Dr. Suresh Babu G.S.
As critical agents of change, education is vital for the youth both for individual and social mobility. Its course change and progress depend on the context in which the educational institutions are situated. Its relevance is also defined by the changing aspirations of the youth engaging with the forces of modernisation. The people of Ladakh are quite applauded by the political wisdom for the decision to establish a university for Ladakh as has been a long pending demand of the youth. Though the sanctioning of a university is the prorogation of the ruling dispensation as a political process, the matter of establishing the institutions requires expertise of different kinds, intellectual acumen and academic commitments. It thrusts on the academic communities to structure the academic and research programmes, educational activities and academic governance. We may speed up building infrastructure and governing bodies in a given time. However, the tasks of setting academic and research programmes require rigorous exercise to reflect on both pedagogical and social values. In a university space, its contours are imaginative, gradual, incremental and deeply interconnected. The foundational idea of academia should be critical in the real sense of the term to respond to the needs of the diverse population it seeks to serve. Being sensitive to the needs of its population, a university should tune time-pace to evolve as a system. Eventually, then it acquires an academic culture of its own with a specific set of concerns of the agencies in the formative stage. That perhaps sets the life of university for Ladakh!
Ecological factors are paramount while defining the characteristics of establishing an institution of higher learning in the upper hills of the Himalayas. For instance, rural life, habitational settings and livelihood strategies in ecologically vulnerable areas are the determining factors in defining the Ladakh time and space. Sustaining human life with very scarce resources and limited modern amenities is the real struggle in the everyday life of Ladakhi in a rural setting. Its outreach would depend upon how we are sensitive to the demography, its distribution and the complex directions of the spatial mobility across the region and the state. Since the internal cultural economic and social differences are quite well pronounced in the rapidly changing scenario of external factors, the sustainability of the communities would define the nature of institutions that we wish to evolve. There are dissenting voices against the new mode and structuring of the educational programmes hastily planned and implemented in Ladakh as has been the case elsewhere in India.
It is a textbook story now that the political parties have already entered into competitive politics that disturbed the current democratic system of an aspirational India. Therefore, political parties with no time articulate welfare schemes and use such schemes extensively for their electoral gains and wield political power. Such attempts make these parties resilient to keep their stronghold over their constituencies and electorates. An ivory tower of thinking that is laid out in the National Educational Policy (NEP) is one such attempt in this regard. The mechanisms of NEP have deeply penetrated its academic design as a new model of future growth to showcase the old/current system as redundant. Without distributing adequate resources to function the universities, the discourses around NEP so far exposed its hegemony over the spectrum of education with a huge burden of transactional cost on the public, especially on the poor. Centralisation of power with the persuasive rhetoric of decentralisation of governance is the new strategy adopted in the policy circle. It does function well with the current political atmosphere. Imposing arbitrariness across the university spaces both in the realm of academia and governance so far is confusing and complicated.
Those who think seriously about the very purpose and goal of education in a democratic system instruct that the system needs adequate autonomy and academic freedom not to the institutional managers but to the stakeholders, especially the teachers, researchers and students. It is in this context that the vision of academia and the transformation of education in the changing aspiration of Ladkhis are to be systematically discussed and debated. This process needs critical reflection to test the time! Carefully executed, we will hear the voice of how it has evolved in the future, if not the political timing with alien ideas. What is desirable, deliverable, useful and meaningful for the students and the future of education is to be judged by the organic intellectuals as they are the torchbearers of preserving and sustaining their indigenous wisdom for the future generation in Ladakh. The authorities should be quite sensitive to the current circumstances to facilitate an open dialogue, cooperation and collaboration across the universities, academics and civil society in this critical phase.
(Suresh Babu G.S, teaches education at the School of Social Science, JNU New Delhi)
