The user of a product need not be an expert in manufacturing the product as well. Two of the world's largest electro-medical equipment manufacturers - GE of the USA and Siemens of Germany - are known as engineering companies and not healthcare institutions. Engineering and healthcare are two totally different areas of science. Students require different aptitude or natural ability and liking to become a good engineer or a doctor. Medical colleges are always attached to hospitals everywhere and not to technology institutes. And, they should remain so. It is not clear what good it will serve to medical students from sharing the campus with engineering students.

The HRD ministry is into all kinds of wrong experiments. The move to have a common campus for both medical and engineering students may be seen as just one of them.

The experiment with India's education system, a fall-out of the 1991 economic reform, is focused more on cost saving on the part of the government on higher education than enhancing its quality standard. Post-reform, education is being promoted as an industry. The buzzword is privatization. Private colleges and educational institutions are being awarded deemed university status. A key purpose behind privatization of the education sector is to drastically reduce the government subsidy on education. The policy suits both the union and the state governments. Education comes under the joint list of the Indian constitution. Both central and state governments own and operate schools, colleges and universities. They also run independent education service for teaching staff. Private colleges and institutions affiliated to state universities are partly funded by the University Grants Commission (UGC). The universal primary education run by the government is free and 100 per cent subsidized. Free midday meals are provided to attract poor kids to primary education.

The union budget for 2010-11 provided Rs. 42,036 crore for education, 1.5 per cent more than last year's budgeted expenditure of Rs. 37,000 crore. The rate of increase does not even cover inflation. The size of this year's union budget was raised by 16 per cent to Rs. 11,00,000 crore. Almost the entire growth in expenditure of Rs. 5,000 crore was on account of school education, primary and secondary. The cost of school education was estimated at Rs. 31,000 crore for the current year, which works out less than 50 per cent of the 2010 Delhi commonwealth games budget. The government expenditure on higher education showed no growth. The divided responsibilities between the centre and the state governments, the absence of a unified education agenda, lack of supervision, poor quality teaching staff, low salaries, politicization of campus, rampant corruption, nepotism, mushrooming private institutions with extremely poor quality instructional facilities and under-qualified teachers, the emergence of a parallel private tuition and coaching system supplying notes and possible question papers among the taught, etc., have ruined the country's education system.

Privatisation of higher education has already opened its ugly teeth as thousands of dishonest businessmen, politicians and underworld dons have entered this lucrative business with new institutes mushrooming almost daily all over the country. For instance, the Uttarakhand capital, Dehradun, once a well-known hub for quality school education, has witnessed an exponential growth of technical and management education centres in the last 10 years. Today, the valley has more institutes than qualified teachers and the poaching of teachers is a routine practice among education industry barons in the region. Even the so-called elite institutions such as IITs, IIMs and medical colleges are no longer the same old organizations of excellence. Good teaching doctors, teaching engineers, management teachers, scientists and technologists have become rare breed. Poor salaries, limited growth opportunities and lower job satisfaction level compared to what are available in the private and corporate sectors are keeping top talents out of teaching profession. The recruitment quota for students on caste lines overlooking the merit factor in higher education is indirectly pulling down the instructional quality as undeserving entrants often fail to understand and absorb lectures and presentations by teachers and external resource persons.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the latest report of the 'Times Higher Education' (THE) global survey and its world university ratings did not find mention of India among the world's 200 top universities. The USA occupied the No. 1 position with as many as 72 universities and institutions, including all of the top five in the world. The United Kingdom held a distant second position with 29 universities, which is highly commendable considering its size and population. Both the Oxford and Cambridge Universities were jointly ranked sixth more on account of heritage and global reputation than academic excellence. Among other countries, Germany's score was 14, the Netherland's 10, Canada's 9, China's 6 and South Korea 4 in the list of 200. China's Peking University ranked the 37th in the world, the highest by an Asian university. These university rankings have, however, nothing to do with the government spending on education and availability of local talents. Some of the most qualified teachers and students in top US universities are, for instance, Indians or people of Indian origin (PIO).

Recent studies across OECD countries reveal that more than the state expenditure on education, it is the management of education which determines the quality standard. A US department of education study show that how the generally poor level of management in primary and secondary schools has resulted in dismal performance among the teen aged. It says about 30 million American adults are 'functionally illiterate'. Another report says the USA ranks 35th in the mathematics literacy rate among 15 year olds out of 57 countries. However, when it comes to higher education the USA occupies the world's top position. The USA spends 3.1 per cent of GDP on higher education. The expenditure rate as a percentage of GDP in primary and secondary education is nearly uniform among OECD countries, barring Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and the UK, which spend more.

The quality of India's government funded primary education is probably among the worst in the world. Corruption, mismanagement and insatiable private greed on top of an extremely low public allocation on education - less than 0.5 per cent of GDP in primary and secondary school education and about 0.14 per cent of GDP in higher education - are the root causes of India's falling education standard. Lofty ideas, high sounding words and legal provisions such as 'The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009' for all children in the 6-to-14 age group 'based on the principles of equity and non-discrimination' are not going to help. Nor will such idiotic cosmetic surgeries as campus sharing by IITs with medical colleges help raise the standards of India's higher educational institutions. Privatisation of education has further corrupted the government's regulatory framework. Unless education is freed from corruption, its quality will remain substandard. (IPA Service)