THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The recent Supreme Court decision of appointing the Salman Khurshid Committee to look into the capitation fee culture in the engineering and medical colleges has brought back into the limelight the deteriorating education system in India.
In a country where every parent has an obsession of making his/her child an engineer or a doctor, this scenario should come as no surprise. If a student happens to fare well in his class 10 examination, it is ineluctable that he be put in either of the two ‘boxes’. The girls can be put into the ‘doctor’ box, and the boys usually find themselves within the ‘engineer’ box!
There starts the rat race, less among the students, and more among the proud parents. The tag of a professional degree embellishes not just the student but also his family, who consider it as their ‘status symbol’.
As a result, the parents are ready to spend a fortune to ensure a seat for their ward in a professional college. This can explain the reason behind the mushrooming of private professional colleges at the nook and corner of every city today. Altogether, India has more than 5000 engineering colleges presently. Do we really need so many?
With education being increasingly concentrated in the hands of an ‘elite’ group, it has been reduced to the status of a business these days. In a college where umpteen number of seats remain vacant even after the admission procedure, ‘selling out’ of the seats, as if it were an auction, is not a rare sight today. So the rich and influential secure them, while the poor meritorious students are left with nothing.
The parents remain smug thinking that they have secured their child’s future by buying him a seat for a professional degree course. But they hardly think of the plight of the thousands of unemployed professional graduates in India. So, there is no gainsaying the fact that an ornamental professional degree is not the gateway to success. It is high time the parents removed this fallacy from their minds.
Anything less than a professional course is always considered infra dig. Being an English literature student, I know it better than anyone else. Most of the time, the young minds are advised by their elders to pursue a course which will yield them a happy life. As a result, they put their passion on the back-burner and focus on their profession. (Question: Can’t passion fetch you a profession?) Who knows how many Mozarts, Chris Browns, and M.F.Hussains have been stifled in this joust!
Change starts with oneself. If the craving for engineering and medical courses in India is trimmed, the culture of capitation fees could peter out. As author Emily Dickinson put it, “If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves.”