📰 Disruption and chalking out a new idea for education
In the aftermath of the pandemic’s deep impact in India, ‘Acadonomics’ is a concept whose time may have come
•When the novel coronavirus first made headlines at the beginning of the year, few in the comity of nations would have thought even in their wildest dreams that it was going to have so much of an impact that not even a single sphere of life would be left unaffected.
•Now, six months into the pandemic, not only has there been a colossal loss of life and economic damage the world over, but COVID-19, as it has come to be called, is leaving a lasting impression on education. This in turn is bound to have a telling impact on generations to come, forgetting for a second the extent to which the current graduating classes are in a state of limbo. In a larger perspective it has also raised the spectre of educational institutions shuttering their doors completely or taking unprecedented steps that have invariably affected jobs and livelihoods.
A comparison with the West
•Shifting gears in an academic setting is not easy whether one is talking about institutions in the developed West or the developing nations. Economics has always been a part of academics; it is only in the present circumstances that it has become all the more apparent as to how management, especially in private institutions, is going to meet demands on the one hand and availability of resources on the other. If one may call this new phenomenon “acadonomics”, it would imply a careful allocation of resources keeping in mind the transient nature of the issue of how long it is going to take to come back to the steady state of affairs that it once was. ‘Acadonomics’ will also involve seeing the economics of moving on to an online mode of the teaching-learning process, whether it is going to be a temporary phenomenon, something of a mix to be offered or a permanent alternative to the current scheme of things that has come to stay for the short and the medium terms.
•The academic choices, or in some instances, luxuries, are not the same for all countries across the world. For instance in the United States, long considered as the Mecca of Higher Education, the elite private and state subsidised universities have endowments that can be used for a range of academic activities — from giving out fellowships to subsidising tuition fees. Harvard University, for example, is said to have an endowment of close to $40 billion, and the top 10 have a cushion of anywhere between $10 billion to $40 billion. By contrast, private academic institutions in India which are not-for-profit do not have any such buffers; and, none of the institutions in this country possesses big corpuses from alumni or industry; their survival for the most part is on the annual income that comes from tuition and the assortment of other fees collected.
Private education
•In the way they are set up, private institutions in India are hardly in a position to meet an eventuality such as COVID-19, something that comes by lightning speed and leaves a trail of destruction that would take many, many years to rectify. In an educational set-up in India, nothing can be reduced — the norms cannot be lowered nor can the infrastructure be dismantled. The status quo with respect to fixed costs remains the same, with some marginal adjustments possibly in costs of electricity, water and deferments in salaries. For the most part, the fixed and operational costs remain the same, and infrastructure once created cannot be shrunk.
•The downside to self-financed institutions is that in the time of the pandemic and loss of jobs, students plead inability to pay the requisite fee (and in many instances, the hostel fee as well) thereby placing additional burden on the management which feels already stretched because of existing commitments that would include paying off interest on the money borrowed for improving infrastructure on their campuses.
Dual mode of learning
•The spike in cost for persisting with a dual mode of the teaching-learning process is going to be quite prohibitive for the next few years. First, the scaling of operations that would include the dual modes of online and offline is going to be expensive due to a dual mode of educational delivery. To rub salt into the wound, the new social distancing norms would lead to the enforcement of smaller class sizes, thereby increasing the effective teaching load and multiplicity of efforts. Second, the online teaching mode brings with it increased costs of IT infrastructure such as network bandwidth, servers, cloud resources and software licensing fees. Third, online teaching means new hiring in the IT sector and increased costs due to engagements with Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, and other online platforms. Fourth, online teaching means setting up multiple studios and educational technology centres which translate into investments in high technology. Fifth, creation of virtual laboratories across all domains of studies and examination centres, etc. would add to the woes in terms of already depleted finances. Finally, it is a wrong perception that all faculty members are adept in online teaching — style and delivery go far beyond donning a jacket, having adequate personal grooming and rattling off from a teleprompter. Therefore, additional funds have to be allocated to train faculty for online teaching.
Possible reforms
•In these difficult times, the onus is on the Centre and State governments to provide soft loans to students to stay with the educational course. For professional and non-professional courses, the natural tendency for students would be to opt for online courses as they could cut back and save on hostel, mess and travel costs. At the same time students looking at online instruction would be disinclined to pay the same fee charged for offline instruction which means that some institutions may well have to shut down due to their inability to meet costs. Therefore, owing to ‘acadonomics’, the consequences can be quite dire with a potential to cause irreparable and long-term harm to the younger generations of students as well as institutions. At this point of time it would seem prudent for the government and regulatory bodies to not interfere in the fee structure, and, for the future, even consider a measure of higher degree of financial autonomy. One would agree that in the long run, technology can flatten the cost due to economies of scale, but in a shorter frame of time of three to five years, the cost of education is likely to go up.
•It may be an exaggeration to say that in India, education and the financial models are inverted as opposed to many others: there is good quality private school education but one that is fairly expensive; but good quality higher education is subsidised in relation to their direct costs. While replicating any western model in India may not be wholly appropriate, it is high time institutions in India are allowed to create coffers or corpuses for a rainy day. Or, perhaps, educational institutions could come to be treated like any other corporate body, with an allowable small margin of profit. The corporate model addresses not just financial sustainability but also a professional governance structure that would entail better accountability and holistic education. ‘Acadonomics’ of the future will not only decide the fate of the academic sector in India but also its quality, ranking, research, innovation potential and its collective impact on our country’s economy.
A systemic transformation of democracy is taking place from within to its very opposite
•The ‘democracy’ that a major part of our world swears by comprises free and fair, multi-party, fixed-term elections based on universal adult franchise in its ideal state. A contestant party winning the majority of votes represents the will of the electorate and gets to form the government; others sit in the opposition until the next election. Simple.
•Its simplicity also conceals some of its structural flaws. The ‘majority of votes’ actually boils down to the majority of seats in the legislature which, in 99% of the time, comes riding a minority of votes. Rarely is a government formed backed by a majority of votes won in a free and fair election. Rajiv Gandhi’s formidable, highest-ever majority in Lok Sabha in 1984 was still short of a majority of votes by about 2%. Narendra Modi in 2014 had the backing of 31% of the votes cast and in 2019, of just about 40%. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential race in the U.S. with a deficit of over 2.5 million popular votes vis-à-vis his chief competitor, Hillary Clinton. It is the same story everywhere.
What democracy brought
•Besides the fact that this democracy is far from becoming universal even well into the 21st century, its own life history is just a tiny dot on the canvas of time: short of a hundred years. Universal adult franchise itself is yet to hit the 100-year mark in the most advanced nations. Even in the U.S., white women won the franchise a hundred years ago but their black sisters had to wait another few decades. The white women too won it in the teeth of opposition, including from thousands of women raising the slogan: A vote or a husband? The Swiss women got the vote less than a half century ago, nearly a quarter century after Indian women did.
•Democracy did not come alone; its accoutrements included guaranteed individual rights and freedoms, free market economy, equality of all citizens, freedom of life and property, etc. — inviolable constituents of capitalism. Elections created space for change of governments even as they guaranteed security against challenge to the regime; the challenge could arise only outside of it, through ‘revolutions’, which in turn had much contracted the space even for a change of government and none for a change of regime. In the end, most ‘revolutions’ could not escape the dragnet of ‘democracy’, their existential as well as conceptual adversary.
•One of democracy’s primary premises, free market, which ‘revolutions’ had sought to eradicate, is now under threat not from its adversary but from its own internal dynamics. The unprecedented concentration of wealth at the top 1% around the world knocks the bottom out of competition in the market, so integral to its freedom.
The principle and the form
•This high concentration of wealth is in turn getting to impact the system’s political functioning by replicating the process. The hollowing out of this foundational principle of capitalism while retaining its form is also running parallel in the other freedoms, other constituents of ‘democracy’ by hollowing out the substance of even free and fair elections and individual freedoms while retaining the form. The notion of the free choice of the exercise of vote at the ballot box gets completely distorted with innumerable manipulations of that choice on all sides, all within the four walls of the constitutional provisions. These include distortions injected into the electoral process through control and misuse of the institutions responsible for carrying out the process; the creation of an atmosphere of delegitimisation of dissent or protest vis-à-vis the government by counter-posing the demands of unquestioning patriotism or nationalism to it; using the sentiment of patriotism to circumscribe the dispensation of fair justice; the control of the flow of information through the ‘independent’ media; setting up of professionally organised mechanisms for creating and propagating fake news; creating and promoting hatred between communities of people through patronising identity politics and using frenzy in lieu of reason as a mobiliser of votes; and not least, meting out the harshest treatment to the most prominent dissenting voices by lodging them in prison on fake charges, never mind that they would all be let off a decade later by the courts for want of evidence. The message to society would have been delivered.
A global scenario
•True, much of what we see happening before our eyes has been witnessed by history; Adolf Hitler’s example, though extreme, comes closest to what we are watching helplessly. Yet, the example is a bad one, for Hitler needed to destroy the Constitution which had brought him to power; today, remarkably democratic and progressive constitutions around the world give rulers enough space for misuse for achieving those goals and yet making the misuse palatable to voters through media and mobilisation. It is interesting that voters haven’t tired of this misuse anywhere going by the ever-rising voting percentages at election time.
•If this concentration of wealth and political power was the case with one country or society, it could easily be attributed to specific local conditions; but this looks like a more generalised, global scenario: in the U.S., China, Russia, India, Brazil, Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere. It is therefore futile to argue that this has flown from the personality or personal diktats of one or the other charismatic leader. Its global scale defies that inference.
•Clearly then, we are witnessing the transformation of the regime of democracy, a systemic transformation from within, from one that had brought us the promise of liberté, egalité, fraternité political, social and economic, to its very opposite: the highest concentration of economic, political and therefore social powers ever in history. Yet ‘democracy’ remains its trademark. Nor does it have the appearance of a sudden, odd aberration with an expected short life, or a spontaneous occurrence in different regions. Its scale is too massive for that.
📰 Inevitable collapse: on steepest contraction of GDP
With COVID-19 hitting private consumption, demand recovery will hinge on govt. spending
•The inevitable has happened. India’s GDP suffered its steepest contraction on record in the April-June quarter, as output shrank 23.9% from a year earlier, provisional data show. It is evident that the stringent COVID-19 lockdowns in force through the first third of the quarter, and substantially in May, hollowed out demand. Private consumption spending, which accounts for almost 60% of GDP, contracted 26.7% as consumers abjured almost all discretionary spending. And exports, which contribute to a fifth of GDP and reflect overseas demand for Indian goods and services, shrank by nearly 20%. Investment activity was the worst-hit, collapsing 47% and shrinking in share of GDP to about 22% from 32% a year earlier as larger businesses conserved cash and refrained from any capital spending in the face of uncertainty, and smaller firms prioritised survival. Across the real economy, every single industry and services sector shrank with the solitary exception of agriculture, which grew 3.4% and outpaced the year earlier quarter’s 3% expansion. Construction suffered the most, plunging 50%, followed by the omnibus services category — trade, hotels, communication, transport and broadcasting — which shrank 47%, hit by the pandemic-linked restrictions. Manufacturing too took a severe beating, contracting 39% as demand for products deemed non-essential evaporated, and factories, even after reopening, struggled to run amid shortages of labour and added safety norms.
•It was left to the government to keep the bottom from falling out on demand as the Centre’s pandemic mitigation expenditure helped expand its consumption spending by 16.4% year-on-year and softened the overall blow to GDP. However, with the fiscal deficit already having exceeded the full-year’s budgeted target in just the first four months, and revenue receipts impacted by the economic contraction, the government is unlikely to maintain a similar trend in expenditure growth over the next three quarters. Unless, of course, it is prepared to forsake its vaunted fiscal conservatism and finds innovative ways to mobilise resources. The still rising trajectory of new COVID-19 infections and a high level of job losses and income erosion are also sure to retard any recovery in momentum. If the latest survey-based data from IHS Markit show manufacturing PMI for August signalling growth for the first time in five months, the same researcher’s findings also stress that “job shedding continues at a strong rate” in the industry. Equally significantly, the output numbers which are expected to undergo revision given the acknowledged difficulties in collecting data, do not capture a swathe of informal sector activity that was severely impacted. Agriculture too faces headwinds in the form of higher-than-ideal rainfall in August in several key crop growing regions in western and central India and with the impact of recent farm market ordinances yet to play out, it may be a while before the end of the tunnel is sighted.
