Last week, Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar lamented a “new disease among children – that of going abroad”. Dhankhar believed this constituted a massive brain drain and “forex drain” for India, apart from the loss of a “bright future” students would have enjoyed had they chosen to stay behind in India itself.
This is not the first criticism of foreign education by the BJP-led Union government. In 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi infamously claimed that “hard work is more powerful than Harvard”. The jibe was targeted at Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen for his criticism of demonetisation. However, the sentimentality of decrying experts and foreign universities was clear.
The tendency to demonise those who leave India for education – not necessarily to abandon the country – diverts attention from the troubling state of Indian higher education under the BJP.
In a snapshot, the BJP’s tenure in government has seen a spiralling increase in graduate unemployment, with the government’s own survey pointing out that one in two Indian graduates are unemployable right out of college. Student suicides have been growing at an alarming rate of 4% annually, surpassing overall suicide trends and even population growth rates.
In repeated global education rankings of educational institutions, Indian universities fail to make a mark. The government slashed funding for the University Grants Commission by 61% in the last budget.
Apart from this litany of failures, two issues loom large: the curbing of academic freedom and the growing commercialisation of education.
In the past ten years and counting, academic freedom and the independence of academia have been under severe threat. The first major attack and onslaught was on the purported bastion of anti-India activity, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
In 2020, as the country stood firmly against the communal and Islamophobic reality of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, JNU was attacked by right-wing goons. This direct onslaught on a centrally funded institution known for its academic excellence was conducted under the gross negligence and, some would argue, tacit support, of police forces.
Centrally funded and controlled universities like JNU have had influences of right-wing control creep in, with questionable and biased appointments to influential positions. For instance, the appointment of M. Jagadesh Kumar as JNU’s vice chancellor in 2016 began a series of controversial and concerning changes. He had once suggested installing an army tank in campus “so that students can be reminded of the sacrifices and valour of the soldiers”.
JNU is only an example of the systematic and continuous onslaught on public universities under the BJP. Every other week, there are reports of universities being starved of funds or of attempts to destabilise the environment through the BJP’s extended network of organisations like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.
Private universities haven’t been left far behind either. My alma mater, Ashoka University, in 2021 became the target of the government, with indirect attempts to stifle the freedom and independence of faculty.
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During my time there as an undergraduate, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, who continues to be an influential and often critical voice against the BJP, was forcibly made to resign. He admitted that the university’s founders felt he was becoming a “political liability” to the university. There were also reports of the government’s pressure on the university with threats of jeopardising its expansion plans.
Recently, the reputed Tata Institute of Social Sciences, which relies heavily on government funding as well, had planned to terminate several members of its faculty – this was later rescinded.
The argument of Indian students looking abroad for education isn’t a result of the threatening state of academic freedom in India alone. It is also a symptom of the desperation of the millions of students who fail to secure a place in Indian universities.
The centralised method of entrance examinations institutes a rat race for few seats in universities. From law to engineering to medicine, access to most affordable public education or government-funded seats in private universities is subject to performance in various competitive examinations.
Under this government, these exams have been severely compromised by several allegations of paper leaks and mass cheating. The ‘leakage sarkar’ has made these scarce seats even more inaccessible for the average Indian.
Further, private universities with criminally high admission and tuition fees have only grown under this government. The growth in private universities has far outstripped that in public ones. The All India Survey on Higher Education reported that while 58 state universities came up between 2016-2021, there were an astonishing 132 new private state universities created.
Further, the survey also reportedly indicated that the overall enrolment in private universities surged between 2014 and 2022 by 108.7%, contributing 39.6% to the increase in aggregate enrolment.
With unreliable and impossible-to-crack examinations and expensive private education, students have been forced to seek out foreign education in unfamiliar and unexpected territory.
For instance, consider Indian students pursuing medicine in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The costs are significantly lesser here than in Indian private education. Education opportunities in these countries are less than ideal, with mediocre quality and limited opportunities for future employment. Students are forced to acclimatise themselves to unfamiliar territory to be able to secure a degree.
The romanticisation and demonisation of those who choose to study abroad takes away from the reality of what students abroad face. Several surveys and personal anecdotes attest to the mental health burden of stress, depression and anxiety faced by students studying abroad.
It would certainly serve the vice president and the Indian administration to focus on fixing the broken Indian higher education system and recognise its series of ailments. Rather than chiding students, it is time to focus on their valid concerns, and actually work to make their future brighter.
Amaan Asim is the national chairperson for the research department of the National Students’ Union of India and is a student at Oxford University.