Communist Party of India (Marxist) Polit Bureau member Sitaram Yechuri said here on Saturday that the process of liberalisation is leading the country to a situation where the priority is to appease international finance capital at the expense of the people.
Inaugurating the preparatory session of the scheduled three-day national seminar on 'Higher education in India: challenges and prospects' being organised by the Kannur University Research Centre, Central Library and the Kannur University Union, Mr. Yechuri said that from the Nehruvian concept of self-reliance which conceived an education system geared up for creating manpower required for building the nation, India had now moved to a situation where the motive was maximisation of profit and appeasement of international finance capital.
Speaking at the function held on the university campus at Mangattuparamba, he said that the opening up of the retail sector in the country to global retail chains was the latest example of the Central government's pursuit of neo-liberal policies. Crores of people involved in the retail sector as a self-employment avenue would be affected by this, he added.
Stating that six Bills concerning higher education was now before Parliament, including the Bills relating to entry of foreign universities and technical education, he said that some of them were eluding consensus in Parliament. Observing that education in a society could not be taken out of its political and social context, Mr. Yechuri said that the higher education was connected to the developmental requirements of a society. Education was not just about imparting skills but also about fostering social ideas, he said adding that education is also an instrument of social control. After Independence, the country had wanted to build its own intellectual resources for training skilled manpower to build modern India, he said. The skilled youth who had come out of the State-funded institutions could not be gainfully employed in the country because of the kind of development pursued by the ruling dispensation.
Mr. Yechuri also said that during the past 20 years, 493 deemed and private universities had come up as against 42 Central universities and 42 State universities. The number of private self-financing colleges rose to 31,324, he said adding that this shift followed the new thinking that the government should abdicate its responsibilities in the education sector to improve quality of education.
"We forget that most of the people running the frontier technologies in the United States are products of our institutions funded by the government," the CPI(M) leader and Rajya Sabha member said. "What we are doing now is actually reducing higher education to a commodity so that educational shops are opened", he added.
Instead of developing the human wealth, the government was reducing it to a status of commodity, Mr. Yechuri observed. Noting that the 54 per cent of the population in the country is below 25, the government should intervene to give them proper education before losing that demographic window. Unfortunately, the competition today is in opening education shops and not in building skills, he pointed out.
When the education was commodified, the country was weakening its potential to become an intellectual powerhouse, he added.
Mr. Yechuri said that the education sector in India had always been a battle among quantity, quality and equity. He stressed the need for a balance among the three to be achieved in the country. While the Right to Education Bill introduced three years ago was yet to be implemented on the ground of shortage of funds, he said that the total requirement of funds for implementing the Right to Education over a period of five years was estimated at Rs. 1,75,000 crore. The government had allowed the looting of Rs. 1,76,000 crore while allocating 2G spectrum, he said. Tax forgone over the past two years in the name of stimulus to tide over the economic crisis was Rs. 14 lakh crore and the concession given to the rich and the high-end tax payers was Rs. 4.5 lakh crore, he said adding that in the neo-liberal logic subsidy was bad and tax concession was good.
University Vice Chancellor P.K. Michael Tharakan, Pro Vice Chancellor A.P. Kuttykrishnan, district panchayat president K.A. Sarala, university union chairperson J.C. Thejaswini, Academic Committee convener V. Sivadasan, Syndicate member P. Babu Anto and organising committee co-ordinator A. Sudha were present at the session.
