Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan was forced to resign under sustained public pressure, but BJP leaders continue to celebrate his tenure rather than grapple with the serious concerns raised during the youth movement. The Wire’s Jahnavi Sen was joined by Saroj Giri, Associate Professor of Political Science at Delhi University, and Surajit Mazumdar, Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, to talk about what really ails the education system, what should be done, and why students’ voices can’t be suppressed.

Read the full transcript of the conversation below.

Jahnavi Sen: Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of The Wire Wrap. I’m Jahnavi Sen. In the weeks since former Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned after sustained pressure and a youth movement across the country, the concerns raised have refused to die down. Particularly questions have been raised around the role of law enforcement during the protests and especially the use of pellet guns. The opposition has said that Union Home Minister Amit Shah must come to parliament and answer these questions as they fall directly under his jurisdiction. Meanwhile, the government’s seriousness about a promise made to leaders of the Cockroach Janata Party that no legal action would be taken against those involved in the student movement appears to be also under question. While state governments have said that they will not be acting on these FIRs they have filed. Student movements say that people continue to be summoned to police stations and one young woman in Noida is facing an FIR because of words she used about the prime minister.

Meanwhile, in both houses of parliament, the BJP has pushed through a bill around paper leaks. This was not a bill that the protesters had asked for, but the Narendra Modi regime has said that this enhanced punishment will ensure that paper leaks do not take place in the future. One of the things we have noticed after Pradhan’s resignation was the way BJP leaders have loaded him and his tenure as Education minister, particularly around the implementation of the National Education Policy. This is a policy that has been critiqued for the way it increases the centralization of education in India.

With me today, I have two people who have been deeply associated with India’s public education system before and during this movement. Saroj Giri, who’s associate professor at Delhi University, teaches political science and Surajit Mazumdar, who’s a professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Thank you both so much for being here today.

Surajit Mazumdar: Thank you. Thank you.

Jahnavi Sen: Now the immediate trigger for this movement was the paper leak in the NEET medical entrance exam and this is an exam that’s conducted by the National Testing Agency, an agency set up just in 2017 precisely for this purpose. conducting this kind of centralised large-scale examination which the government said the CBSC was no longer able to do properly, and this kind of centralisation is something that is further pushed by the NEP. I want to talk to both of you a little bit moving further back from these protests. What has been happening around education with this push for centralisation? What are the effects it has?

Surajit Mazumdar: Well, I think, one thing is clear that if you look at the nature of participation in the protest and the scale and width of that participation, it’s quite clear that the NEET leakage issue was only a trigger and there’s a larger concern with the state of affairs in particular with relation to education. So I think the crisis as far as education is concerned has three main dimensions to it. One is that you had in the last two decades a very massive expansion of participation of young people in the education process from school to higher education and particularly with regard to higher education. There’s been a significant increase in the enrolment and the proportion of young people who are going, however proportionate to that, there has not been an expansion of public investment in education. In fact, public investment in education has struggled to retain the 4% level it had achieved by 19 in the early ’90s. So, there’s been a significant amount of privatisation of education which includes private educational institutions increase in cost of public education as well as a whole large private tuition industry that has also grown which has raised the cost of education for people and which of course is a new way in which inequality and access to education is being constructed.

On the other side, the aspirations that are driving this large increase in enrolment is that people see education as the only possible route to any kind of a reasonable career because the other options that are available are jobs not available or of course at extremely low wages which are a pittance. But the system’s capacity to satisfy those aspirations is shrinking. So, the increasing gap between the scale of people who are entering particularly higher education and seeking careers which are commensurate with that education and the actual availability of those. This is the second dimension of the crisis and the consequences of this contradiction are being felt in the entire process in between.

So, the process of education itself in different ways is coming under these two processes. On one hand increasing pressure on students. So, you are not any longer educating yourself to develop your abilities to find the best way in which you can contribute to society. you are basically trying to seek the few opportunities and you’re in a constant process of competition to achieve success in those limited opportunities that are available. So, there’s this increasing pressure on students yet you don’t have those aspirations being satisfied and the way of trying to control this contradiction has involved this increasing centralisation. NEP was only in a sense accelerating a process that was already underway. It accelerated that process of privatization and accelerated that process of centralisation because somehow the government had to try and control the consequences of this contradiction and this movement which and the large participation in it was in a sense a reflection of the fact as to what can happen if this contradiction goes on developing. It is dangerous for the order which is trying to keep this state of affairs going. And therefore, in a sense education is being destroyed, also to emancipate it of any potential of playing a positive role in the transformations that are necessary if these aspirations are to be satisfied.

So, I think the crisis is quite widespread and people feel it in different ways and this movement has suddenly given expression to what people have seen from their own experience without necessarily having a systematic critique of it. From their own experience they can see what kind of conditions it is creating for them and that’s what has found expression in this movement.

Jahnavi Sen: Is there anything you’d like to add to that? The roots of this movement?

Saroj Giri: Well, not specifically, not exactly the roots of this movement I would say, but just one comment on the education- public education system is, it is so true as he rightly pointed out that there is so much of people entering the institutions you know, and definitely the volume of people as well as I don’t know the rate at which they are entering.

If you have some metrics, I’m sure you can see that enormous numbers of people are coming into institutions and the institutions are of course not able to cater because of lack of spending and all of that. But I think related to that or I should say a more qualitative kind of problem there which is going on is I think regardless of the inability of the infrastructure to cater to the students to give them even basic facilities or even run the exams properly, I think somewhere those who actually join the institutions they realise is in so many ways. you know, they realise that the system or the state or the institutions whatever you want to call it is not really investing anything qualitative in them and here it looks like to me that – take for example the exit policy which is there in the BA the four-year programme and all of that – the fact that there’s so much of focus on exit. Which means that you are treating the education system, the institutions, as a kind of a conveyor belt to rush them into joining the contractualised workforce, the precariat. The institutions are just a kind of an alibi, just a kind of a lame excuse to actually quickly throw them into the precariat working force, and somewhere these youth, the students are realising this, that that they are not being given anything.

And there is the number of exams that they have increased in the NEP. Earlier, you had an end semester exam and then internal assessment. Now there’s continuous assessment. If you want to do continuous assessment, the very term ‘continuous’ shows that means you should have the requisite faculty-student ratio, you should have the infrastructure. So many exams are there now in that one semester, and there’s a lot of pressure on teachers. Students are also realising that these exams are just nothing, they are just some metrics. These are like biometrics only, the exam has become like biometrics. So students last year, when the NEP first syllabus kicked in, students are opposing that we have too many exams and these exams are like nothing. These are like just empty things, you know. So, I think that discontent is also coming not because they have been actually denied the infrastructure in some material sense, but also they are realising that it is a kind of a systemic abuse. You are not in investing anything called education. You are not imparting knowledge. You are not really inculcating anything. So, in that sense you are treating them as just ready to join the precariat workforce. And I think that anger is there within them.

Jahnavi Sen: Taking off from what you said about basically just throwing them into this labour force where, what are the kinds of jobs you’re getting? They are extremely precarious. It’s extremely gigified, the entire economy. You have fears around AI or if they’re not fears, then your job is to train AI. In this........

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