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THIS IS REGARDING THE GOVERNMENT ASKING THE INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER
LEARNING TO BE MORE SELF SUFFICIENT. THE LEFTISTS NOW SEE ANOTHER
VESTIGE OF STATE PATRONAGE SYSTEM GOING AWAY FROM THEIR HANDS.
This seems the season for the planning commission to discover ugly
home truths. First it found out that the government's economic
strategy is deeply flawed. Then it concluded that the figures of
people below the poverty line were cooked up in a way that showed
the finance ministry wished to prove there are three types of
untruths: lies, damned lies and statistics. Now the planning
commission has discovered that not only officials but even
independent research institutions have been helping themselves to
public resources while failing to deliver what is required from
them.
A little noticed patronage play during the tutelage of the self
righteous Manmohan Singh over the finance ministry relates to the
distribution of largesse to some research institutions even as
there were calls for austerity While overall outlays for education
were tightened, favoured institutions were doled out fairly large
amounts of public monies. Among them has been the doubly blessed
Rajiv Gandhi Foundation which had the effrontery to refuse to have
its accounts audited as required. Among others were the Delhi
School of Economics and the Institute of Economic Growth, both
institutions with which Singh is connected in his personal,
academic capacity
The planning commission has found that even after two to three
years from the time of disbursement of Rs 100 to 120 million to
such institutions, they have achieved little in terms of research.
This may distress the planning commission and worry the comptroller
and auditor general. It does not surprise those who have been
familiar with the process of state funded research in India.
For many years, those in control of official research institutions
have treated the planning commission and other funding bodies like
the Indian Council for Social Science Research as mere cash cows
which can be milked cynically. Neither quality of research nor
quantitative output as return, for the investment has been regarded
as important. Like much else, research reflects the kind of social
order within which it is conducted.
For instance, there is a connection between peasant and student
activism and officially sponsored social science research in India.
In the late Sixties and early Seventies, when the movements of
militant agricultural labourers and poor peasants found their
loudest echoes in the campuses and students seemed to be
relentlessly seeking ways to transform society, some "institutions
of higher learning" were set up through official patronage. Now
that the threat from those fronts has abated, the same institutions
are languishing, apparently afflicted by terminal intellectual
ailments.
The most noted of such institutions was the Jawaharlal Nehru
University set up during the Naxalite movement with the avowed aim
of giving some radical or potentially radical sections of the
intelligentsia a place under the official sun. A well endowed
university, the JNU provided a controlled environment for the
airing of leftist thought, a hothouse for inconvenient ideas which
could be quarantined within its ivory towers. The virus could thus
be checked from infecting other more vital parts of the body
politic. The JNU's ambience was so deliberately created that it
appeared to allow free debate when in fact it was largely an inward
looking, almost incestuous, institution engaged in internecine
disputes' among leftists. The establishment's encouragement to
what, D.D. Kosambi derisively caned "official Marxists" OM - so
tied them to the rulers' apron strings that their brightest stars
have ended up ghost writing the budgetary wisdom of the likes of R
Chidambaram and authoring inane documents like the common minimum
programme.
JNU at least has had the redeeming feature of the presence of
students, a feature that stimulated its teachers to carry on
research. Other purely research institutions set up at about the
same time have, by and large, not had even this advantage. Indeed,
the "professionalization" of social science research in the early
Seventies created an enormous but intellectually underemployed
unintelligentsia whose productivity, low to begin with, has
gradually gone down both quantitatively and qualitatively The prime
institution responsible for this state of affairs is the ICSSR and,
to a lesser extent, the Indian Council for Historical Research and
the Indian Council for Philosophical Research.
The ICSSR, the ICHR and the ICPR were set up with the intention of
separating research from teaching, a principle flawed in its very
premises. Apart from a few nonteaching social science institutions
like the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, good
research in India always drew from teaching. Even in the Indian
Statistical Institute in Calcutta, activities like formulation of
the second five year plan accompanied, and indeed benefited from,
teaching graduate students. The best research in the pre-ICSSR
phase was conducted by university teachers. But the ICSSR and its
sister institutions were founded on the premise that research
required a greater aloofness, a higher and more isolated ivory
tower than universities provided.
These "specialized" research institutions lacked a problematique
precisely because they were cut off from the mainstream of society
As long as they were forced to notice what was happening in society
on account of its sheer intensity, they attempted to get involved
in the major discussions in the context of the Seventies' agrarian
unrest. As soon as these movements abated, specialized researchers
either switched on to more arcane concerns or lapsed into
inactivity. This suited the state fine, since critical social
science was hardly what it required when the urge to globalize was
strongest in the ruling class.
The ICSSR did little research on its own; it did "research
management". Even this was almost proto-capitalist in orientation
- doling out money on a putting out system and on a
patronage-clientilist basis. The ICSSR mandarins turned into
dispensers of money.
Among its feudatories are the 40 odd research institutes funded by
the ICSSR. There is one in almost each major state and, appropriate
to the nature of the Indian polity and sham federalist culture,
half a dozen in Delhi. They replicate the existence and experience
of the hegemonic body, the ICSSR. Their grant in aid covers
infrastructure maintenance and staff salaries but does not include
seed money for research. Like the ICSSR, most of these institutes
have become parasitic, bureaucratic and brain dead bodies.
Besides, in the last few years, the real value of grants has
declined on account of inflation. Hence, many of these institutions
are unable to buy books, subscribe to journals, upgrade computers
and maintain the infrastructure for research. The currently
fashionable philosophy of privatization, of raising resources for
public activities from private donors has pushed many of them into
the arms of international agencies. That has placed extraneous
priorities on Indian research bodies. Even institutions like the
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, with accomplished
and left oriented researchers, have had to rely more and more on
international consultancy than original, critical social science
research.
Other institutions are worse placed. The planning commission has no
details about the ISI's progress in establishing a plan policy
centre for which it received Rs 25 million. And, despite the
generosity shown to other similar institutions by Manmohan Singh,
the K.N. Raj Institute, the Centre for Development Studies at
Thiruvananthapuram, has turned into a teaching shop affiliated to
the JNU. The Chandigarh based Centre for the-Study of Rural and
Industrial Development has for long been an omnibus racket. The
Centre for Policy Research in Delhi gets legitimacy from the ICSSR
and cash from foreign funders and is in essence a parking lot for
retired bureaucrats and lobbyists for the US oriented globalizers.
The purpose of the state has been served. A large body of
researchers who could have troubled the state by asking
uncomfortable questions were rendered silent and their interests
were diverted towards esoteric exercises in post-modernism.
Researchers were cut off from more volatile students. Social
scientists were depoliticized. The crucial relationship between
science and society, vital to the development of theory and
evolution of creative praxis., was severed. Status quo was
protected in the realm of thought as in the material world. It has
taken some time for the planning commission to discover only a part
of this truth.
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