‘Stop grants to deemed varsities’

MANGALORE: Ritabrata Banerjee, national general secretary of the Students Federation of India (SFI), has alleged that deemed universities in the country are commercialising education.

Mr. Banerjee, who was here to take part in a camp for SFI members, told presspersons on Sunday that deemed universities had become business centres and did not cater for the educational needs of the poor. Chhattisgarh had become the hub of deemed universities, he said and added that the grants to these universities should be stopped, as recommended by the Yash Pal Committee.

He sought implementation of the committee’s recent report on improving higher education (the committee had recommended, among other things, abolition of the deemed university concept and conversion of a few deserving deemed universities into full-fledged ones).

Only nine per cent of Indians pursued higher education whereas the global average was 20 per cent. Even in Africa, the rate was 20 per cent he pointed out and demanded that the Centre earmark six per cent of budgetary allocations for education.

Mr. Banerjee charged the BJP with ‘saffronising’ education in the States ruled by it. History textbooks were being altered systematically in Karnataka, Jharkhand and Rajasthan, he said and sought a comprehensive legislation to regulate fee structure, admission process, and the curriculum. While more and more women from minority communities were taking to higher education of late, surreptitious efforts were on to keep them away from the mainstream. The SFI was against the ‘saffronisation’ of education, he said.

Mr. Banerjee opposed the Bill on Foreign Education Providers by stating that under this Bill, the Government was trying to open up the education market in the country to foreign universities. If the Bill were to be implemented, a situation might arise where foreign universities would convert India into an education market without Government control.

The SFI had succeeded in preventing the Government from passing this Bill in the past 10 years, he claimed. H.R. Naveen Kumar, president of the State unit of the SFI, alleged that the Karnataka Government was ‘saffronising” education by privatising the mid-day meal scheme. Thousands of poor women employed in preparing food were being rendered jobless, he said.