Babus in Indian Higher Education
Educational domain in general, higher learning in particular will be meaningless unless educational processes would be filtered through desirable levels of democratic values. Not only is meritocracy a much more contested terrain in India, but the idea that there should be clear links between academic productivity, salaries and tenure, as in China, would meet fierce resistance from a vocal interest group, namely faculty. The University Grants Commission (UGC) rules, that faculty members in public institutions should automatically get promotions based on the length of service and have a common salary structure linked to civil service salaries set by an anachronistic authority called the Pay Commission, have reduced faculty to the status of babus. It is not surprising that so much of higher education in India - both overall regulation and the internal governance of universities - is what Pankaj Chandra, former director of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore, termed "babudom" - a regime of, for and by babus.
It is ironic that regulation and governance of higher education in authoritarian China are far more decentralised than in democratic India. Indeed, one might even say that higher education functions more democratically in China than it does in India, where the UGC (and other regulators) and the human resource development (HRD) bureaucracy have stifled the openness and creativity that are necessary for higher education to flourish. The number of colleges in India increased from 12,806 to 35,539 between 2000-01 and 2011-12, which meant an average of nearly six new colleges a day for more than a decade. The Indian higher education regulatory system has allowed every politician worth his/her name to start a college.
The weak leadership and the dominance of a remarkably small number of individuals in selection and review committees of central higher education institutions and the country's science laboratories, ensures pliability, de facto patron-client relationships and that few openly challenge the system.
Everyone knows this, but can't say it openly because Unless India's higher education system gets rid of the babu mentality - both at the regulatory and at the ministry level as well as within universities - it will betray its promise to its young and to the country's future. At the same time, an alumnus of an IIT has a far greater emotional stake in the success and future of his alma mater than a dozen bureaucrats in the HRD ministry or the selection panels they appoint. The more the HRD ministry gets involved in personnel selection, the more it undermines the governance of universities and leaves itself with little time to focus on its core policy-related goals.
