Dr Manasvi M Kamat
Rajasthan for long received condemnation for being part of BIMARU States, an acronym coined by Ashish Bose in the mid-1980s from the first letters of the names of the Indian States of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and UP. BIMARU has a resemblance to a Hindi word ‘bimar’ meaning “sick” and refers to the poor socio-economic conditions within those states.
Rajasthan is now seemingly working overtime to shed the bizarre tag. The news that Rajasthan has been ranked second in the School Education Quality Index 2019 by the NITI Aayog brought in big cheer. The purpose of the state-level SEQI is to institutionalize a focus on improving education outcomes and was prepared after evaluating 30 indicators in 20 large and eight small states. The report comes as a boost for the state government as the Annual Status of Education Report for 2018-19 released in January 2019 had placed Rajasthan among the bottom five in learning outcomes.
The success of reforms at the school-level has now put the higher education sector in the State to full action. The Rajasthan’s Department of Higher, Technical and Medical Education has 75 universities, 3025 institutes, offering 225 degrees and around 9797 courses under its ambit and has realised its role in bringing about the quantitative and qualitative improvement in the higher education in the State. Higher spending on social sectors including that of education helps harness the benefits of the demographic bulge.
Over the years, Rajasthan has made significant progress on access to education, but its quality has always been a concern. A good beginning has been made to achieve the goal of revamping the curriculum, by urging all the colleges and universities to come up with a new and modern curriculum under the Choice-based Credit System (CBCS) in their institutions, making the classes more interesting for the students to attend.
These efforts received a shot in the arm with the TEQIP, a Scheme of MHRD and World Bank, providing Rs 10 crore to each engineering college of Rajasthan and Rs 20 crore to Rajasthan Technical University, Kota for enhancement of quality and up-gradation of the curriculum of technical education. In the last few months, the department has arranged many training seminars, conferences for improvement of pedagogy.
About Rs 25 crore will be spent in the current financial year on modern labs, computers and research facilities by which more than 10,000 students of technical institutes will be benefitted with better facilities in education, research and consultancy.
With an objective to prepare good academicians, the department has started an induction training programme for newly appointed assistant professors. Initiatives like free coaching classes for regular students of the colleges help the department in making the education sector vibrant and result oriented. Subject matter experts in the department are involved in preparing e-content for these classes. The department is also opting for skill education initiatives along with regular studies.
In a vast-spread State like Rajasthan, the issue of transfer of faculty and staff in government colleges is always a big challenge. Realising that the State presently doesn’t have any policy for transfers and they are mostly politically motivated the department is in the final stages of coming out with a policy on transfer of teachers based on an innovatively evolved ‘grading system’.
As per the new transfer policy, every teacher would get scores on a scale of 100 purely on the basis of their performance. The parameters are like performance in the last three years, attendance, results, reforms introduced by them, district, state and national-level awards, and results in his/her subject with additional points on the basis of gender and physical disability. The higher the score on the given scale, the chances of transfer at the desired place will be more.
The new policy has provisions to provide relief to single mothers, separated and divorced women and those suffering from chronic illness. The transfer policy also has a provision for deploying female teachers in ‘for-girl’ schools and colleges.
In another initiative titled ‘Commissioner Ki Class’, the Education Commissioner will engage classes in government colleges to prepare students for competitive exams while the ‘Rajasthan Healthier Youth and Moral Education’ (RHYME) is meant for students of all the private and government colleges in Rajasthan, where health issues and moral values will be discussed.
For the young girls, the government has announced a programme titled ‘Girls Empowerment and Mentoring’ (GEM) aimed to focus on the overall development of girls especially revolving around health and safety issues. Women teachers are planned to be trained to mentor the girls.
The State government is determined to provide quality education to students and for this an ‘Administrative Efficiency and Progressive Learning Effort’ (AEPLE) programme has been initiated by involving principals and senior faculty members of colleges. For sports enthusiasts, various inter-state games and sports tournaments are planned to be organised under the ‘Arjun Drishti Programme’ (ADP) to provide better opportunities to students interested in sport.
Following the footsteps of the successful intervention of ‘Pratiyogita Dakshta Programme’ (PDP) in government colleges, similar classes are planned to be organised in private colleges, which will be available to students for free to prepare them for competitive examinations.
Last October (2019), the Higher Education Department of Rajasthan announced a ‘Scheme of Ranking for Colleges’ in the State. The main aim of the ranking system is to design development plans for the colleges as per their ranks of around 252 government colleges of the 33 districts in the State. The evaluation as planned will be based on 130 points on various factors which will include: assessment of colleges in teaching system, student-aid system, institutional management, qualitative evaluation of faculty members, development opportunities to faculty members, social development of the institutions and exemplary works by partnerships and institutions.
The college ranking initiative by the State Government is being taken keeping in view the need for continuous evaluation and preparation of plans based on the ranking reports. The development plans will ultimately aim for better results in
colleges.
The vision of Rajasthan is to transform the State as a thriving hub of higher and technical education in the country and a good beginning has been marked. After all, well begun is half done.
