I have been following this whole NEET story and as expected, there are always those who refuse to accept it. Everytime I call a customer help line(phone, life insurance etc), I walk away exhausted. Exhausted at having to explain my problem, exhausted at getting meaningless phrases that the speakers don?t even understand themselves, exhausted that there is sometimes no solution for a problem big enough to warrant the call or complaint to customer care.
Everywhere I see roads around me dissolve in the rain, news reports of bridges and buildings collapsing and of tenders being given to foreign builders to build Indian infrastructure. If you transfer to a new city, could you just pop into any doctor?s or dentist?s clinic(within or outside your insurance network)? Not all health care providers are alike. You need to talk to people to find out who is trustworthy.
All health care providers may boast of various degree certificates, but not all have the right aptitude for patient care. Most treat patients and their families like pieces of meat with money in various pockets/orifices and are happy referring them to a chain of other?specialists?, all taking a cut out of the patient?s peace of mind and bank balance.
Medicine and engineering are the craze in India, with all parents queuing up to push their hapless kids into these streams. Why then is it so difficult to find examples of fine work done by Indian engineers and doctors? How many people can afford the big hospitals which attract medical tourism?
I suspect that the reason lies in our primary education sector that caters to different pockets, the CBSE and ICSE systems at least trying to teach students basic concepts, while the state boards follow the mark-oriented, learn-by-rote system that throws up students with 99% marks even in languages, many of whom won?t find admission in colleges, because these colleges also know the value of these high marks. And then they find themselves lining up outside colleges.
Neither the central nor the state governments have done well in terms of opening enough colleges and universities, so these private players with lots of black money have stepped in to fill in the vacuum. Nature abhors vacuum so these players do well for themselves attracting many of these students who cannot get admission in other places.
As money is a key player in these private places, parents? income rather than children?s aptitude takes precedence. This is not to say that there are no good students in these places. They are like rare or at least not-so-frequently-found diamonds among the tonnes of sand comprising of students whose parents? business already awaits them or who will go into software placements, regardless of what stream they pick before graduation.
Thousands and thousands of graduates?who will give them jobs? Will they all become entrepreneurs? There was a big hue and cry about start-ups in India, how well they were doing and how dynamic they are. Now Flipkart puts off IIM-A placements for some months and pays the students a few lakhs as compensation for delaying their appointments and the institute is up in arms, demanding more compensation.
Will the landscape of this country improve with the thousands of engineering and medical and dental and other professional graduates? Many argue(rightly so) that most of these graduates are not even employable. Nothing they seem to have been exposed to during their school or even these university years has helped them pick up useful skills for the workplace. Why? What are they doing? What are the teachers doing?
What are these school boards and university boards/managements doing? What are MHRD, UGC, NAAC, and all these other alphabet soup makers doing? If all these graduates are to come out of college and seek and get employment in the?national playground?, why shouldn?t they comply with a national eligibility test? I mean all professional courses?medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering, even the sciences, commerce and humanities.
Nowadays, when many(not all) of these customer care representatives speak in?English?, one wonders what they are saying. Forget pronunciation, the grammar is off and most of the time, they are reeling off rehearsed phrases without really listening to what the customer Is asking so not much English is needed for this. After all, many singers have sung songs in languages other than their own mother tongues with the lyrics written out for them phonetically in their own mother tongue.
Many of these customer care representatives and mutual fund managers even give wrong information to customers just so they can serve their own interests. Lack of ethics is one major problem, but their inability to understand their roles and the consequences of their advice suggest very basic problems in their training in commerce. Most people will be transferred to other cities in India at some point or the other in their careers, in the private or public sector.
When citizens in different parts of India must be exposed to them, why should they not comply with a national eligibility test? Why are these states objecting to NEET? In my opinion, these state boards that make money off of hapless parents are the major culprits. State board education cannot be called education in many states and the quality is so poor that one wonders how these poor students will ever catch up in colleges and universities.
Schools focus on finishing off the syllabus for tenth and twelfth grades in six months or less, sometimes in the ninth and eleventh grades themselves, respectively. They then spend the rest of the time on the tenth and twelfth grade syllabi, drilling it into the students? heads, making them take tests and exams to score high marks without understanding anything.
TOI had a report about a state board in Maharashtra that refused to raise the minimum passing marks because this would mean a lower pass percentage of students who would clear these exams. Like these car companies(Mitsubishi and VW) who got caught with their defeat devices, all these places know how to massage their statistics to make things look good for themselves and how to dodge what will make them look bad.
These colleges and universities obligingly dumb down their curriculi to suit the needs of these poorly trained students. And there you have these unemployable graduates in different disciplines, all of whom will drain taxpayers? pockets and give us heart attacks and headaches with their incompetence and callousness. Any student who is good and whose parents have the financial means, will simply leave the country, enriching this incompetent population in India. And then we read and admire people abroad who accomplish something and say they are of Indian origin. How wonderful.
Take a look at these faculty and top technocrats in our research and educational institutes of?national importance?. How many of their children study here in India? How many settle abroad? How many of these?learned? people have you spoken to who have told you that they will be visiting or have come back from visiting their children who are settled abroad? Not even the custodians of our educational and research policies trust the system to allow their children to go for higher studies in India and use that higher education here in India.
When a farmer tells you he grows food for general market consumption in one area and separately for his own family in another area(organically), what does that tell you about his practices? So what is the solution? In my opinion, the solution starts with common eligibility tests that will actually serve the purpose of telling students whether they should spend the next four-five-whatever years of their lives on that particular discipline that their parents and their families? neighbours are pushing them into.
The other parts are trickier?parents leaving their kids to decide for themselves based on aptitude rather than social status issues, kids learning to be more responsible. These things are easier said than done and will take a while to change. Another thing I have always believed is vocational training for those who cannot fit into the mainstream education system. Why force kids who just don?t want to study to get a degree?
Of what use are these bachelor?s and master?s degrees for people who are just sitting through the courses and getting their degrees because they paid the fees? Doesn?t this cheapen those degrees of students who are actually competent enough to be in those disciplines? Unlike the do-it-yourself Americans, we are a nation full of people who rely on others for our electrical, plumbing, carpentry etc needs. Why is it beneath anyone?s dignity to learn these vocations?
All these graduates are being churned out by these universities, many of whom are private players, and many of whom are contributing to the voices refusing to follow NEET. They make their money but even the money they pump into the maintenance of their institutes and faculty salaries are all taxpayers? money. Whenever people are asked to comply with some universal rule, people talk about autonomy.
Some faculty in DU refused to provide keys for their question papers because they said it would impinge on their autonomy and rights as it would encourage administration to correct those papers themselves. Even something so basic as an answer key becomes a bone of contention for these faculty members. It?s not at all difficult these days to copy syllabi of various courses from the Internet as well known universities abroad have posted such information or at least provided the names of the reference materials from which topics can be copied.
But whether these universities are actually able to teach those syllabi?who checks that? UGC and other accreditation agencies are supposed to. So why the poor quality of graduates from these universities who?benchmark? their syllabi against those of well known universities? Where?s the gap? This is why it is important to implement NEET for medical and dental students from the next year onwards and for ALL courses in ALL universities in ALL STATES AND UTs in INDIA from the following year.
One common eligibility entrance examination for each discipline. Of course, eventually, scrap these state boards and merge the entire system of education into something that looks like the CBSE syllabus, but with importance given to regional languages in various states(that being the ONLY difference between the various states). Give some time to state board schools to have bridge courses to help students catch up with the others. But don?t allow these fellows to keep degrading education and the general quality of life and level of competence in this country.
Autonomy should come in where faculty recruitment takes place and HOW they implement educational policies, not in whether they want to follow those policies or not. Anyone not following these guidelines should be prevented from getting any sort of support(especially financial) that taps into taxpayers? pockets and from even making money off of taxpayers by keeping their universities and colleges open for?business?. One common refrain I always hear in India is,?Where will we find the personnel qualified enough to teach these courses and syllabi?
One, according to these people?s sloganeering, they already have personnel qualified enough to teach these courses and syllabi and that?s how they get their accreditation and ranks and grades etc.
Two, these people who are enjoying themselves, pretending to be part of think tanks and MHRD and UGC etc, need to start doing their jobs. Not just going to various conferences and lighting lamps and receiving mementos and planting seedlings, but actually trying to come up with meaningful policies and implementing and monitoring those solutions in the long run. Stop brain drain and use the huge mass of human resources available in this country that foreign countries are so eager to tap into.
Three, many of these places still have faculty shortage. I am never clear about whether it?s because they want to save money on salaries or because they want people who will follow orders rather than be independent and rock the boat a little. All institutes in India prefer to hire their own graduates; no doubt, understanding the system and the code of the place is a huge advantage in retaining faculty. But sometimes it's also about maintaining status quo?Indians like sycophancy and all administrators surround themselves with yes people, who will tell them what they want to hear.
Of course, as all these graduates come out and will have nowhere to go, they are being and will be absorbed into their alma mater institutes. In many cases, where the degrees were given after enough incubation and little actual education, that old horrible adage will become more and more relevant,?If you can?t do, teach.? And as more poorly trained graduates will teach youngsters, the worse things will get.
Then we might as well scrap these alphabet soup agencies and open travel agencies and see which countries accept our good students. Employ graduates in this emigration process. Kill several birds with a few stones. But the way migration is affecting the EU and other education hot spots, I doubt they will want any more migrants on their shores for a while.
