A specter haunts the Indian higher educational system, the specter of privatization. The government’s share in overall education expenditure in 1983, which was 80 percent, has gone down drastically to 67 percent in 1999. At the same time, private expenditure on education has increased by about 11 times in the last 15 years.

In the case of engineering colleges, the private sector, which accounted for just 15 percent of the seats in 1960, now accounts for 86.4 percent of seats. In the case of medical colleges, the private sector dominance has risen from 6.8 percent in 1960 to 40.9 percent in 2003. Statistics reveal that in 2000-01, around 42% of the 13,072 colleges in India were privately owned and managed. This sizeable chunk educated nearly 37% of the students who had enrolled into higher education.

Moreover, the protracted and fiercely contested battle in the last five years, over seat-sharing and fee structure in these institutions, shows that privatization of higher education has become an issue of national importance.

However, it is mainly after Indian policy­makers, without much choice in this regard one should say, cast the dice in favor of privatization in the 1990s that the higher education sector has witnessed this massive rise in the number of private players.

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With Liberal Economy in the ascendant, Liberal Education faces banishment. We have moved far away from Newman’s “Idea of a University”. In Newman’s vision University’s “Function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.”

Today, Education has become a tool for survival and Higher Education a tool for gaining status and power in society. The Universities are no longer “Ivory Towers” removed from the hub and noise of society but a part of its flux and flow. Ours is not an age of ideas but an age of processes.

The emphasis has shifted from developing ‘reasoning minds’ to ‘competent skills’. Even in Newman’s time there were demands to make Education and Instruction ‘useful’ because “where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return”. But now commercialism has gone beyond utilitarianism and Education is fast turning into a Business Enterprise.

Lord David Putnam, a Hollywood Film Producer turned Chancellor of the four-year old University of Sunderland bluntly states: “Oxford and Cambridge are institutions that offer excellent, traditional education. But there are new jobs opening up that need specialized courses, which these places don’t offer. Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, don’t have media schools.

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Jobs related to art and design, pharmacy and business have also attained importance in the new economy worldwide. We cater to the new world where old certainties are collapsing”. Lord Putnam has launched the Indian Chapter of the Sunderland University that he unabashedly calls “a one-stop shop”.

It will operate from Britain’s official cultural outfit in India, The British Council. Comparing it to the big commercial football organizations, he extols Sunderland University as “Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea rolled into one”.

Switching to the Indian context, Professor Yashpal, former Chairman of the University Grants Commission and Indian Space Research Organization is not impressed by the likes of Putnam and his lesser Indian counterparts.

He filed Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court against 112 private universities that he pejoratively calls as “teaching shops”. Many of them are actually operating from Bazaars and shopping complexes flouting UGC guidelines on courses of study and award of degrees.

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The Apex Court took a serious view and declared unconstitutional the provision for Private Universities in the Chhattisgarh Private Sector Universities Act 2002. Consequentially, Private Universities in India got abolished. Will the specter of nexus among Businessman, Politician and Bureaucrat leave the University Education alone? How long?

Academic world is under scare of privatization. Professors, scientists, researchers in Indian universities have reservations about the role of private universities. The private enterprise will soon control the emerging areas of science and technology. They are worried about the government intentions.

Through the Private Universities Bill the Government intends to devalue the status of public funded universities and push the captains of industry to command the frontiers of Information and Knowledge. Any sponsoring body with an endowment fund of 10crore rupees will be able to own a university as a “body corporate”.

The private university conglomerates may soon gobble the present public universities up. Academic freedom will be sent into the limbo. Administrative safeguards will be implemented more in breach than observation.

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The supporters of private universities argue that competition among them will improve the quality of higher education. The experience so far in other fields inspires little confidence in such arguments. The exploitive tendencies in Indian Business are stronger and more callous than in Western Business.

In advanced countries, education and research are regarded as basic to the advancement of society. Operations and procedures are more transparent, public more aware of their rights.

Poor and even middle class students may not be able to find means to enter universities once private universities succeed in commercializing higher education. Private Universities in India are intended to be and will only be profit- making shops. These are genuine fears.

In India, Education, besides improving economic conditions, is also the means of bringing about social equality and change. Private Universities, by definition, will be elitist. They will lead to class divisions and economic disparities.

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Market forces have severe limitations when called upon to meet social obligations in the Indian setting. A developing society cannot afford to embrace Social Darwinism dispensing the cruel justice of ‘survival and supremacy only of the richest’.

When Milton Friedmann argued in the American context that public education is the only major social enterprise that runs counter to a basic market economy, he would not have imagined that his observation would by and large hold true in the Indian context as well, especially with higher education.

When undue restrictions such as fee-regulation and reservations are imposed on private institutions in the name of social justice, consistency in policy is lost. The Indian State has not told its private hospitals to charge differential rates, nor has it ordered private hotels to provide food and lodging at subsidized cost.

This is despite the fact that both health and food are basic goods for the survival of mankind, maybe even more important than higher education in this regard. The attitude of the State in the field of higher education has been to impose its own burden on private players, an attitude decried by the Supreme Court in Inamdar.

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Despite this, Article 15(5) stands testimony to the fact that our policy-makers still refuse to be guided by reason. One can only wish that the State instead of attempting to unduly restrict private players fulfils its own responsibility.

Since India is a signatory to the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), it will soon have to open its doors to international service providers in the field of higher education as well. The only way forward is to improve the quality of education.

Instead of thinking about this, our policy makers seem keener to cling to an outdated model of social justice. Truly speaking, the privatization of higher education has thrown up much less constitutional challenges than the attempt of the State to control the free play of market forces.