Academician Asks for “Branch & Root” Reform for India’s Education Ills
JNU Professor Makarand Paranjape keeps the audience and emcee Sunanda Vashisht in rapt attention during his wide-ranging talk on India’s education challenges and potential solutions.
By Pramod Kulkarni
Houston: A professor of English literature at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) with an 18-year tenure, Makarand Paranjape was the guest speaker on the topic of “Education in India – Challenges & Imperatives”, hosted by the Indian Consulate on Saturday, July 21.
Deputy Consul General Surendra Adhana welcomed an audience of about 50 guests. Consul General Anupam Ray then introduced Professor Paranjape as “a truly extraordinary mind. I’ve rarely met an intellectual with such diverse knowledge and with amazing insights into what it is to be an Indian.He also has an ability to analyze the past and bring it into the present.”
Sunanda Vashisht, a blogger and commentator on Indian culture and politics, provided Professor Paranjape’s academic background. He received his undergraduate degree from St. Stephen’s College in New Delhi and both his MA and PhD from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Paranjape’s literary achievements include more than 40 books on both academic subjects and poetry, including Debating the ‘Post’ Condition in India, and The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi. He is currently researching the archives of author Raja Rao at the University of Texas in Austin. “He is both an insider and an outsider and not afraid to question the status quo,” said Vashisht.
Tracing the history of education in India, Dr. Paranjape said the first instance of an academy documented in the world was in the Upanishads (850 BCE) in the form of a dialogue between a father and a son, who has just returned from 12 years of schooling. The father asks his son, “Do you know who you are? Do you have knowledge of the atma (soul)?” In this context, Dr. Paranjape said. “The thrust of education in India has always been more than practical or vocational, but focused on transformation—intellectual, cultural and spiritual.”
Dr. Paranjape also mentioned that India’s oldest university was at Taxila (now in Afghanistan), followed by the Nalanda University in Bihar. Dr. Paranjape cited the destruction of Nalanda and its library by Bakhtiyar Khilji as the end of classical India in 1293 CE.
It was at this time that education in India shifted from the intellectual to the practical. The Mughal kings were interested in metallurgy or manufacturing, for example. Some Mughals such as Akbar and Dara Shuko were patrons of learning.
The next milestone for Indian education, according to Dr. Paranjape, was the death of Aurangzeb, the last great Mughal emperor, and the subsequent British victory at Plassey, when medieval India ended and colonial India began. The British provided only a miniscule budget for education and resisted educating the Indians in practical knowledge such as steel manufacturing.
Speaking of the current educational system after independence in 1947, Dr. Paranjape said, “We’ve completely failed in providing quality, free primary education, despite huge budgets both at the central and state levels.”
“Why did we fail?” Dr. Paranjape asked. “It is because of the lack of political will. There is no clear thinking, but piecemeal efforts.”
“We need branch and root reform, rethink and come up with a better model for universal education. We need a public-private partnership and entrust delivery to reputed NGO-type organizations on a turnkey basis with high level of accountability.”