Betrayed expectations and incentive reversals

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Betrayed expectations and incentive reversals
- The case of education scenario in Manipur -

Amar Yumnam *

Two poems are of immense relevance and interest when it comes to the contemporary education scenario of Manipur.

One is the paraphrasing of "La Fontaine" by Jacques Delors thus:

Be sure (the ploughman said), not to sell the inheritance
Our forefathers left to us:
A treasure lies concealed therein.
But the old man was wise
To show them before he died
That learning is the treasure.

The other poem is from "The Threepenny Opera" by Brecht and Weill and reads thus:

They tell you that the best in life is mental
Just to starve yourself and do a lot of reading
Up in some garret where the rats are breeding
....................
I soon found out it wasn’t reimbursin’
Decided to continue being earthy...
Where’s the percentage? asks Mack the Knife
The bulging pocket makes the easy life.

The transition from the first poem to the second poem is exactly what has happened to the education sector in the State of Manipur. The present mess in the education sector is particularly a post-Statehood phenomenon.

Recall the expectations aroused by the granting of Statehood to the State in the beginning of 1970s. This euphoric period was also reinforced by the grand visions of the two-three political leaders of the State who were the links between the old ideals and the new realisms.

Fuelled by the heightened expectations, the traditional values attached to education got a boost in the State. Attending to the calls of the people, the then leaders went for a massive expansion of the educations sector especially under the sponsorship of the public sector.

The original driving force for this was to free the educational institutes of the State from the shackles of finance and localism, and thus release the latent talent of the youths to full bloom. With the advantage of hindsight, we can yet say that there was nothing wrong with the original vision and actions. But something definitely went wrong with the process of operationalisation of the vision.

The single stroke of converting the private schools and colleges to Government ones did kill the existing spirit of competitions among the institutes without putting in place a new sense of commitment, enthusiasm and competition.

Instead, the spirit of appointing the locally available most competent educated youths to the private institutes was replaced by a mechanism invented by the successive political class to convert appointments into these institutes for developing clienteles.

Since the performers would generally not succumb to the tactics to develop cliental voters of the political players, the academically non-achievers started working in tandem with the power that be to temporarily manipulate with the prevailing system. This is how we have seen and been seeing appointment to teaching positions of many who simply should not be teachers.

This had the second round effect of declining quality in the delivery of the educational institutes in this land. With this the trust people of the State originally put on these institutes got dissipated.

The once powerful conscience-keepers class of the land was done away with and to the great transitory benefit of the political class. Remember, the core lesson of economics which emphasises that people do respond to incentives.

These newly acquired endogenous weaknesses of the education system were coupled by other exogenous failures happening in other sectors of the economy. Education would be demanded and valued only in an atmosphere where the wages of the academic performers rise faster than that of the non-skilled and non-performers.

But unfortunately this did not happen. The political class of the State, as corrupt as they are, saw to it that anybody who can take a stand should not find a place in its action of appointing to the various public sector avenues.

We should remember that this was happening in a region where the public sector was the largest employment giver; this scenario still prevails. This definitely lowered the valuation of education by general public unless in context of families who would be looking beyond the State in their future scheme of things.

What is really disturbing is that the State now increasingly witnesses the rising density of this trend of the non-achievers occupying the centre and pushing the performers to the periphery.

This has made the various bodies and pressure groups in the State acquire a very violent character in all their functionings as the persons manning the centre do not have the capability of other more positive functionings.

This definitely is not a sustainable situation as the incentives in place are all of the wrong kind.

There is no example in world development history where such incentives led to positive transformations, while we have in the fall of the Roman empire an instance of the direction we are fast proceeding.

* Amar Yumnam writes regularly for The Sangai Express. The writer can be contacted at yumnam1(at)yahoo(dot)co(dot)uk . This article was webcasted on December 14th, 2007.

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