Rajasthan: Students forced to migrate in search of good colleges

Jaipur: Manan Azad, 29, is packing his bags to go to the US for taking up research in biotechnology. At present, he is working on a research project in a leading hospital in Ahmedabad. Manan believes that his US opportunity and association with the Ahmedabad project would not have been possible if he had not left Jaipur, where the academic infrastructure is below par, and gone to Bangalore for graduation and post-graduation. Despite financial constraints, he convinced his father who runs an electric repair shop to send him to Bengaluru.

“Education standard is pretty poor in Jaipur colleges. They lack infrastructure, good faculty and above all academic atmosphere,” Manish rued.

There are lakhs of students in Rajasthan like Manan who face a similar problem every year. Thousands leave the state in search of good colleges in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and other places.

“It means additional financial burden, but what choice do we have,” said Anurag Varshneya whose son is studying commerce in a college in Mumbai.

“We have very good private schools in Jaipur but college education is a nightmare,” said Poonam Singh, another parent.

The problem is that state government colleges don’t have adequate number of teachers. In nearly half the government colleges, 50 per cent of the posts are lying vacant. Of the 219 government colleges, 14 do not have a single teacher, while 102 have half the sanctioned posts vacant, especially in English.

Rajasthan has made good strides in girls’ education. According to all-India survey on higher education in the past one decade, girls’ enrolment in colleges increased by 230 per cent. Last year, there were 4.67 lakh girls and 4.65 lakh boys in government colleges.

Unfortunately, most of them are denied quality education because not every parent is willing to send daughters to live alone in an alien city. In contrast in Jaipur, there are 46 girls’ colleges, but 42 face a shortage of teachers. Of them two have no teachers, while 12 have 50 per cent vacancies. Out of 6,219 posts 2,284 are vacant.

However a teacher in Government College in Sikar said that the bigger problem is that of attitude. “There is no academic environment whatsoever here,” he said, claiming that teachers are just not interested in teaching.

“I have a colleague who boasts that he has not taken a class in his entire career,” he said, while blaming the government for putting so many non-teaching responsibilities on teachers.

There are several private universities in the state, but these too lack quality. And, the biggest casualty of prevailing sub-standard in higher studies is employability. Several studies have suggested that more than two-third of the graduates in the state are not employable.

State-run Rajasthan University, also faces criticism for poor quality. Last year, retired professor R.B. Singh and retired bureaucrat Satya Narayan Singh filed a PIL accusing the university of duping students enrolled in the high-fee self-finance scheme (SFS) courses by offering ill-trained teachers.