Sunday Posts

India is facing a crisis in credibility. Right at the time when the world economy turns south, the Indian leadership continues to fiddle and confuse, and is allowing the country to drift aimlessly. After years of abundant jobs, swelling salaries and cheap credit, suddenly the Indian middle class arrives in the age of redundancies, penny pinching and ever-rising rates of interest: The end of dream may have arrived, so it feels. This may be the time we all feared: This is like putting a car on reverse while zooming ahead at 100mph. Much of the prosperity in India was only the feel-good kind, only a few people did really well. The others read about them and had a feeling of progress. Suddenly, all of that disappointment may all surface, tearing the country apart. Unless, indeed, everyone's attention could be diverted with something compelling. Like a war, perhaps. This is a classic setting for jingoist, misanthropic leader who can find someone to blame. This is not a time for reas...

I wrote about arriving at a break point a couple of weeks ago, and I intend to follow it up with more concrete plans now. I am fast arriving at a point of crisis, when I have started questioning the worth of my day-to-day activities, even if they are financially rewarding. The desire to do something meaningful gets me out of the bed every morning, and after spending twenty years in For-Profit education companies in various sizes and forms, I have started questioning whether I have always been barking up the wrong tree. I have a theory about commercial enterprises - that companies can only make money serving a socially useful purpose - and I shall claim that my early career spent in IT education proved that this was indeed the case. However, as I traveled, I have started discovering the other side of the coin, progressively, encountering in various opportunistic enterprises with business models founded on exploiting arbitrage and extracting the advantages of regulatory failure. I have...

There is an easy way to look at For Profit Higher Education - a huge conspiracy by global capitalists to bring down the last vestiges of the Welfare State. It is a way to make money, as a colleague and a Higher Education Researcher puts it, out of people's aspirations; he implies, but does not say, that this is achieved through selling them unattainable dreams. All profits of private education sector comes from public subsidies, a noted commentator claimed, and projected the public subsidies going to For Profit education sector in the UK as one of the biggest swindles of modern times. The furore in America, about the high default rates of student loan repayments by the students attending For Profit schools, has created a sub-genre of journalism of its own. The critical question then, does For Profit Higher Education play a socially useful role? It may seem idealistic and mundane, but this is important: An industry (the hated word) or the sector (amen!) must have a socially use...

India needs 1500 universities, Kapil Sibal, its Human Resources Minister, muses, and follows it up with some complicated statistical comparison with the United States. This is still a long way to go from its current 564 degree granting institutions. He is obviously making a subtle argument in favour of more private participation, even investments from foreign companies. However, his problem lies elsewhere: The challenge that lies ahead relates to quality, not quantity. None of the Indian universities feature in the global lists, whichever list one may refer to, including even the lists that get published for young universities. Private sector investment isn't going to solve that problem. Not even getting some of world's top universities into India will help: That, if it ever happens, will only create the additional problem that some of India's best institutions, chronically underfunded, will end up losing their star talents, making the problem of quality even worse.  A...

I have written about this before, once rather optimistically ( see here ) and then, after couple of years of emails and dialogues with people who could or could not return, with more caution ( the second article here ). Since then, a number of things have changed, including an worsening of the economic climate worldwide and slowing of growth and employment opportunities in India. In fact, the conversations about India has become significantly downbeat, even despondent these days, and the enthusiasm about return among Indian expats, if the microcosm of a community that I live inside is any reflection, has somewhat waned. Hence, it seemed appropriate to return to the conversation one more time. Admittedly, there is a personal story here. I personally maintain deep links with India and would want to return. My story is somewhat typical: My father lives alone in India, and my brother, who used to live with him allowing me the independence to travel, passed away. I feel worried, guilty...

A new trend in Indian Higher Education is that the big business houses are entering Higher Education sector by setting up schools themselves. Usually, this is to be expected: India's thriving industry requires people, and the Higher Education sector can't provide it, not with the right skill level or in adequate numbers, hence one would expect investments from large employers in propping up higher education. However, as things stand now, the corporate involvement in Higher Ed is driven by commercial considerations and bandwagon effect, everyone thinks it is a good business, rather than skills requirement or philanthropy. While this means shiny new schools and increased private investment in Higher Education, this also brings education within control of India's 'tycoon economy', and may be detrimental to education innovation in the country. It is usual for big employers to support Higher Education: Some of the best universities in the world have been set up with...