Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Wire App. I'm Janavi Sen. In the weeks since former Union Education Minister Dhanendra 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 Kokoro Janta 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 lauded 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 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 is Associate Professor at Delhi University, teaches political science and Surojeet Mazumdar, who is Professor of Economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Thank you both so much for being here today. Thank you. Thank you. 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 Authority, an agency set up just in 2017, precisely for this purpose of conducting this kind of centralized large scale examination, which the government said the CBSA was no longer able to do properly. And this kind of centralization is something that is further pushed by the NAP. 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 centralization, what are the effects it has? Would you like to start? Yeah, please. Yeah, please. 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 need issue was leakage, it shows 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 have had in the last two decades a very massive expansion of participation of people young people in the education process from school to higher education and particularly with regard to higher education there has been a significant increase in the enrollment and the proportion of young people who are there. 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 in the early 90s. So there's been a significant amount of privatization of education, which includes private education 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 enrollment 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 wages which are which are a pittance. So 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 the 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 are in constant process of competition to achieve success in those limited opportunities that are available. So there is this increasing pressure on students, yet you do not have those aspirations being satisfied and the way of trying to control this contradiction has involved this increasing centralization. NEP was only in a sense accelerating a process that was already underway. It accelerated that process of privatization and accelerates that process of centralization because somehow the government has to try and control the consequences of this contradiction. And this movement which had 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 emaciated 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. Is there anything you would like to add to that? The roots of this movement? 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 you 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 should I 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, is I think somewhere you know those who actually join the institutions they they realize in so many ways you know they realize that uh you know they are just being uh they like the the system or the state or the institutions whatever you want to call it is not really investing anything qualitative in them you know and here it looks like to me that uh take for example the exit policy which is there in the BA, the four-year program and all of that, you know. 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 contractualized workforce you know like the precariat The precariat workforce is like so the it feels like the institutions are just a kind of an alibi you know just a kind of a lame excuse to actually quickly throw them there into the precariat kind of working force you know And somewhere, you know, these people are realizing, the youth, the students, they are realizing this, that this is not giving anything. You know, and the number of exams that they have increased in the NEP. This is, earlier, okay, you had an end semester exam and then an internal assessment and now this continuous assessment. If you do want to do continuous assessment, the very term continuous shows that, that means, you should have the requisite faculty-student ratio. the infrastructure should have this that and this book review and so many exams are there now in that one semester and there's a lot of pressure on teachers and students are also realizing that these exams are just nothing they are just like some metrics you know 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 this content is also coming not because they have been actually say denied the infrastructure in just like some material sense but also they are realizing 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 you know inculcating anything So, in that sense you are kind of treating them as just you know ready to join the precariat workforce. And I think that anger is there within them. Taking off from what you said about basically just throwing them into this labor force where what are the kinds of jobs you are getting, they are extremely precarious, it's extremely gigified the entire economy, you have you know fears around AI or if they are not fears then your job is to train AI. In this situation do you think is it possible or does it make sense, is it useful to try and draw straight lines between this movement that we have seen and quite large scale protests we have seen over the last several months across the country from workers and different labour groups. There were of course the ones right outside Delhi that got a lot of attention around Noida but we have seen such movements across the country over the last several months in different pockets. Do you think in some ways the issues that you are raising, even if perhaps not what we saw in the slogans and things like that, very much would align in those ways? I think once the education system, the institutions, they lose the respect of the students themselves, then students will act the way they did. So all these profanities that everybody's talking about, and the system is also kind of, they feel also not just
