Higher education in West Bengal.

Higher Education in West Bengal.

There is some misinformation around regarding the quality and relevance of higher education in West Bengal (WB) which needs to be removed. I am going to address various issues individually.


1. Lack of engineering colleges.

As recently as a decade ago, there were merely a handful of engineering colleges in WB, mostly run by the government such as Jadavpur and Shibpur. These colleges were, and still remain highly regarded centres of excellence competing effectively nationwide. The paucity of private engineering colleges lead to a migration of students to other states, principally Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Tamil Nadu. The departure of perhaps 50,000 students each year lead to an expenditure of 50000 X (40,000+40000) = 4 Billion rupees per year. This money was pumped into the burgeoning economies of these states and it came from the not very deep pockets of middle class Bengalis.

In recent years, there have been many private tech schools established. At last count, there are 91 registered under the umbrella of the West Bengal University of Technology.http://www.wbut.net/ The outflow of students has reduced somewhat, but still remains.

What matters is the economic cost. Most of our departing students do not join centres of excellence like the IITs or BITS, where many students receive scholarships. These students pay hefty fees to study at perfectly average institutions. Money which could have been profitably rerouted to WB.

2. Engineering vs Science vs Commerce vs Humanities.

Most students in high school try to take the tried and tested route of an engineering degree followed by an IT job. Few have the courage to try other things, and who can blame them. Most employers seem to take the blinkered viewpoint that an engineer is the only employable person around. There are precious few engineers who do engineering anyway. By and large, most of our bright girls and boys are busy writing code. Thus, the intellectual, monetary and temporal investment in a BTech degree, in perhaps Mechanical Engineering is largely unutilized. Do note that I say ‘unutilized’ and not ‘wasted’.

The other side to the thousands of IT jobs springing up all over is that all other fields are suffering. Very few students take up the humanities by choice; in most cases, it is an inability to perform in the mathematically intensive fields of engineering which pushes someone to, perhaps, comparative literature. This will undoubtedly have a profoundly deleterious long-term effect on the balance of values we ascribe to things. A society, which lives by the technology of iPods and does not care much for the music which is saved in them is in for trouble. Remember that although Sparta won the war, it is the greatness of Athens, which we speak of.

3. Tuitions.

The practice of high school and college teachers offering private tuitions is a cancer, which infects all of Indian education. This is not endemic to WB at all. All the states of India suffer from this, some more, some less. However, blanket bans on private tuitions have not achieved anything worthwhile. As long as there remain colleges with faculty positions, which have not been filled, tuition classes will continue to thrive. Another factor is the intensity to which competition has been taken. The average student is at war with the system and the system does not take prisoners. People who flunk any major exam like the Class X, the Class XII slip between the cracks in the floor. They are the casualties no one talks about. Sad, but true. One might suggest raising the wages of teachers, especially in Government institutions. There is then the question, ‘where will the money come from?’ Well, raise the fees at the colleges to more realistic levels. Apparently student unions raise hell at this. The members of those same student unions do however, pay, quite substantial sums to their private tutors. Rather fallacious, is it not?

4. The role of elite institutions.

Calcutta is home to some of the better known colleges in India: Jadavpur, the Indian Statistical Institute, St. Xavier’s College, Ram Krishna Mission College, Scottish Church College, Bethune College, Lady Brabourne College and finally, Presidency College. Most of these places operate under the University of Calcutta. The current myth is that these institutions have lost their relevance and that the best in liberal arts education has shifted to other places. The India Times college ranking currently places Calcutta colleges somewhat low on the pole.

The first point to be made is that opinion polls such as the one mentioned above are based on opinions. If one looks at results, the picture will be rather different. So what are the results we look at? From my own perspective, students of the pure sciences and the humanities usually do not enter the job market right after graduation. They typically stay at school for higher degrees. In that context, we might ask what happens at various nationwide entrance exams for graduate degrees in the liberal arts.


Again, from a personal perspective, the important exams in Physics are: the Joint Entrance to Master’s programmes conducted by the IITs, the IISc entrance test, the Joint Entrance Screening Test (conducted by 12 research institutes), the National Graduate Physics Exam (conducted by the IAPT). Speaking from personal experience, at most of these exams, students from Calcutta tend to wipe out the competition. As a case in point, at the 2002 NGPE, 18 of the top 25 students were from West Bengal. All of the final 5 gold medalists were from West Bengal.

This is due to the rigorous syllabus at the undergraduate level followed by Calcutta University. (Most other universities in WB tend to follow CU’s lead.)

Another perspective is here.

To be concluded.