The Hindu Business Line : Education de-reserved

THE DECISION OF the seven-judge Supreme Court Bench that the state shall not impose any reservation of seats in unaided private professional colleges is a ruling that has not come in a day too soon. In fact, one would have thought that the proposition had so little moral or legal merit that the matter should be litigated at all and then that it should require the adjudicating skills of the highest judicial forum of the land.

From the welter of evidence now available on how economic agents behave vis-à-vis production and consumption of goods or services of economic value, some principles have come to be well accepted. One, that the mechanism of state allocating goods/services (public quotas or reservation percentages are just that) among competing classes of consumers at best of times ends up being misdirected and in the hands of venal regulators can quickly degenerate into an exercise in the most grotesque and bizarre form of resource allocation. Two, even in a situation where certain goods of an essential nature and consumed by the masses are in short supply, shoring up the quantum through whatever means available is the better option than allocating available supplies among competing demands. Even then the intervention on the supply side should be seen as a short-term measure while creating conditions for the market to enhance supplies to meet the demand. This, of course, raises the question whether the metaphor of ordinary commerce should at all apply in the field of education.

For a society that is steeped in the tradition of seeing education as an elevating experience or its pursuit as a noble public purpose, such a notion may seem heretical. But requirements of crafting policies in the larger public good does not permit one the luxury of ignoring the realities of the market place. Viewed from this framework, for the vast majority of students admission to professional courses in engineering, medicine or management is nothing more than a passport to affluence and the societal recognition that follows the possession of material trappings of life. It is best that the providers of such education and those in its pursuit are left to negotiate the terms of this arrangement as they deem best. The idea may take a while to sink in but it surely will.

It would amaze someone today to learn that not too long ago the state seriously believed in the notion that public interest is best served by it deciding who among the vast multitude of consumers are deserving of the limited quantity of motor cars or two-wheelers and at what price, though these were produced by a clutch of private manufacturers. Applying the logic of the marketplace to the field of education also implies that the suppliers of this service are not allowed to cloak themselves in charity apparel. It is time the state also saw them as engaged in a commercial activity, pure and simple, and applied the principles of taxation as imposed on those similarly placed.

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