Fallacy of central model

Context:  The recent All India Council for Technical Education’s (AICTE’s) support/scheme to the writing and production of engineering textbooks in 21 regional languages ignores justice to state/local level issues.

Major problems in the scheme: ignores the needs of states -

• Ignores the regional diversity: The scheme prefers the textbook to be for a course in the AICTE national model curriculum.
  • E.g. it ignores regional problems likethe nuances of irrigation in Maharashtra; the schedule of the patkaris (canal operators) and the workings of the paani wapar sanstha (water user associations).
  • May lead to employability crisis: because what is taught and what is practised are different.
• Ignores the higher education departments of the states: The current scheme neglects the involvement of peers from the universities in the development of the curriculum.

Reasons for ignoring the need of the state: depicting the issues in the administration of education in India:

• A routine practice: States’ demands are neglected since grants are made to individual faculty members and sometimes, institutions; state department cannot convey their priorities.
• Centralisation of Agenda Setting: For example, the annual funds with DST exceed Rs 4,000 crore while Maharashtra operates an S&T budget of about Rs 60 crore.
  • Many grants go to faculty members in the elite centrally funded institutions who have little understanding of or interest in the regional problems.
• Casting science as a national project rather than a living practice of a community: It created a dichotomy where -
  • On one side, centralised state, its scientists and professors working in elite institutions are there
  • While on the one side, the people, as recipients of the benefits of science but not as participants.
• Creation of a negative Social narrative:  States were seen as swamps of vested interests, parochial in thinking and highly unequal and exploitative in social relations.
• Overall decrepitude: Elite central institutions and scientific agencies have become the centres of mediocrity and decay; moribund bureaucracy and a narrow intellectual class incapable of honest work.

Way forward

• Acknowledge the needs of states: Accept that states were neither born equal nor are their developmental trajectories similar.
  • Most developmental innovations such as the Anganwadi, mid-day meals, water management, consumer and producer cooperatives, have come from the states.
• Create an accountable and decentralised system: Since the embedded hierarchy in a centralised system of science is sucking out the creativity of our youth and causing stress and disaffection.
• Devolution of funds: of MHRD and its institutions and the funds available with DST to the states; Devolving more powers to states is in accordance with the spirit of the constitution.