Prioritise Professional Course

Editorial:
The news that Medical Council of India proposes to slash intake at the Sikkim Manipal Institute of Medical Sciences by half [down from a difficultly earned 100 students per batch to 50] is unfortunate not just for the institute, but also for the country as a whole because it reflects a warped sense of priorities among the planners. India needs more doctors, not less. If the in-take has been slashed because the institute lacks infrastructure, then the institute needs to be pulled up more severely because it has been around for far too long to still be found wanting. If that is not the case, then what is? These will probably come to light in the coming days, but the reduction in the number of professional seats is a worrying sign, as mentioned, not just for Sikkim but the nation at large and requires a serious consideration by the policy makers [and not just in the context of fitting in more quotas].

Turning to Sikkim, the State made the right beginning some years ago on higher education matters by starting institutes for with medical sciences, engineering and polytechnics. Pressure from the students has forced the State Government to open more degree colleges, but the priority for Sikkim has to remain institutes which equip students with job-skills. This, by no means should be considered as suggesting that “regular degree courses” are not important or any less significant. The focus on education is distorted all over India and there is no need for Sikkim to repeat the same mistakes if they can be as easily avoided. There is nothing wrong per se with colleges that offer “plain graduation courses”. Things start getting complicated when the institutions which do so [like the colleges here] do little to excite the thirst for higher learning among the students. A simple BA or a BSc degree is no longer something that can get one even within sniffing distance of decent employment. Of course, the purpose of education should not be employment alone, but what cannot be ignored is the fact that the existing institutions in Sikkim offering such courses rarely produce candidates who take their education further even into the post-graduation domain. And in the case of those who are interested to do so, only in the very rare instances do the institutions provide them with the grooming that can take the students to institutions of repute for further education. The mediocrity on offer leads to a situation where one is left with graduates who, because of the degree, aspire for jobs for which they cannot compete. A State which keeps repeating that unemployment will be the next big problem cannot afford to keep churning out educated people who will almost definitely end up unemployed. This is why the focus on institutes that impart professional courses was a good beginning for Sikkim.
At stake are not just individual futures and careers, but also the development trajectory itself. To underline this fact, compare China and India. The ideologies which run the two countries differ but India and China still have much in common - both are populous countries [No. 1 and 2 on the chart], both are big and populated by a multi-ethnic milieu. Both countries are targeting development and yet China appears to have stolen the march. This is not only because the government in China can bulldoze its policies on the people. China’s continued success in world trade is also because it has more professionals on the field to back its aspirations. Professionals are produced by the educational system and let’s see how the performances stack up. China produces far fewer graduates than India – 18,77,492 a year as against India’s 24,60,00 [figures of 2008 vintage]. And yet, it produces far more professional graduates than India does. Every year, 6,44,000 engineers enter the Chinese market against the 1,55,000 in India; 1,11,000 people become doctors in China every year while only 25,000 earn such a degree in India; surprisingly for a communist regime, China also produces more management graduates than India – 2,81,000 against India’s 64,000. So what does India produce? Simple graduates, called “non-professional” graduates in educational parlance. Where China gets 1.73 lakh Science graduates a year, India churns out 5.4 lakh. The difference hikes up with Humanities which spew out 11.5 lakh graduates in India against 5 lakh in China. If quality was guaranteed, the tables could have turned, but fact remains that India has only a handful of institutes of any real worth in these fields, as the rush for the B.Com course at a Delhi college recently proved. The real India lives in the rural belt and this section needs more doctors and engineers, and yet, the educational policy sees to it that only a very small number are prepared each year. There is no logical explanation for this. But logical reasoning has never been a strong attribute of our planners who come from a select pool too distanced from the country to understand what its people need. Sikkim, by contrast, has a substantially healthy number of institutes of offering professional courses. It even has a Directorate for Capacity Building and Livelihood Schools in every constituency. It will need to ensure quality courses now and provide matching infrastructure. It is here that the picture turns gloomy. Performance of the livelihood schools and its courses have been erratic and the infrastructure poor [as in the case of CCCT at Chisopani]. These need to be corrected.