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| Inequality Gap in New Entrance exam | | |
Vijay Garg
The experience of the University of Delhi over the years has been behind the idea of the Central Entrance Examination. Students of any one education board got more marks in their admission. However, there are very simple alternatives to this problem and it is better to try to improve them.
In the coming session, admission in about fifty central universities will be done through integrated entrance examination. There is no harm in this at the level of thought, but applying it in one stroke in a country of so many diversities should not give rise to widespread discontent elsewhere. The Tamil Nadu Assembly has unanimously decided not to participate in it. Voices are also being raised against this from Aligarh Muslim University and other universities. There may be some politics in this, but some practical reasons are also obvious.
The first problem is that about ninety percent of the children of the country read the text books of their respective state boards, whereas the questions asked in the Integrated Entrance Examination will be based on the books prepared by the NCERT at the central level. That way most of the youth will be left out of it. It is not possible that any one exam will cover the NCERT syllabus and also the material taught by the states of Gujarat, Kerala, Odisha, Tamil Nadu. In the last three-four years, such voices have been rising in opposition to the NEET examination of medical because of these reasons.
Wouldn’t it be unfair to children who are confined to their respective board books in any village from Chhattisgarh or Uttar Pradesh, Bihar to Nagaland? They have no experience of any national examination, nor facilities for teaching and speaking there. It would also be against the principle of equality. The consequences of economic to social inequalities are gradually visible in the entire system of the country. Due to the online examination of Staff Selection Commission, children studying in distant villages were in a way out of jobs forever.
Where in our constitution the talk of decentralization has been repeated time and again and where every day its reverse is happening. Digitization may not mean confining all the systems, facilities to a few metropolitan cities and their English people. Therefore, it is better that initially this step should be limited to a few selected universities and based on that experience, it should be carried forward in the future. This entrance exam is not meant to face the challenge standing on no boundaries immediately. This is the process of creating the future generations, which requires careful, patient steps.
Another big question is that of the existing school structure becoming irrelevant. If the number of the school, any weight of his studies will not be there at the time of admission, then why will the children go to school? And why be limited to those books? The development of science and technology happens in private hands at a rate many times faster than the making of our curriculum. Right now there is talk of entrance exam and books have come in the market. Will the twelfth board exam have any meaning or will the whole education system be confined around coaching institutes, tuition centres? Paper leaks from above, the danger of copying corruption, whose news is published in the newspapers every day and its culprits hardly get any punishment.
This is what the experience of the last twenty years of IIT entrance examination tells us. The secret of the success of the coaching institutes of Kota, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Patna has also been that the children studying in them do not have to go to regular schools, they come directly to the coaching class, they study the same. Yes, their name is definitely written in the register of some school or board for nominal and they also pay regular fees there. These are mostly private schools. The same situation is now likely to happen across the country. One cannot turn a blind eye to the present dangers in the central entrance examination.
The experience of the University of Delhi over the years has been behind the idea of the Central Entrance Examination. Students of any one education board got more marks in their admission. However, there are very simple alternatives to this problem and it is better to try to improve them.
The bigger question should be, what do these central universities teach? Does their curriculum lead to fundamental research? Why have these courses not become scientific, flexible and up-to-date compared to the universities of the world? Why our engineering and IIT courses also keep on memorizing the old things of thirty to forty years. The same is true of social issues as well.
This can be gauged from the fact that we do not stand anywhere in the ranking of universities of the world. Can we turn a blind eye to the fact that every year around one million of our students go to study abroad and a substantial amount of foreign exchange goes out this way. Surprisingly, the entire university system is silent on this. Why are we not able to make Global Standard Books and Curriculum especially in our Indian languages? Will the picture change just by creating the posts of Professor and Senior Professor in every college? You select children from any complex examination, if they do not get the right atmosphere in our classrooms, then this exercise will be of no use, except to increase further discontent among our youth.
Why is there never any talk about the recruitment of teachers who carry out the curriculum and the education system in the classroom? The whole country knows that recruitment in central universities is done only because of political clout, dynasty or ideology. Former cabinet secretary TSR Subramaniam, in his report submitted to the central government in 2016, had talked about the formation of an education recruitment board at the central level for the recruitment of teachers on the lines of the Union Public Service Commission, but there is all-round silence on that.
Certain steps have been taken in the state university recruitment process and the recruitment has been handed over to the state commission, but the central universities are still immersed in a politics. There is a big reason for this that some of these teachers climb the shoulders of their respective parties and also get some Parliament and ministerial posts. What a paradox it is that for the admission of students, there is talk of examination one after the other again and again, but keeping aside the questions of qualification, research, party commitment, dynastic corruption of the teachers who teach them, everything is the same. It just keeps on going.
The last twenty years are witness to the fact that sometimes PhD-NET is made mandatory and after recruiting their respective people, the next government makes some other changes again. There is doubt that such teachers or such central universities will play any role in the transformation of education. If our central universities do not have students from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Manipur, Kashmir, can we call them universities? In the words of Ramachandra Guha, the right to write a university should be where the students are from all over the world as well as the teachers. So it will not only be a loss to Tamil Nadu or these states, the entire reputation of our central universities will be lost. The philosophy of education is to uplift the weakest, not to advance the privileged creamy section. This disparity gap seems to be widening with the new entrance examination. |
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