Fight against capitation fees in colleges in India

2006-10-26T23:50:00.000-07:00

The vicious cycle of corruption

Education system in India encompasses a very vicious circle of corruption. Corrupt politicians steal money from local governments and put that money to start colleges. The corruption of capitation fees is then funneled into whitewashing all the money. Corruption breeds further corruption.

Professors are hired based on how much they can pay in advance. Since colleges are required to maintain some permanent professor staff, these job positions are also offered based on corruption.

Here is a live example of how things go,

Pradeep Raisoni is a local council person from Jalgaon. He has been with the local government for last 20 years. He has literally milked the government. Pradeep Raisoni has over the years encompassed crores and crores of wealth. Recently he was arrested for a housing scam which was to the tune of 90 crore rupees in Jalgaon. The local counsilors from the city busted more than 90 crore Rs using housing loans from various institutions. The people who pay the burden of his corruption are the locals. More on this corruption story can be read over here,

http://in.news.yahoo.com/060204/48/62cwn.html

Pradeep Raisoni and his brother Sunil Raisoni have started a number of colleges in Nagpur and Pune cities of maharashtra. The various engineering and management colleges owned by Mr. Sunil Raisoni are literally a rip off for students. Students are consistently asked to pay fees for one reason or another.

The entire purpose of starting these colleges is to invest and reap further benefits from this corruption.

Next week I will publish information regarding loop holes in establishing colleges like Minority Colleges and how politicians & businessmen reap rich rewards from these legal loopholes.

2006-10-23T12:39:00.000-07:00

Medical Colleges in India donot have proper facilities for education.

The case for medical colleges is even worst compared to those for engineering colleges. Medical colleges currently charge more than Rs 40 lakhs per seat for private placement. However the facilities are really bad.

Here is some more information on subsequent problems found year after year at Medical colleges. Most of this information is also available online.

In December 2003, journalists found that Bharati Vidyapeeth Deemed University’s medical college in Pune had hired doctors to play faculty during an MCI inspection. MCI did not find anything wrong with the institute but a high-level probe into the working of private medical colleges in Maharashtra, ordered by state governor Mohammed Fazal, found serious lapses. The probe had been conducted to identify problems in fee structures and inadequacy of facilities. The probe, conducted by the Medical Education and Drugs Department, found that of the 17 private MBBS colleges inspected, only one met MCI norms. Three colleges had a 50 per cent shortage in the professor cadre, while four colleges had a shortage of more than a 50 per cent deficit in the professor cadre. Four colleges had a shortage of more than 50 per cent in the associate professor cadre. Bharati Vidyapeeth was also listed for insufficient teaching and non-teaching staff, inadequate infrastructure in some departments, and fewer patients than mandated in the hospital.

An inspection carried out in 2004 by the Maharashtra state government’s medical education and drugs department showed that private colleges in the state did not meet the criteria set down by MCI. Its report showed that of the 17 medical colleges in the state, nine were short-staffed by between 50 per cent and 63 per cent. “Most of the faculties shown by the colleges are working on a part-time basis on monthly salaries as low as Rs 2,000,” says the report. It also points out that it is surprising that in spite of such clear shortages, MCI has recognised the colleges.

2006-10-23T12:33:00.000-07:00

Affirmative Action

More affirmative action on capitation fees is required. Here is a recent article which highlights what I have been saying through my blog about how Private institutions and Business Men are profiteering from education.

Read the entire article here,
http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2319/stories/20061006003010900.htm

Here is the main segment from the article,

INDIA'S wealth lies in its vast human resource, those unexplored reservoirs of talents and faculties as yet untapped by education through the instrumentation of schools and colleges. These institutions are unapproachable for the extensively agrestic, slum-soiled, rag godly urban and densely downtrodden demographic multitude, owing to want and poverty. Primary, secondary and, rarer still, higher education and professional degree courses nurture personality development. Alas, admission to schools and colleges is purchased by the rich from private managements of what are dubiously labelled as self-financing institutions. The state, guilty of insouciant dereliction of duty, has withdrawn gradually from its constitutional obligation to offer egalitarian education facilities to the have-not sector, leaving the gates open to non-official agencies which are often motivated by profit. In the ages past, noble, though private, educational institutions used to invite the rich and the poor and all worthy youth aspiring for higher education. The Church, with evangelist motivation, had a Christian yen to impart instruction but it had no defiling passion for money-making by using education as a commodity. The nation owes a tribute to the Church for its education mission among the people fee or no fee. The dollar had little purchase over the social soul of the bishopric.
A bizarre metamorphosis has maligned the hallowed home of learning. A new class of educational adventurists has unblushingly mushroomed. They, using the alibi of holy nomenclature to hide their commercial agenda, meet the demand for high degrees in professional colleges for which inflated tuition fees are the price. The Socialist Secular Democratic Republic, forsaking its paramount duty of providing for its young generation higher education for a reasonable fee and no capitation fee, has abdicated its cultural trust in favour of privatisation. What, then, about Socialist slant in the Preamble? Our governments have, without qualms, violated the principle of fair education: running an adequate number of universities for a just fee, or if private alternatives are the choice, getting an undertaking from non-state managements, before granting them permission to start a college, that they would not take capitation fees and agreeing to charge tuition fees at government rates.
Whatever the court may issue as its oblique ipse dixit, higher education should never be commercial. It is rape to fleece capitation fees from financially unable but meritorious candidates. Alas, Christian, Hindu and Mammon-worshipping institutions and corporate managements, except a few morally principled institutions, are delinquents. This is thanks to the economic policy and the priorities of cowardly commercially-interested governments, that have withdrawn from imparting knowledge without which citizenship is not meaningful for `We, the People of India'.
Now, in Kerala, education is aggressively dominated by so-called self-financing colleges. Privatisation, whose preference for money over man, is the de facto rule. Universities are governed by an empire of free-booting private adventurers, individual, institutional and corporate. Godist enterprises collect lawlessly large sums of money from indigent Indians for admission to courses and professional colleges. Has the state (executive or legislature) no voice, no authority to make education open for the humble Indian in our corrupt world of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation? It is a tribute to the Kerala government that the State has valiantly woken up to enact a creative law to regulate the promotion of higher education. To establish social justice in the higher education sector a reformative, regulative law is a must. Thus, in unblushing contra-constitutional deviance, the state, with diminishing values, has granted access to higher education to billionaires and cut out half a billion humans who belong to the weaker sector.
The Constitution obligates the state to provide equal educational opportunity and economic justice to every citizen. If the Socialist Secular Democratic Republic retreats from providing learning facilities for the weaker section it is treason. So the first commandment is for the state (Central and provincial) to create by legislation social and economic conditions which will never deny the weak or the have-nots the right to higher and professional studies. The state should not be bullied and tempted by the wealthy, and charge capitation fees affordable only to capitalists and inflated tuition fee which baffles parents save the mega-affluent. (Affluenza is this pathology.)
Social and economic justice being fundamental rights, poverty and backwardness must be overcome by the state by taking positive initiatives such as granting loans and scholarships and evolving schemes to secure admission for the poor subject to merit. Non-state colleges must close down if they cannot run educational institutions without mobilising resources illicitly from students. Alternatively colleges could draw on donations or popular charity - did not Mahatma Gandhi and his `do or die' struggle for Independence move forward only by people's benefactions? It is a matter of socio-economic justice that they do not charge capitation fee, which is skullduggery, and instead admit students on the basis of merit. Institutions of higher education should and be compliant with public sector transparency and public audit and offer large concessions for weaker sections.
Here comes the first commandment of Swaraj: Man, valuewise, is more than money. Self-financing is an alibi for freebootery, an anathema in the hallowed halls of universities. For Swaraj, we need a patriotic student foundation. We, the people of India, shall preserve this vision and its actualisation as a socialist, secular, democratic Republic, guaranteeing equality and justice. Fundamental rights, social, economic and political, belong to the humblest and the highest in their developmental potential. Upon the education of the people of this country the fate of this country depends. The first duty of a university is to teach basic wisdom, not a hollow knowledge, nor vapid piety. Vivekananda put it powerfully: "Education is the manifestation of the perfection already in man". Economic justice and social equity being the title deeds of the lowliest, the state must provide schools and colleges which will offer to the finest talent of the feeblest humans in the country college admission to acquire an achievable high degree. The state shall be bound to start as many institutions as are necessary for our people. What we want, as a priority, is food and knowledge, not more shining motor cars, expressways, air-conditioned sky-scrapers It is absurd to plead bankruptcy for the first charge on the state, namely, people's education, but to borrow with abundant liberal readiness for extravagant luxuries and urban development with high technology and low employment. It is a commandment that the state does create higher educational facilities, directly or through just arrangement, with public-spirited capito-philanthrophic or godist institutions committed to unfolding the mental, moral and spiritual faculties everyone latently possesses. Private institutions should not be permitted to run high-level colleges unless they undertake to include people of the lowliest means but possessing the highest talents. After all, the nation is great only when even the last of its members shares its treasury of education, where the poor are free, and merit has priority. Wealth without merit shall not buy entrance, nor the socio-economically weak be told no because of empty pocket.
Today, a slew of dominant castes and communities have parochial domination. An agglomeration of churches of a multitude of faiths and a miscellany of godless materialist masses, each with its narrow politics, corrupt tactics and terrorising strategies, organise colleges and professional schools, and together they make Indian education cyclopic. So many caste-based, religiously-rooted communally-oriented colleges pollute student minds.
Government and non-official tuition fees must be moderate. India is culpable for suicides committed out of penury. The money of privatisation governs education. This shall not be. Many a celebrated Ramanujam misses life's mission because our rulers are sinners and pro-rich policy shapers.

2006-10-21T11:29:00.000-07:00

IT department should investigate capitation fees further..

Sometime last year in July, the IT Departments raided various colleges across Maharashtra. During this last year though nothing has happened after the raid. There was no further news of any wrong doing or what happened. I wonder why only the raids get published and nothing else happens after that.

Following is the location of the news:
http://www.my-maharashtra.com/n/a/arc6-2005.shtml

Here is the snippet -

....The Income Tax Department, IT Department, has trained its guns on professional colleges in Maharashtra, for not disclosing incomes. The Income Tax officials also searched the residential premises of the promoters and some middle men, who run the colleges. Officials say that the interrogation for those people in the education system, who have accepted black money in the form of donation and capitation fees, has brought quite a few important documents into the limelight. The colleges which have been raided include Lata Mangeshkar Medical College, G.H.Raisoni College of Engineering, Sunil Raisoni and Kavi Kulguru College in Nagpur. In Pune, MIT Medical College, DY Patil Medical College and Bharati Vidyapeeth have been raided....

The owners of these colleges are very well politically connected and established. I would definitely like to hear if anybody found out what happened after the raids ?

2006-10-20T12:48:00.000-07:00

I will start posting stories every day and week until people see to what level corruption has penetrated in our system.

One of the king pins of corruption : Mr. Suresh dada Jain

This MLA from Jalgaon is so corrupt that pretty much the entire town of Jalgaon knows that corruption is rooted completely within his philosophy.

Mr. Suresh Jain is a MLA from Jalgaon for a long time. The only thing consistent with his idealogy is how to make money. Over the last few years he has changed a lot of political parties. The only gain was to get a minister position. So for a while he was the minister of higher education in Maharastra government. Now you know what that means. The only job ministers do in this post is accept bribes and release licenses for people to start colleges.

His biggest benefactor was Mr Sunil Raisoni, who as it turns out in the last few years has opened up more than 10 colleges. Surprising aint it ? Mr. Raisoni is also related to Mr Jain. Well it turns out Mr. Raisoni's elder brother is Mr. Jain's right hand man. Mr. Pradeep Raisoni is Mr. Jain's local right hand man in Jalgaon. Over the years Mr. Raisoni would bribe Mr. Jain and thus keep reaping benefits from his department of technical education. Through the last 5 years I have personally seen, Mr. Jain receive more than Rs. 1.5 Crore in bribes from Mr. Sunil Raisoni.

Well Mr. Jain is now no longer a minister and all of that credit goes our sincere and honest Shri Anna Hazare who has held numerous fasts and organized people against Mr. Jain. Through his gallantry he has denied a post to a corrupt MLA. Kudos to Anna and his strength.

Long Live Bapu.

2006-10-20T12:43:00.000-07:00

Why would I start another blog on this. Why do you care read about this. ?

I DONOT KNOW. However I do know that I need to speak about this.

Who Am I and Why Am I writing this blog ?

My name is Shrikant Joshi and for the last 20 years I have been teaching in various Indian colleges. Over the years, I have seen tremendous degradation of our education system. I have also seen tremendous amount of corruption. Due to financial conditions and constant pressure to keep myself quiet I have not spoken, but now through this wonderful medium of internet I can speak and express myself freely.

Keep a spotlight on this blog and you will get enough stories on corruption across Maharastra.

My ultimate aim is that through this if people realize some of the wrong then the intelligent kids of our country will have a chance to grow and survive.

Long live Bapu !