[Reader-list] Smart cards in higher education

[ravikant]

http://www.hindu.com/2009/12/23/stories/200912235483

*Smart cards in higher education *

Shahid Amin and Shobhit Mahajan

/ The latest flashy proposal of Delhi University — biometric smart cards 
to ensure teacher attendance and reward those who work overtime — 
reminds us of Sanjay Gandhi’s Emergency, certainly not of Harvard Yard 
or Oxford’s dreaming spires. /


A recent piece by an ex-energy adviser on India’s carbon intensity 
reduction holds lessons for our educational CEOs. It makes the point 
that India’s low carbon growth in recent decades has left untouched 500 
million Indians without electricity, and 700 millions who use some sort 
of biomass for the bulk of their domestic energy requirements. The 
lesson is not that we should abjure, mock Gandhi-style, energy-efficient 
gadgets. It is rather that a sub-continental polity like ours can ill 
afford to clone enclaves and islands, surrounded by a stagnant water 
body of disprivileged citizenry.

Quick-fix solutions are being flashed on websites of the HRD Ministry 
and several front-ranking universities. In both instances, there is a 
gesture towards openness and feedbacks from stakeholders and civil 
society. But instead of the responses being placed on the same website — 
creating an open access — these inputs are shredded into files or simply 
ignored.

This seems to be the case with the Ministry’s plan to create 14 world 
class universities, funded by the state but “unencumbered by history or 
culture of the past” — something that no world-class institution would 
dare boast about. The underlying idea is to build islands of excellence 
by relying on “the highly skilled Indian diaspora.” While other publicly 
funded universities – even premier ones like Calcutta and Delhi — are 
clearly hobbled by their sheer size, teacher politics, and professorial 
apathy, the new ‘national’ edifices will simply skip over resident 
Indian talent. The message is that even those who returned home with 
research degrees from world-class universities to put their shoulder to 
the wheel before the new dispensation need not apply.

For their part, older institutions such as Delhi University cannot quite 
effect Bertolt Brecht’s sardonic suggestion: if dissatisfied with the 
existing lot, “elect another people.” For /desi vishwa vidyalayas/, the 
parameters are given: a national intake of students from unequally 
diverse backgrounds and a sudden doubling of enrolments to accommodate 
all categories of reservations. And of course the problematic lot: more 
than 7000 teachers, as with Delhi University, some of them of 
indifferent quality, but a large number of dedicated professionals who 
are responsible for the brand of the university’s flag-ship 
undergraduate Honours courses.

Naturally, our Vice-Chancellors are not immune to the buzz about India 
as an emergent knowledge giant. And so they no longer see their role as 
one of steering an overburdened ship buffeted by the squall of equity, 
access, and quality. For them, it is not the receding horizon that is 
the limit. If they could, they surely would abandon ship and ‘take off’ 
from the crowded deck. As that is not possible, the basic contours of a 
university need to be quickly altered. This, it is argued, will help 
improve our ranking on the international table of world class 
universities. ‘You cannot lift a bucket of water from mid-air; you have 
to lift it from the ground’ — this modern Chinese saying has a lot to 
commend to our educational planners in a hurry, especially those 
advocating a Great Leap to catch up with China.

It is against this background that Delhi University is currently being 
genetically modified by its administrators, to make it conform to the 
highest Ivy League, Oxbridge standards. Its flagship undergraduate 
Honours courses in more than two dozen disciplines, affecting a 100,000 
students in some 80 Colleges, have to be slashed, and retrofitted into 
smaller, 15-week-long semester courses.

The current practice of allowing Honours students to specialise in one 
basic subject, leaving a quarter of the scores to a wide choice from 
specially designed units in other disciplines, is to be replaced by a 
Major and one Minor, from the very point of entry. That in the United 
States an undergraduate is not required to decide on a Major 
straightaway; that there is, in fact, a medley of ‘Minor’ subjects that 
she or he could choose from seems of no consequence. The fluffy mantra, 
“A critical level of knowledge of a second discipline is being 
increasingly realized globally,” is supposed to take care of any criticism.

Clearly a hybrid semester system cannot remedy all that ails India’s 
universities. The vast number of first-generation learners has to be 
enabled to develop core competences; teacher truancy has to be curbed; 
and new pedagogical synergies need to be developed. The latest flashy 
proposal of Delhi University: biometric smart cards to ensure teacher 
attendance (and reward those who work overtime), as reported recently, 
is no doubt front-page news. Beyond that, it reminds one more of Sanjay 
Gandhi’s Emergency, certainly not of Harvard Yard or Oxford’s dreaming 
spires.

Somebody needs to tell Manmohan Singh about this ‘fingerprint and 
thrive’ strategy being chalked out for India’s premier university, which 
is proud to count the Prime Minister among its scores of distinguished 
faculty.

(/The authors are respectively Professors of History and Physics at 
Delhi University./)