JNU violence | The importance of keeping higher education affordable

Representative Image

Biswajit Dhar

January 5 was undoubtedly the darkest day for 50-year old Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the top-ranked university of the country. About 50-70 armed men attacked the students and faculty members who were protesting against a sudden and steep increase in hostel fees — for nearly 50 per cent of the students this move has raised an existential problem as their families would be unable to afford the fee hike and they would be forced to discontinue their studies.

When this proposal of fee hike was made by the university administration, no one would have imagined that this issue would assume such terrifying proportions. Over the decades, many such piquant problems have been handled in a matured manner by the stakeholders in the university, the students, teachers and the administration, in a spirit of accommodation and appreciation of the concerns of each other. However, as weeks went by, it became clear that the past traditions have become irrelevant under the present dispensation.

The issue that the JNU students have been raising for the past 70 days, must be contextualised as this has got lost in the allegations and counter allegations. Simply put, the JNU students are asking a fundamental question to all the right-thinking people in India: can’t the children in this country expect their government to provide them affordable higher education?

What makes this question so very relevant is the fact that more than 70 years after it attained political independence, just one out of four children in India is able to go to a university. In 2018, India’s gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education was stuck at 28 per cent; it has barely moved since 2015. There is an embarrassing gap between us and some of our peer countries, including China and Brazil, where the corresponding figure is more than 50 per cent.

The biggest irony for India is that decades after it has been conclusively established that education is one of the fundamental prerequisites for empowerment and development, individuals and institutions have to constantly agitate to make the government pay heed to the importance of bringing higher education to the masses. While the quality and direction of political discourses in India raises serious questions on its intention on the question of empowerment, there is hardly any justified reason why a government that had once made development as its prime targets should continue to deprive the citizens of higher education.

There seems to the singular lack of understanding that one of the most significant reasons for India’s inability to reduce its development gap with its peer countries is that the country has been producing human capital of much inferior quality. A large majority of the youth faces a bleak future since there is a hiatus between their skill sets and the market demand. This situation could have been quickly turned around, as had happened in China, through increased public provisioning of higher education.

This is undoubtedly the best bet for bringing the excluded into the centres of higher learning and to provide them the opportunities that they must have. Instead, the message being sent out from the precincts of JNU is that many more of our youngsters would be excluded from getting access to higher education. With such policies of exclusion being heaped on the citizens, at what pace would India realise the goal of a $5-trillion economy?

A disquieting development we have been witnessing with considerable unease is the systematic assault on one of our last surviving commons, namely the university campuses. These have been the spaces where generations of youngsters have constantly invoked the famous lines of Rabindranath Tagore: “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high …” JNU has been one of those great commons where a healthy culture of free debate and discussion was the recipe for ensuring that the community within was not “broken up into fragments” by “narrow … walls”.

For the past few years, this refreshing character of JNU has been consistently under attack. The dark night of January 5 was an attempt to break this character of the university completely. However, as the new dawn emerged, JNU stood up yet again to announce to the world that though bruised, the resolve of the university to stand by its values of upholding equality and justice cannot be broken!

Biswajit Dhar is Professor, Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Views are personal.