The document discusses issues related to equality, freedom, and fraternity in Indian higher education. It notes that while the constitution guarantees these principles, they are not fully realized in practice. Social and economic justice are lacking, and less than 1% of the population controls over half of India's GDP. Higher education faces problems with access, quality, and ensuring equality of opportunity.

1. EQUALITY, FREEDOM & FRATERNITY:
INDIAN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION SYSTEM
– A CRITICAL APPRAISAL
Veteran Major P M Ravindran

2. • WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to
constitute India into a SOVEREIGN, SOCIALIST, SECULAR,
DEMOCRATIC, REPUBLIC and to secure to all its citizens: -
• JUSTICE, social, economic and political;
• LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship;
• EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote
among them all;
• FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the
unity and integrity of the nation;
• IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of
November 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO
OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.
- The Preamble, Constitution of India

3. Introduction
Equality, liberty and fraternity-
three terms made popular by the
French Revolution are now
recognised the world over as
the touchstones of a welfare society.

4. “People always keep on saying to me, so you
are the maker of the Constitution. My answer
is I was a hack. What I was asked to, I did
much against my will. I am quite prepared to
say that I shall be the first person to burn it. It
does not suit anybody.”
- Dr. B R Ambedkar
Rajya Sabha, 2nd Sept 1953

5. 'this Constitution … may be heaven for
the lawyers, and may even be the Magna
Carta for the capitalists of India, but so
far as the poor and the tens of millions of
toiling, starving and naked masses of
India are concerned, there is nothing in it
for them.'
-Seth Damodar Swarup, Constituent Assembly,
19 November 1949

6. If an enactment is itself clear
and unambiguous, no
preamble can qualify or cut
down the enactment!
-Powell v Kempton Park Race Course Co and
Attorney General V HRH Prince Ernest
Augustus of Hanover ([1899] AC 143 at 153
and [1957] AC 436, 467-68)

7. Preamble of the Constitution is
not part of the Constitution
Supreme Court of India, Berubari Union and exchange of
Enclaves, AIR 1960 SC 845, 856
Preamble to the Constitution is
part of the Constitution
Supreme Court of India, Kesavananda Bharati v State
of Kerala, (1973) 4 SCC 225; AIR 1973 SC 1461

8. The Part and the Whole
Equality, liberty and fraternity in the Society.
Human Development Index (HDI) scales life
expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living.
As per the list published in 2008 based on data of 2006, India
stands at 133rd place amongst 195 countries, China is at 90th,
Sri Lanka 104th, Iran at 84th, Egypt at 116th and Congo at 130th
place .
As per 2016 HDR , India is at 131, Vietnam at 115, Iraq at 121,
Bangladesh at 139 and Pakistan at 147

9. • GDP (PPP)
World average - $10,150.8
U S of A - $ 57,466.8
China - $ 8,123.2
Iraq - $4,609.6
Vietnam - $2,185.7
India - $1709.4
Pakistan - $1,468.2
Bangladesh - $1,358.8
*World Bank national accounts data, and OECD National Accounts data files
accessed at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD

10. As per a similar report by IMF India does not figure in
the list of first 50 either in the nominal or PPP
rankings for 2016 or the projected figures for 2020.
Luxembourg and Qatar are at the top positions on
nominal and PPP basis, respectively in 2016.
With per capita income of $105,829 Luxembourg is
10.26 times richer than world's $10,313.
But in PPP terms, Luxembourg is only 6.24 times richer
than world's $16,329.
In PPP terms, Qatar has GDP per capita of 129,727,
7.94 times higher than world. It is at 6th position in
nominal ranking.

11. Infant Mortality Rate
World Average - 48.8 per 1000 live births
Sri Lanka - 11
China - 23
Nepal - 53
India - 55

12. Literacy Rate
China - 93%
Sri Lanka - 90.8%
Egypt - 71%
India - 65.2%, 159th out of 195 countries.

13. People Below the Poverty Line (UNDP list)
China - 4.6%
Malaysia - 15.5%
Egypt - 16.7%
Sri Lanka - 25%.
India - 28.5%

14. China became independent in 1950. It had
been devastated by Japanese occupation from
1935 to 1945 and 38 years of civil war between
the Nationalists and the Communists.
Yet China is far ahead of us in every sphere.
Why is it so? Why ? Why ? Why ?

15. China has had more effective governance.
Chinese leaders were/are more nationalists.
They have always put the interest of the
nation above that of self, dynasty or the
party

16. My interventions using the Right to
Information Act have convinced me
sufficiently to assert that all our public
servants are idiots or traitors* unless
proved otherwise!
* An idiot is one who does not know the job he is
paid to do and a traitor, the one who knows it but
will not do it (except when there are other forms
of motivating factors)!

17. We now live in a nation where….
doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice,
universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom,
the press destroys information, religion destroys morals,
our banks destroy our economy, our citizens live in willful
ignorance. and reek of cowardice’
Comment by theirreverent1 at
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/why-does-the-u-s-
government-treat-military-veterans-like-human-garbage

18. Justice gone missing!

19. While equality, liberty and
fraternity go hand in hand, they
can do so if and only if they are
founded on the factors that can be
identified as social, economic and
political justice.

20. What prevails in our country is only a shadow of
political justice in that the electorate gets to
vote periodically for a candidate of their choice,
to represent them in the government. However,
after the vote is cast whether any of these
representatives really represent the interests of
those who elected them is a big question.

21. If I were to answer that question
honestly, it would be a big
NO!

22. Of social and economic justice one would be
justified in doubting if they exist at all. Even in
a fully literate and politically conscious state
like Kerala where the Communist Party of
India (Marxist) have led the government every
alternate 5 years, reports have appeared in
the media of certain sections of the society
being treated as untouchables even as late as
in the last six months!

23. On the economic front,
there have been reports that
in India more than half of its
GDP is with less than 1 percent
of the population!

24. ‘Justice is an intrinsic human need.
We suffer much privation but
we cannot suffer being wronged.
Absence of justice, we must not forget,
is one of the causes of crime.’
-Aravind Kumar, Jurist and lawyer,
'Needed high speed legal redressal’
Pioneer, Kochi,01 Aug 2006

25. ‘When we transformed from subjects
to citizens, we forfeited our rights it
seems, since what happens in our
country now in the name of law is
often rank injustice.’
-'Human rights, the genesis of justice is from
religion' under 'Faith Line' by Renuka Narayanan,
The New Indian Express of 20 Dec 2004

26. 'Judicial system has not been able to meet even
the modest expectations of the society. Its
delays and costs are frustrating, its processes
slow and uncertain. People are pushed to seek
recourse to extra-legal methods for relief. Trial
system both on the civil and criminal side has
utterly broken down.'
-NCRWC

27. 'Thus we have arrived at a situation in the
judicial administration where courts are
Deemed to exist for judges and lawyers
and not for the public seeking justice‘
-NCRWC

28. NCRWC
The National Commission to Review the Working of the
Constitution was a judiciary-headed, judiciary-heavy body.
It had 11 members of whom
4 (M.N. Venkatachaliah, the Chairman, B.P. Jeevan Reddy, R.S. Sarkaria
and Kottapalli Punnayya) were judges of the SC/HC,
2 (Soli J. Sorabjee and K. Parasaran) were advocates,
2 (P.A.Sangma and Sumitra G. Kulkarni) were political nominees,
2 (Dr.Subhash C. Kashyap and Dr. Abid Hussain) were bureaucrats
and just one (C.R. Irani) was a representative from the media!
A citizen’s review of the Report is available at
http://raviforjustice.blogspot.in/2011/03/report-of-ncrwc-citizens-
review.html

29. 'The Chapter 7 of the Report is titled 'The
Judiciary'. This chapter particularly is seriously
flawed and distorted. The much needed Judicial
Reform issues have not been even touched or
these got deleted in the final draft.’
-Dr.Subhash C Kashyap, in his Notes to the
Report of the NCRWC

30. 1. I believe in a Unified and truly Secular
India. However, the Commission debates
seemed often to reduce the Constitution to
being a platform for divisiveness and not
unification.
2. The Commission did not initiate or promote
sincere debate in the public with regards to
the issues that it was contemplating. The
efforts was more to "evade and defer" instead
of to "identify issues, table them for debate
and to deal with them".
- Ms Sumitra G Kulkarni, NCRWC

31. Dr Subash Kashyap, Member, NCRWC in his
Notes to the Report of the Commission:
Attention is also invited to the decision taken by the Commission at
its 14th Meeting held on 14-18 December, 2001. Para 16 of the
minutes records that "There shall be a National Judicial Commission
for making recommendation as to the appointment of a Judge of
the Supreme Court (other than the Chief Justice of India), a Chief
Justice of a High Court and a Judge of any High Court."
"The composition of the National Judicial Commission would be as
under:
a) The Vice-President of India
b) The Chief Justice of India
c) Two senior-most Judges of the Supreme Court, next to the Chief
Justice
d) The Union Minister for Law & Justice."

32. However the composition of the NJC as recommended
by the Commission in its Final Report is:
The National Judicial Commission for appointment of
judges of the Supreme Court shall comprise of:
(1) The Chief Justice of India : Chairman
(2) Two senior most judges of the Supreme Court :
Member
(3) The Union Minister for Law and Justice : Member
(4) One eminent person nominated by the President
after consulting the Chief Justice of India : Member

33. Other interesting quotes from the
Report of the NCRWC:
• 'The basic law is that all citizens including members of Parliament
are equal before the law.'
• 'Privileges of Members are intended to facilitate them in doing their
work to advance the interests of the people. They are not meant to
be privileges against the people or against the freedom of the
press.'
• 'The power of court to punish for contempt of itself is part of
sovereign power and can inhere only in a sovereign. Articles 129
and 215 recognize the existence of such power in the Supreme
Court and the High Courts as they exercise inter alia the sovereign
judicial power. Parliament and State Legislatures exercise sovereign
legislative power'
• 'The highest office in our democracy is the office of citizen; this is
not only a platitude, it must translate into reality'.

34. The Supreme Court itself had admitted in 2009
that it had wrongly sentenced 15 people to
death in 15 years! In 2012, 14 retired judges
had reportedly written to the President,
pointing out that since 1996 the Supreme
Court had erroneously given the death
penalty to 15 people, of whom two were
hanged!
-You were wrong, My Lords,
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150802/jsp/
7days/story_34917.jsp#.VcJWsjNH27x.faceboo
k

35. In a first-of-its-kind report, the Delhi High Court had tried to
arrive at the cost of its operation by considering its budget
and the time spent on hearing cases in financial year 2007-
08. Last year, the total expenditure incurred by the court was
Rs 42.45 crore for 213 working days. “The average cost of
listing each case before a judge worked out to Rs 1,297 and
the average court expenditure per minute was Rs 6,327 or Rs
19,93,180 for each working day”
“This expenditure excluded the time spent by the judges dictating
reserved judgments in the chambers and preparing the cases for
the next day as well as the time spent for correcting and signing
the order in those 64 odd cases listed each day,” the report said.
AGENCIES
( Reproduced from Times of India, February 11, 2009, Page 11 )

36. CASES FILED IN ONE YEAR (1999):
INDIA : 13.6 Million (1,36,68,073)
USA: 93.81 Million cases
DOCKET’S PER JUDGE:
INDIA : 987
USA: 3235

37. Law makers without any prescribed qualities,
qualifications or experience, their men Fridays (popularly
known as bureaucrats, who are required to help them in
decision making by collecting and collating data and
maintaining records) without any accountability and a
judiciary which has the scope for the most whimsical
decision making being held not only without
accountability and beyond criticism but also protected by
a totally illogical and weird armor called contempt of
court, are the essential features of our Constitution, the
Bible for our governance!

38. The Educational System Muddle

39. Apart from enforcing law and order,
health and education are the only
services that the government of a
welfare state should have taken
upon itself to deliver directly to the
people.

40. Three objectives to higher education:
• fine tuning the art of learning (by self and as a
continuous process)
• fine tuning social skills and
• acquiring competence needed to earn ones
living, or in other words, finding a job.

41. In the context of higher education,
there is a need to ensure that there is
equality of opportunity to access it,
the liberty to choose any subjects of
one’s choice and to interact freely with
each other as members of a fraternity.

42. Education as a Right.

43. Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act,
notified in the Gazette of India on 27 Aug 2009,
provides for free and compulsory education for
all children in the age group 6 to 14 years.
The National Education Policy is still in
embryonic state.

44. National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC)
was set up by the UGC in 1994 to accredit universities
and institutions of general higher education as well as
to certify for educational quality.
National Board of Accreditation (NBA) was established by
the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) in
1994 to accredit programmes and institutions.
Themes and questions for Policy Consultation on Higher
Education were released only on 21 Mar 2015*
*Can be accessed at the website of MHRD

45. Access to Higher Education-
the admission process
• National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) was made compulsory for
admission to MBBS and BDS courses with effect from academic year 2016
• Made mandatory only from the academic year 2017 with the final seal of
approval coming from the apex court!
• In Tamil Nadu, a student, who had got 1176 marks out of 1200 in Plus 12,
committed suicide!
• In Kerala problems arose from a different source- the apex court decision
empowering private medical college managements to charge Rs 11 lakhs
as fees per year for 85 percent of the seats and Rs 20 lakhs for the
remaining 15 percent seats reserved for NRI students!
• There are four different fees- General merit quota, General non-merit
quota, management quota and NRI quota- in the same college

46. Questions that beg answers…
• Why have AIIMS and JIPMER been excluded
from NEET?
• Why have similar common entrance
examinations not been introduced for other
professional courses?

47. Quality of higher education-
Ranking institutions and disciplines.
• National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF)
• Minister for HRD for‘dividing the universities in
three categories - A, B and C -on the basis of
various criteria including their NIRF rankings’
• NIRF however covers not merely universities but
also colleges and even disciplines.
• Right now getting the ranking is a voluntary process
and hopefully it will be a necessary factor for
educational institutions to even survive in the
competitive world of commercialized education.

48. Cost of higher education-prohibitive!
• Apex court decision is a blow to the aspirations of
students hailing from amoung more than 90 percent
of the population.
• Amoung the top 20 rank holders in the All India Civil
Services Examination of 2017 nineteen are engineers
and engineers constitute half of all those who
cleared the exam!
• Skill sets and compensation

49. Reservations- murdering equality,
liberty and fraternity in one stroke
• A country where everyone is competing to be
backward!
• In a fast and competitive society it would be fatal to
compromise on competence to perform whatever
one is required to perform.
• There is a need to provide support to those who had
been/continue to be on the fringes of the society.
• The only way of doing it is by helping them
acquire the competence they need to
perform the tasks they would like to perform.

50. Campus Politics or breeding ground
for criminals for political parties?
• Required for grooming the future citizens for fulfilling
their responsibilities in a democratic society.
• In practice, reduced to a recruiting ground for criminals
in political parties!
• Destruction of public property can alone suffice to brand
campus politics as an irresponsible and anti social activity
and ban them!
• How many times has anyone seen or heard students
protesting vehemently for regular updating of syllabus,
better libraries and facilities for extracurricular activities,
regular classes and timely conduct of exams and
announcement of results?

51. Education vs Employment Opportunities.
• 13.3 per cent of India’s population in the age group
of 15-29 years were unemployed.*
• 47 per cent of Indian graduates are not qualified for
any industry job
• 70 per cent of our engineering graduates are not
employable! **
*http://www.thehindu.com/features/education/careers/unemployed-or-
unemployable/article5486730.ece#!
**According to Aspiring Minds National Employability Report, 80% of the
them are unemployable! (Study of more than 1,50,000 engineering
students who graduated in 2015 from over 650 colleges)

52. Interestingly, Kerala, with it’s higher than
national average literacy rate, has an
unemployment rate of 7.4 per cent, which is
much higher than the national average of 2.3
per cent. According to Labour Bureau's "Third
Annual Employment & Unemployment Survey
2012-13" released on 29 November 2013,
unemployment rate amongst illiterate youth is
lower than educated youth.

53. 3 Reasons Employers Say They Don’t Hire Youth*
• Youth Seem Too Entitled
• Youth Are Too Apathetic
• Youth Just Aren’t Ready
* Posted by Adam Fletcher at https://adamfletcher.net/why-
youth-are-unemployable/
He is a speaker on engaging young people in business,
education, and communities. He is also the author of
several books, including Ending Discrimination Against
Young People.
Learn more about him by visiting adamfletcher.net.

54. Learning to Earning…
• National Skill Development Council (NSDC) - 25 million youth to be
trained in various skill-based jobs over the next 10 years
• Further government action required:
 remove hurdles to economic activity
 simplify regulations
 Improve quality of public education
 Dismantle licence raj
All the above required to enable entrepreneurs exploit fleeting
opportunities ! According to a report of World Bank “Stitches to
Riches?” even a 10% growth in garment price of China will
create 1.2 million jobs in the Indian garment industry!!!*
*https://www.naukrinama.com/youth-want-jobs-not-quota-it-will-
not-remove-frustration-of-unemployed-people/

55. Steps to Youth Employability*
• Accept Responsibility.
• Teach Young People About Mindsets.
• Promote Practical Hopefulness.
• Create Partnerships.
• Build Connectivity.
• Redo Education.
• Promote In-person Internet.
• Foster Entrepreneurial Lifestyles.
• Stop Fighting Change.
• Make Lifelong Learning An Accessible Expectation.
*Adam Fletcher

56. Conclusion
Equality, freedom and fraternity are not merely some ideals to be
touted by opportunists when it suits their convenience. They are
mindsets to be imbibed from the day one starts interacting with the
society. We are not living in an ideal world and that is why we have
set up a system of governance with well defined tasks and
empowered and equipped to fulfill those tasks. The cost to the
citizen for sustaining the government is considerable. The
accountability and transparency required in government functions
are practically nonexistent. The subversion of the Right to
Information Act, the only pro-democracy, citizen friendly law of the
country, could be a case study for how every public servant in this
country continue to treat the citizens as subjects, quite often worse
than the way they were treated even by the colonists!

57. The youth of today, in
our educational
institutions, have the
onus of retrieving the
situation for themselves.

58. Ramdhari Singh Dinkar*, Hindi poet,
essayist, patriot and academic, had
once said that when youth walk, the
ground beneath should tremble.
* His poem ‘Singhasan Khaali Karo Ke Janata Aaati
Hai’ (Vacate the throne, for the people are
coming) was used by Jayaprakash Narayan to
inspire the people during his fight against the
Emergency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramdhari_Singh_D
inkar

59. But it would be important for them to
also understand that everyone’s
freedom ends where the other man’s
nose begins.
Remembering Jesus Christ who had
said do unto others what you expect
others to do unto you!

60. And finally, our own poet,
Rabindranath Tagore, who had
exhorted:
"Let me not pray to be sheltered from
dangers but to be fearless in facing
them. Let me not beg for the stilling
of my pain, but for the heart to
conquer it. Let me not look for allies
in life's battlefield but to my own
strength. Let me not cave in."

61. Recommended further reading:
• http://www.articlesbase.com/politics-articles/democracyeast-is-east-and-
west-is-west-4287828.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.com/2011/02/reforming-our-justice-
delivery-system.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.com/2011/03/who-will-judge-judges.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.com/2011/03/parliamentary-standing-
committee-on.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.com/2011/05/indian-judiciary-who-said-
what.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.com/2011/04/crime-of-non-governance-
and-quasi.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.com/2011/05/awful-office-procedures-
complaint-to.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.com/2012/01/delivering-government-
services-to.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.in/2012/02/urgent-amendments-needed-to-
rti-act.html
• http://raviforjustice.blogspot.in/2012/04/ias-indian-assholes-on-strike-
service.html

62. Real Courage is found, not in the willingness
to risk death, but in the willingness to stand,
alone if necessary, against the ignorant and
disapproving herd.
- Jon Roland, Constitutionalist. Austin, Texas
1976
http://www.constitution.org/jr_cv.htm

63. "When government fears the people,
there is liberty. When the people fear
the government, there is tyranny.“
- Thomas Jefferson

64. Thank you

65. Jai Hind!