Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Nations are built by healthy institutions

Mr Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote in his resignation letter to PM “Why should all institutions in a country the size of India adopt the same admissions quotas? Is there no room at all for different institutions experimenting with different kinds of affirmative action policies that are most appropriate for their pedagogical mission? How will institutions feel empowered?............... how will they ever achieve excellence and autonomy if basic decisions like who they should teach, what they should teach, how much they should charge are uniformly mandated by government diktat?............. grave dangers for India as a nation… continues to abet a politics of illusion.”.

“Jawaharlal Nehru. He wrote, “So these external props, as I may call them, the reservations of seats and the rest, may possibly be helpful occasionally, but they produce a false sense of political relation, a false sense of strength, and, ultimately therefore, they are not so nearly important as real educational, cultural and economic advance which gives them inner strength to face any difficulty or opponent.”

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