Saturday, June 1, 2013

Indian HRD Minister of State, Dr. Shashi Tharoor, Writes Newspaper Article on Indian Academic Controversy

I was very pleasantly surprised to read an article related to an academic controversy by the Honourable Minister of State for Human Resource Development, Govt. of India, Dr. Shashi Tharoor. I think it is wonderful that an HRD minister has chosen to interact with interested members of the public and academics via a newspaper article. [BTW currently India has one HRD minister, Dr. M.M. Pallam Raju, and two HRD ministers of state, one of whom is Dr. Shashi Tharoor, http://mhrd.gov.in/whoswho.]

First a little bit of background on Dr. Shashi Tharoor from his wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shashi_Tharoor. He did his graduate studies culminating in a Ph.D. from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He served in the United Nations from 1978 to 2007 with his last post being UN Under-Secretary-General. He was nominated by the Govt. of India for the post of UN Secretary General, competed with present UN Secretary General Mr. Ban Ki-moon, eventually withdrawing his candidacy. He also has a literary career as an author of many English books. I think India is very fortunate to have such a distinguished person holding a union minister of state position for Human Resource Development (HRD).

The article I referred earlier appeared in The Hindu today, "Drop the rhetoric, start the debate", http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/drop-the-rhetoric-start-the-debate/article4770857.ece. While the article's focus is on a current academic controversy in Delhi University, the article touches upon general academic issues including HRD ministry interaction with academic administrators, which was very interesting to me.

[Please note that the Creative Commons Attribution CC-BY license does not apply to this post.]

Dr. Tharoor writes, "It may be heresy to say it, but education as a sector remains the last frontier largely untouched by reforms. The economic reforms of the last 20-odd years have unleashed our economic potential, and the governance reforms of the last 10 years have raised our civic awareness. However, we as a nation need to completely overhaul our educational systems and processes if we are to realise the full potential of the demographic dividend that awaits us in the coming decades of the 21st century."

I am delighted to see such an unequivocal statement put out by a union HRD minister on the need for academic reform in India. He goes on to say that Indian academic positions have become another government job for life positions with little incentive for performance or disincentives for non-performance! I think his view is quite right. But I have to clarify that I do not mean to imply that all Indian academics take it easy because it is a secure job. I am quite sure many will be working hard and trying to excel in teaching and research. But if the system is such that performance is not rewarded well and non-performance is not penalized then the motivation to excel in teaching and research will slowly but surely dwindle in most persons caught up, usually for an entire work-life, in such a system.

He points out that the academic community (typically) blames the overbearing interference of government (HRD ministry and higher education regulators UGC & AICTE, I guess) functionaries for academics and academic institutions not being able to excel. This is an interesting issue for me. My opinion is that as huge amount of public tax payer money is given to academic institutions by the government, the recipients of such money must be answerable to representatives of the people, which are the elected members of Parliament and HRD ministers in particular. Top academic administrators should not be allowed to escape accountability by resorting to tactics of blaming government interference for poor performance of the institutions they administer.

Students and parents of the students are key stakeholders in the academic system but are not in a strong position to raise their voice and be heard. Yes, there are student unions but I don't know how effective they are for improving the academic standards of teaching and evaluation. Once again, IMHO, it is the moral responsibility of elected members of Parliament especially the HRD ministers to hold academic administrators and academics responsible for their duties of teaching and evaluating students well. If Indian academics and Indian academic administrators are not willing to be accountable to even the HRD ministers then who will they be accountable to?

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