THE observation of the honourable Bombay High Court needs to be taken seriously that education has become unaffordable in India despite it being treated as a pious activity as per the Indian culture. Mr. Justice A.S. Chandurkar and Mr. justice Jitendra Jain have observed that it is the State’s responsibility to ensure that an affordable education is available to everybody. It is unfortunate that the honourable judges found it necessary to make such an observation even after 75 years of Independence. It must be stated without mincing words that the overall education in India has become rather unaffordable to most people in the larger Indian society, leave alone the economically better off segments whose numbers are smaller than numbers of people from other sections. This problem also stems from another undesirable reality that good education is often linked to physical infrastructure and facilities available in schools and colleges. Minus those facilities, education is thought to be incomplete. This half-baked definition has cost the country much in terms of overall quality of education at different levels.

 

When much emphasis is placed on physical infrastructure in schools and colleges, the cost of creating and maintaining that has to be factored in the calculation of cost of education. Going by these standards, it is only logical that education becomes an expensive, unaffordable activity to most members of the larger Indian society. That is where the State comes in as the entity with a moral responsibility to provide classic education to all at affordable costs -- to which a specific reference has been made by the honourable Bombay High Court. Those who have studied and understood fully the concept of education will agree that basic and classic approach to mass education will reduce the financial requirements to conduct the activity. If good teachers are made available to students at every school and college in different fields of studies, a good purpose of education gets served well. Even in remote places and rural and tribal communities, this may be made possible with planning and determined effort. The trouble is that the country does not think in such terms. Providing decent classrooms and school premises with basic facilities such as libraries, laboratories, playgrounds of moderate size will require only reasonable financial resources.

 

Some such facilities can be made available to different schools as common-use platforms that can be utilised by different schools in the vicinity. The Government does try to make things better and more easily available to people from economically poor sections of the society. Despite that effort, the goal of affordable education is still eluding the country for long. This calls for another approach to the process of learning at basic levels. At the present, the country’s education planners do not appear ready to consider anything out of the ordinary -- to improve the overall quality of education in India across economic divides. But it is the calling of the present times that education planners of India turn their attention to the issue of affordability of education at all levels. That is the need of the hour. It is unfortunate that the thrust of present-day education in India is on provision of good quality of physical facilities to students. Instead, what is needed is the good quality of pedagogy at all levels so that the students get introduced to fine conceptual body of education rather than to physical facilities at every possible level. This is basically the responsibility of the State -- as pointed out by the two judges of the Bombay High Court.