In Memoriam
Mukul Kesavan | 14 April 2024 | The Telegraph
The death of Delhi University has gone unremarked. It isn’t formally dead; it still educates tens of thousands of students but it is not, as it once was, a place where students and teachers desperately want to be. Some institutions within it, like the Delhi School of Economics, are in better health than others and some of its affiliated colleges are more desirable than others, but hard-working students and ambitious academics increasingly look elsewhere.
This is part of a broader tendency: the secession of India’s comfortable professional classes from public institutions of every sort, from hospitals to school boards. Upper-middle-class parents in India have always sent their children to private schools but these schools were generally signed up to public bodies like the Central Board of Secondary Education and, its lineal ancestor, the All India Higher Secondary Board, for their school-leaving examinations. The new, upscale, very expensive private schools that have mushroomed in India’s metropolitan cities prefer to work towards school-leaving qualifications designed by Western regulatory bodies like the A-Level and International Baccalaureate diplomas…