-bats.

May you pass your test well, Kapil.