Chief Justice of India Surya Kant did clarify, the very next day of his controversial statement, that he didn’t mean all “unemployed youth” to be cockroaches but only those with “bogus or fake” degrees. I argue that the so-called real universities can also produce cockroaches.
But before outlining, I am pressed to clarify, for cockroaches mean different things to different Indians.
We used to inhabit a country some time ago when cockroaches were universally loathed and considered dirty. They crawled through all kinds of spaces in the dead of the night; they came out of nowhere and disappeared into holes and shades; got crushed under some chappal or got pesticide-choked to death. The Home Minister of India some years ago said, “infiltrators are termites.” Had he said cockroaches, it would have worked just the same. Frederic Nietzsche’s critique, “If you crush a cockroach, you’re a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you’re a villain” used to be applicable for us too.
Now there is a new cockroach on the national horizon and it is making us remember all the forgotten aspects of cockroach life. Cockroaches are remarkably resilient. The species has been around for 300 million years, long before us humans and will be, apparently, the only ones to be around after a nuclear cataclysm. They renew the earth by decomposing dead plants and animals and enable the nutrient cycle. They have exceptional flexibility to survive in all kinds of habitats.
In this piece, I am talking about the first kind of cockroaches that Justice Surya Kant and us millennials and GenX used to talk about, and not the resilient, flexible, renewing agent that GenZ have now developed (in the etymological sense of un-covening).
Let me come back to my original point: cockroaches can as well be mass produced in established Indian universities.
The current Education Minister of India, who knows he has the support of the richest and the most powerful armies of the country, is rightfully confident but the problem area is that his own ministry’s work actively contributes to the further mass production of cockroaches. I don’t mean this only in the general sense that the ruling party’s three operational maxims, “demolish, demonetise, bulldoze” have a tendency to feed into a cockroach-thriving ambiance but specifically in the recent history of higher education.
Ten ways to mass produce cockroaches in Indian universities:
Create a political narrative saying there is nothing good with the earlier educational system, and all that can be done is demolition, demonetisation and bulldozing from the inside. Pretend to have a new policy filled with words such as “next generation”, “global”, “state-of-the-art” and “choice”.
Establish a centralised exam disregarding the qualifying exams and the nature of academic training in different institutions for different disciplines. The only way to clear this exam must be through coaching.
Bring in as many courses as possible: 75% increase in the number of courses a student studies, reduce the time available per course to 60%, introduce courses that anyone can teach because everybody already knows what is in there (Chocolate-making that can be offered by Physics, Philosophy or Physical Education is a classic example).
Keep students in the classroom as much as possible. Make them write exam after exam, internal assessment after internal assessment, to the point that they are doing about three times more exams as compared to the earlier system.
Stop trusting teachers. Always work with the assumption that they evade work and lie. Make them clerks, giving them a lot of pointless bureaucratic work.
Do a managerial miracle such as adding a whole new year without hiring faculty, without building classrooms or adding space. Make dissertation supervision work so smooth and soft that it doesn’t even have to be part of the workload of teachers. Make colleges buy AI products to detect AI text—the ones that are so insanely efficient that the only way to get around the software should be to intentionally misspell and mis-punctuate.
Conceptualise learning as a rolling stone: do away with the very idea of university calendars and keep the learning cauldron boiling! There are so many ways for this: hand over the entrance test to some agency that has exhausted all possibilities of messing up exams that delaying results is child’s play for them, or just come up with an exam calendar where all are waiting around for weeks so purposelessly. Students cannot have the comfort of seniors and juniors, teachers don’t know whether they are teaching, invigilating, evaluating, or just being around. But as long as nobody is taking a vacation, it is a satisfying proposition.
Prepare unique question papers: the first question and the fourth question can be the same but when asked the examination branch should be able to say ‘no change’ till it becomes such a habit that nobody will ask if a question paper is indeed right.
Introduce the ‘gig economy’ in teaching. Pay the guest teachers by the hour and make any time spent with students after the class unpaid labour. Issue no experience certificate; pay no vacation salary. Just present it as a way of giving one person’s job to two people and thus solving the employment crisis.
The most important thing is, never let anything settle down. Keep adding. Keep introducing. Keep destabilising. Tire them out. After a point nobody would want to join colleges. Then make the teachers responsible for bringing students. Blame it on them. Tell them these institutions are run so that they have their work!
The confidence of the Minister for Education has been that none of the parents care. Nobody is ever going to say if you don’t educate our children well, we will throw you out of power. No media has any worry. Nothing will happen to TRP rates. Teachers, a number of whom have become either cynically complicit with powers be or nihilistically alarmist in their opposition, can always blame it on the new generation who don’t care. These lots can keep a dead body of a university look alive. Or, like in Eugene Ionesco’s play Amedee or How to Get Rid of It? the dead body can even grow.
But then on the side of this make-belief show, cockroaches evolve. They will. They always do. They are always already there. And counting…
The trouble is only when they get together, answer an online call or gather on the street in Jantar Mantar. Well, what can one say!
N P Ashley teaches English in St Stephen’s College, Delhi.