Smriti Irani's obsession with ranking is unhealthy for India's education system

Globalisation is often a seductive game inviting people into unnecessary comparisons and unreal clubs.

One creates a system where one wants to rank everything from the most developed nations, the finest cars, the most beautiful women, often without wondering who the rankers are and what constitutes the basis of rankings. When it is the ten most beautiful women in the world, there is a voyeuristic enjoyment as long as one does not ask what beauty is or whether there is a racist element to it. Globalisation creates unwelcome clubs and comparisons which often destroy an otherwise welcome diversity.

Sadly, politicians too get into the business because they find it a handy tool. When you worry about rankings you convey your apparent concern for the whole without revealing any understanding for ground level realities.

When our president echoed his concern for education, he remarked that there was not a single institution in India which ranked in the first 200 in the world. A concern is then articulated about the number of institutions China has in the first 100, with the added wonder that Singapore and Hong Kong also managed to qualify.

Education

This ranking game has had a more individualistic bias. Earlier we used to worry about the number of nobel prizes a country received and wonder why India hardly made the grade. Analysts failed to understand that rankings reduced the educational universe to a flat land, a uniform terrain where diversity and difference were ignored. What one did for economic indicators one did for education with even more devastating consequence.

There was a literal economisation within the ranking game. In fact, rankings turned education into a dismal science. Recently Smriti Irani, our HRD minister, went one up on the president by unveiling an indigenous ranking system free of international bias. The model of course is China which created a similar two-set model prior to going global.

Irani’s comments are revealing. She claims employability is the central concern confronting the 23 lakh applicants, including PhDs, applying for 368 posts of peon in Uttar Pradesh. This raises two questions. Do degrees have to be connected to jobs? Can't there be other forms of learning? Secondly, what sense does it make if a man with a PhD has to apply for a peon’s job? Thirdly, why is enjoyability, the sense of play, creativity not as critical as employability? The fact that students do not get jobs might have to do with a skewed economy. In fact, few ask how many livelihoods, especially crafts, and ways of life industry and economy destroy.

The ranking game creates a set of ancillary industries very reminiscent of tutorial colleges created in the first wave of university organisation. The tutorial college is how an informal core which surrounds the university, training one for admissions and also compensating one for lack of access. In fact, the admission industry virtually destroyed education by reducing knowledge to shortcuts, techniques and guess questions. Cities like Kota in Rajasthan prospered in creating the admission and examination industry. Students felt that without this guarantee or insurance of techniques they would never make it to the bureaucracy or industry.

The corruption involved in evaluation and accreditation is frightening. The National Advisory Council (NAC) is today more powerful than the University Grants Commission (UGC). The latter had an advisory function. The NAC determines the life chances of an institute and, since its inception, is among the most corrupt organisations. What we need is not a system of rankings but an index of corruption in education.

Corruption

Take the NAC list of professors as evaluators and see if you can identify well-known academics. The NAC evaluators are among the new zamindars of knowledge, dalals of certification. This is a process that needs examination while colleges are wasting huge man-hours preparing reports only a kabadilwala would be interested in.

There is an innumeracy to rankings that we must challenge. It is not just the evaluating criteria but the fetishisation of number. This equation of rankings to excellence is a reminder of the earlier disaster where IQ was related to intelligence. The idea of IQ has two flaws. Firstly, in fetished number and secondly, it hid an ethnocentricity as racial or cultural bias. IQ was used to beat black people into accepting an invidious classification as a mentally deficient people.

Controversies

Rankings also ignore tacit assumptions and traditions. When we rank an institution, we do so within a set of assumptions about cultures of knowledge. Ranking as a process is silent about the tacit understanding of excellence. Rankings freeze quality. In the same way one needs to ask how representational is a ranking. Does it do justice to the definition of knowledge in different cultures?

The obsession with rankings also distracts from real debates and controversies on the ground. Ranking as a form of accounting is confused with accountability. The enthusiasm for rankings has drowned the debate on the fate of liberal arts, or what the role of scientific research in a university exactly is.

Requirements of knowledge, pedagogy, creativity get lost in a standardisation process, where education as a protean process becomes a procrustean format. The academic quota of productivity and papers becomes a part of other quota games. With rankings we are destroying a university as a vibrant culture and bureaucratising it. It is just the latest fashion, but such fashions will prove costly to the academe.