We were meant to live

On January 1, 2017, I wrote a blog post (Take notes: It's 2017!), which is one of my favourite posts. Part of the reason is that the post went on to become one of my highly read posts till then, but also another reason was that it was my first post about something I was truly passionate about.

Today, an Instagram story of one of my friends made me revisit the post. The story was an appeal to the students of Delhi University to support a strike by the Delhi University Teachers' Association organized against recent policies by the Central Government. I hadn't previously given much thought to the Government's decision to grant autonomy to various Universities in the country, and I hadn't thought about what would be the repercussions of the decision. However, the story went on to list out some of the adverse effects, which prompted me to do some further reading into it.

Here's the gist of what it is. The Government of India has decided that it will be granting full autonomy to 62 higher educational institutes in the country. This means that they get to do whatever they want, provided they don't ask for money from the University Grants Commission. Therefore, for the University to sustain itself financially, it would increase the fees paid by the students and/or get private players to fund courses offered by the University.

While there are indeed people in India who can very well afford to pay higher fees, for the vast chunk of India's population, higher education is still barely affordable. Therefore, further increase of fees is going to put higher education out of the reach of many. This is going to be disastrous for India in the long run. India's population is highly young, and in the coming decades it will be crucial for India to build a qualified workforce. By limiting higher education to one segment of the population, we are not doing that. Secondly, for many families aspiring to rise out of poverty, education used to provide that way out. This will no longer be possible for such families, who are going to be stuck in a cycle of poverty.

Getting private players, which would primarily be industries, to support courses would be counter productive to higher education, especially for the science and humanities streams. This is where my blog post of last year seems almost prophetic. The world is moving towards an obsession of productivity. The industry is only going to support courses that would directly benefit them or their industry in the short term. Hence, STEM courses would easily get funds. However, pure sciences and humanities, which advance the learning of humanity in general, and thereby lead to better understanding of ourselves and better functioning of society, would not be appealing to these private players.

You may well argue that humanities and pure sciences are quite useless because they aren't productive. To respond to that would be another blog post, however, in short, to be 'merely productive' is to the role of machines, but we as humans, are meant to live for so much more. At least I'd like to believe so (and Switchfoot would agree with me ;)