FDI in Education Continued...

What will be the benefits of FDI in Education?

The obvious question is that what are the benefits offered by the FDI in this sector? The reasoning in favor can be many. The most important of them is the quality of education at an affordable price. Let’s take up a simple case. Suppose some top notch foreign university is allowed to invest in one of its extension center in India. Now, most of the funds of any world class institute are spend on funding the latest research. Now, the extension center can benefit from the ongoing research at the parent institute (Advantage offered by the cutting edge digital tools like video conferencing, e-conferencing etc). Also the faculty will be drawn from some of the available Indian talents which currently prefer to take the western route due to dearth of opportunities here. The manifold advantage includes low cost professional education for our students, retaining the best available teaching talent within the boundaries of our country and saving of billions of precious foreign exchange. The increase in number of institutes for higher learning will also witness a complimentary rise in the number of preparatory schools, specialized schools, language learning centers and primary schools which would further help strengthening the primary and basic education in our country.

What are the obstacles?

So we see that there are too many benefits than why not the government simply opens this sector for the dollar investments? The challenges are many and some of which are:

1. If we open up this sector without uprooting the existing problems with our educational system, then it would be difficult for the present system to compete with their foreign counterparts.
   

2. Money will soon gain importance in the new system as in capitalism profit is the main motive and therefore, it would be difficult for the less privileged communities to match up with the privileged one.
   

3. The present system needs a facelift which includes reconsidering the present level of reservations to underprivileged communities. It’s a matter of debate that should reservations not be replaced with income incentives for poor?

(I have an interesting example to quote in this regard. Symbiosis Institutes conducts its national aptitude test SNAP for admission to postgraduate programs. This year the lower limit on scores for general category students were 97.25 however for SC candidates it went down to 60 something and for ST students it went further down to something near 38. This implies that a ST student irrespective of his family’s annual income would get to the next stage of admission process despite of his paltry score and at the same time some student with a much better score (in 90’s) will miss the bus even if his family income is lesser than this ST student. What crazy world we are living in? And what absurd policies we are sticking to?)

4. Managing politics of differences will be another daunting task before the current coalition government which has however failed to show the determination and grit to take the hard decisions for a better future.

The best thing is that our government understands the importance of FDI. China and Japan are leading by example and I think that the question is not of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ type, it rather is of the type When, and how?

Chill out guyz... it's happening in India.. more and more campuses are opening up daily. However, due to the lack of proper benchmarking it still is in its nascent stage.