(BiharTimes) Among the observers of contemporary Bihar, there is near unanimity that higher education is an area that has received the least attention during the current sushashan of the JU (U)-NDA led government in the last seven-eight years. In a state where the benchmark of public expectations from the government, and the delivery of civic services, has been abysmally low, any perceptible change in the conventional bijli-pani-sadak development landscape gets touted as the sure sign of a ‘resurgent’ Bihar. Thus, the on-going construction of new roads and bridges has overshadowed popular imagination to an extent where any attempt at a balanced assessment of the development deficits of the current regime is likely to be seen as an act of disloyalty to one’s land. Part of the reason emanates from the appalling governance that was the hallmark of earlier ruling dispensations. Naturally, extraordinary adulation greets any governmental initiative that has the promise of bettering life chances of the poor and the needy in this benighted land given to an overdose of optimism in the most adversarial circumstances. Sadly though, no such initiative has been visible so far as higher education is concerned notwithstanding the rhetoric that abounds in the media and official discourses. This systemic neglect of higher education is, however, revealing in terms of sociology of power and governance in Bihar.
            It is well-known that the upwardly mobile and the aspiring upper-middle caste-class Biharis have had no stakes in the higher education sector in Bihar ever since they started swelling the campuses of the universities and colleges in Delhi. Barring those who were lucky enough to enter the portals of the IITS, the NITs and the IIMs, a substantial number of Bihari students with disposable parental income have offered entrepreneurial raison d’être to the plethora of technical institutions that have mushroomed on the sides of the highways across the Vindhyas. One need not go for any headcount of the Bihari students in Chennai, Pune or Tumkur to vouch for this trend. In recent years, one discerns two new developments: first, the Bihari girls (even from the mofussil towns) travelling long distances with parental escort to enroll in these institutions where their brothers have been going for long, and, secondly, the farsighted and the resourceful Biharis sending their children to places outside Bihar before the marked educational barriers of Class X and Class XII to ensure that their children are free from the stigma of being called the Biharis, and also to help them speak better and unaccented English. Both these attributes are seen as definite advantages at various interviews faced by the Biharis. An earlier generation of the Biharis, as a rule, would display their Matriculation and Intermediate certificates issued by the authorities in Patna, and thereby, had to face the subtle and not-so-subtle ridicule for their misplaced aspirations and disproportionate, if not undeserved, zeal for upward social mobility.
            Of necessity, those who have moved out of Bihar have no time and energy to think of those who have been left (and not stayed) behind. In broad sociological terms thus, the colleges and universities in Bihar are home to two distinct categories: (1) the employees of all ranks whose major concern is to keep getting their salaries and pensions howsoever delayed so that they could finance the parental ambition of seeing their children do better in life (which necessarily means their not being forced to return to Bihar), and (2) the students from largely rural areas and from lower economic strata who would enroll in these institutes precisely because they do not have the wherewithal to go elsewhere.  It would be some sort of time pass till their marriage and early parenthood force them to catch one of the trains going to India’s expanding metros where they would become the statistics in the ever-growing informal sector of the economy as watchmen, courier boys and sundry other occupations.
Anyone who has seen the ways students get treated in the offices and classrooms of the colleges and universities in Bihar would appreciate the appellation of employees deliberately mentioned above – corrupt, uncouth and parasitic to the core. An office attendant would pester you for fifty rupees to get your scholarship papers signed by the head of the department whereas your research supervisor would expect you to be ready to shell out thousands on the day of your viva-voce to entertain guests and all those whose signatures you need on your thesis. A laboratory attendant will charge you his own levies and a caretaker of an auditorium need to be bribed otherwise on the day of your reckoning it would smell of dead rats. Teachers have stopped connecting with their students any longer as they increasingly inhabit different social universes in caste/class terms. In good old days, the social universes of the teacher and the taught would correspond to a large degree. The new generation of students entering the classrooms is so alienated from their teachers that they are condemned to draw their sustenance through reactionary forms of student politics or the much-admired youthful lumpenism across boarding houses (lodges in popular parlance) in an alien urban setting. Livable students’ hostels are things of the past used to narrate legendary achievements of some of its bright inmates in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Moreover, a generation of young Bihari students is simply deprived of any worthwhile classroom experience. They spend their time in the ever-growing dilapidated and claustrophobic coaching institutes even as they continue to be on the rolls of various schools and colleges. The ambitious ones join these coaching institutes in Class IX itself and continue thereafter. Given the peculiar social character of the higher education institutions in Bihar it is no wonder that the only collective voice emanating from the teaching fraternity is concerning parity of pay scales on par with their counterparts in the central universities. How else does one explain that not a single appointment of a collage and university teacher has been made in the past decade? Even the conservative government estimates put these vacancies around four thousand. With ten universities, 267 government constituent and 227 affiliated colleges even otherwise Bihar is at the bottom heap in terms of per capita availability of higher education seats for its population. In practical terms, most of the colleges are simply defunct; some not even having ten teachers owing to the retirement and non-recruitment of teachers.
As a matter of fact, this neglect of higher education is detrimental to the interests of the Ati-Pichada (extremely backward castes) and the Maha-Dalits whose cause the government claims to champion. Indeed, they are the ones who are condemned to avail of these scanty facilities for higher education. They simply cannot afford to go out of the state, and thus, have to suffer the pitiable quality of education offered across the length and breadth of the state. Then, there is the larger issue of the vicious spiral of low quality human resources that this criminal neglect of higher education generates and feeds into. Most of the primary and secondary school teachers will be recruited from among these poorly-educated and ill-equipped graduates whose paltry salary and contractual nature of employment will hardly ever act as incentives for imparting quality education to the school-going children. The lure of high-profile administrative and university jobs may bring back some of the non-resident Biharis back to the state but the school education will remain condemned to this systemic inertia and policy paralysis. In a manner of speaking, this neglect amounts to the deliberate betrayal of the interests of the poor and the downtrodden who have but government schools to turn to for their children’s education.
There is no sociological riddle behind this neglect. The socially-articulate and the economically-empowered voices have to care for their newly-found Bihari Asmita through cultural symbolisms of Nalanda and the Budhha Jayanti Parks. The high caste entrepreneurs have to maintain the real estate bubble in Patna on the plank of a resurgent Bihar. The real beneficiaries of governmental investments in higher education will take ages before they turn into potential buyers of the swanky apartments in Patna and Noida. Till then, the show of a resurgent Bihar has to go on. In this hullabaloo, pertinent issues will remain subterranean. The Bihar Government need not explain its institutional lethargy in providing land to the regional campus of the Aligarh Muslim University, or its dramatic one-upmanship on the issue of central universities in the state. An otherwise articulate chief minister can well afford to maintain studied silence on the failure of the Nalanda International University to take off. An oppositional government with the political drive to challenge the Centre on the Ramlila Grounds in Delhi on the special category status to Bihar can happily and quietly tolerate the state Governor’s suspect interference in the appointments of Vice Chancellors as well as other unnecessary meddling in the affairs of the universities and colleges. Long Live Sushasan!  

Manish Thakur, an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, is currently a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.