Dr Manasvi M Kamat
The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) currently celebrating its Golden Jubilee year is once again in the midst of a controversy. The issue hotly discussed is whether institutions like JNU are a waste of the taxpayers’ money.
The controversy started when the JNU released a new hostel manual indicating a revision of fees after 19 years. The students took to the streets against the administration’s move and questioned the proposed 600 per cent fee hike. They argued that the hike will make education unaffordable for them.
Subsequently, a fierce faceoff erupted between the students of the JNU and the administration once again bringing the former at the forefront of the news and set off debates on the justifiability of the fee hike.
New Delhi-based JNU is a public university established in 1969 with the aim of bringing ‘frontier disciplines and newer perspectives for old disciplines to the Indian university system’. The aim was to create ‘scientific socialism’ by providing accessibility to students and primarily from the weaker sections of society. JNU is currently placed between 600 and 800 slots in the World University Rankings and is the Second-Best University in the country as per NIRF ranking 2019 with several Nobel laureates, politicians, diplomats, artists, academics, and scientists as its distinguished alumni.
While traditionally JNU focused on the liberal arts and applied sciences, it has diversified towards engineering and management studies in recent years with an MBA introduced in 2019. JNU has a fiercely competitive admission system. In 2018, for instance, there were 1,08,192 applicants were vying for around 3,000 places with the PG in International Relations attracting close to 200 applicants.
As per the 2017-18 annual report of JNU, 43 per cent of its students are from lower and middle-income groups with an average monthly family income of less than Rs 12,000. Thus it is true that the brightest among the socio-economically deprived masses of the country see JNU as a game-changer of their destiny. It seems to be natural that the students were paying Rs 10 per month for a shared hostel room and Rs 20 for a single-occupancy hostel room at present now having to pay Rs 300 and Rs 600 respectively after the hike will protest. Although the university has rolled back part of the fee hike for below poverty line students, the bone of contention is the Rs 1,700 service charge that students have been asked to pay for utilities like water, gas and electricity.
When JNU was established it was the time when government heavily invested in education. Since then the successive governments carried on with the same philosophy. The fee revision considered after so many years seems to be a lot steeper. In comparison to the JNU, other central universities in the surrounding like the Delhi University (DU) and Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) charge anywhere between Rs 2,500-3,000 for hostel accommodation even after subsidising the costs. The administration, therefore, aimed to bring in some parity.
Unfortunately over the years, the JNU did very little to ensure its self-sufficiency and cover its ends through self-enforced means. The gap between academic receipts and expenditure, therefore, widened over the years compared to other publicly funded universities like the Benares Hindu University (BHU), the Delhi University (DU) and other autonomous institutions in the country. Based on the NAAC Self-Study Reports for 2016-17 and 2017-18 it is found that the academic receipts of JNU were just Rs 7 crore corresponding to the total expenditure of Rs 518 crore. The expenditure thus works out to be 74 times higher in comparison to the receipts and self-explains the extent of lower fees and over subsidisation at JNU.
For the same years, the expenditure of the BHU has been 20 times the receipts while it was 23 times for the DU. In the case of IIM Ahmedabad this was conversely true. The academic receipts for IIMA were 1.30 times higher than total expenditure. In case of IIMs and IITs, it is not that the total expenditure is recovered through student fees alone but these institutions are a perfect example of how resources could be raised externally and overdependence on government funding reduced. JNU failed to do this.
Higher education in India is plagued by three major problems -- issue of unequal access, less funding and faulty allocation. The completion rate for secondary school in India is around 65 per cent according to Unified District Information on School Education (UDISE). However, for higher education, India in 2018-19 had a Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) of 26.3 per cent as per the AISHE. For the SC and the ST students, the GER is as poor as 14.9 and 5.5 per cent respectively. The data shows the extent of unequal access and opportunity for higher education.
The government has set up an ambitious GER target of 50 per cent to be achieved by the year 2035. If the data that more than 75 per cent of India’s population has an average family monthly income of less than Rs 12,000, reduced public funding and consequentially increasing the fee component will exclude a vast section of students from vulnerable segments of society from going in for higher education. The proposed fee hike is therefore unjustified in the present context.
The other two issues are about funding. Though since 2004 it was said that India should spend around 6 per cent of its GDP on education, the share of the Union Budget allocated to education fell from 4.14 per cent in 2014-15 to about 3.4 per cent in 2019-20. Also, the problem in India is about the elitist institutions and some disciplines like the STEM getting a bigger pie of allocated budget at the cost of subjects in Humanities, Languages, Pure Arts and Social Sciences. As of 2018, a little over 50 per cent of the Union government’s higher education funds were given to the handful IITs, IIMs and NITs reportedly having just 3 per cent of the country’s students while the remaining 97 per cent in 856 institutions got the remaining funds.
The JNU row teaches us some important lessons. The onus must be on higher education institutions to raise its own resources, but not certainly from fees alone. More importantly, institutions should set their expenditure priorities right and give up on its one-fee-for-all approach. It is also absolutely necessary that public spending for higher education must be raised as the lower-income and the socially deprived groups have limited access to education. Given that education is a constitutional right in India we must understand that public funding of higher education is a wise investment, and not certainly a waste of taxpayers’ money.
