For years, Bhagvanji Raiyani wrote letters. He wrote them to government officials, complaining about secret admissions practices and illegal tuition fees. He wrote them to university vice chancellors, complaining about the sale of everything from answer sheets to places in medical school. But no one ever wrote back.
One day in 1995, he opened his newspaper to read that a private institute that coaches students in how to pass their end-of-year exams had given high-school students the answers to the tests, in order to raise the institute’s profile, and its profits. Mr. Raiyani was incensed. The rich had once again bought their children a place in college, while the poor were being squeezed out.
He put down his pen and called his family together. With his children provided for and his development firm doing well enough, he announced that he was embarking upon a mission to reform education.
“No one will be spared, not professors, not principals, and not politicians -- especially not politicians,” he remembers telling them. “Society will ostracize us, friends will leave us, you may lose your jobs. Are you ready?”
“No!” they answered in unison.
The next day, Mr. Raiyani drove down to the municipal office and registered his education-watchdog group, the Forum for Fairness in Education. Instead of sending letters, he would file lawsuits. Instead of hoping for a reply, he would wait for a verdict.
An engineer by training, Mr. Raiyani knew little about India’s complex educational system and even less about the law, but he was prepared to learn.
Fast forward seven years, and on most Wednesday mornings you’ll find Mr. Raiyani at the Bombay High Court, which presides over Maharashtra and several neighboring states. A Gothic curiosity that is half castle, half church, the court is rife with reminders of the colonial power that once ruled this land, from the life-size oil paintings of long-dead Englishmen to the Indian lawyers in long black robes, perspiring in the tropical heat.
Wednesday is reserved for public-interest cases and, as usual, it’s a free-for-all. Spectators meander in, filling up the back seats. The lawyers crowd into the front. Mr. Raiyani, 64, takes his place among them, but this little man, in his white starched shirt and pants, is obviously not one of them.
“There is a tradition in India that education is a mission, it is a service, it is an obligation,” says Mr. Raiyani as he waits for the court to convene. “Yet over the past two decades, education has become more commercial and beyond the reach of the common man. Today, the affluent can promote their own children, but the poor have no access. This is what makes me angry.”
When his complaint number is called, Mr. Raiyani pushes his way through the scrum to the feet of the presiding judges. In his arms are stacks of writs and petitions that over the years he has learned to write. He unknots the twine keeping his files together and opens a thick, worn folder.
Mr. Raiyani tells the court that his organization’s seven pending cases must be heard before the new academic term begins. He passionately argues that unless the evil practices outlined in each petition are immediately struck down, they will spell ruin for this year’s entering class.
This is Mr. Raiyani’s crusade. Good versus evil. Education versus ignorance. Nothing in between.
Mr. Raiyani is not tilting at windmills. In 1998, his watchdog group won a landmark case that clamped down on secretive admissions practices. The court ruled that all colleges and universities must make entrance-examination scores public, to ensure that admissions are based on merit, and not money passed under the table.
In another case, Mr. Raiyani persuaded the courts to close down an engineering college, operating out of rented shacks without qualified staff, nearly all of whose students failed their state exams. The education department decertified the college. Yet the chief minister overruled the decision because the owner was a big player in the minister’s political party, says Mr. Raiyani. “This was wrong,” he says. “These students were being cheated.”
For all the battles he has waged and won on behalf of students, you would think that Mr. Raiyani would be some sort of hero. But his victories have made it more difficult for parents to work backroom deals and for colleges to cover them up. Now administrators quote the court’s rulings to parents and demand more money to circumvent the system.
Many in the teaching community are likewise disenchanted with Mr. Raiyani’s campaign. Before he filed a suit to stop the practice, some professors skipped their college lectures and instead held their classes at one of the private tutoring institutes that charge high fees. Mr. Raiyani’s group found that the owners of these lucrative enterprises were often the teachers themselves. The new rules ban professors from conducting outside tutoring and require colleges to enforce attendance rules.
He has also earned the wrath of educators who feel they have been unfairly targeted. They don’t doubt Mr. Raiyani’s good intentions, but say he doesn’t understand that not all transgressions are the same.
Vishwanath J. Arekar is the weary administrator of the financially strapped, government-financed Sheth N.K.T. Thanawala College of Commerce. Mr. Raiyani’s organization has taken him to court because classes exceed the state limit of 120 pupils -- which occurred when an unexpectedly large number of first-year students passed their exams.
Instead of winning the appreciation of the fairness group for accommodating hundreds of qualified students who would have otherwise been pushed out, Mr. Arekar now feels that he is being treated as if he had been caught stealing the students’ lunch money. “Raiyani does not understand the ground realities,” says Mr. Arekar, who recently put an “out of order” sign on the college’s one elevator to save on the electricity bill. “The government won’t give us the money to create new divisions or allow us to hire more teachers on such short notice. Yes, in large classes teachers may have to shout to be heard by everyone, but no one is complaining. Throughout the year there’s been no problem. He is the problem.”
But Mr. Raiyani doesn’t let criticism, or even death threats, sway him. He believes his own life is an example of what is possible. Only with an education where the sole criterion for success was merit could he go from being a child of an impoverished farmer to a student at an engineering college. “I don’t believe in God, I don’t go to temple, I don’t believe in reincarnation,” Mr. Raiyani says. “I believe in education.”
Yet he has paid a price for his unswerving faith in his mission. Mr. Raiyani was on his way to becoming a rich man when he left his property-development business to run the watchdog group. And his crusade has caused painful rifts in the family, according to his wife, Pravina. She says one of their children, who had middling examination scores, was furious when her father refused to write her a letter that would have secured her place in a good college.
Mr. Raiyani’s crusade also nearly spelled social ruin for his family, when he could not find husbands for his four daughters. (Arranged marriages are still the norm in India, even among educated families who ignore other social conventions.) When the daughters -- all with advanced degrees from universities in the United States -- were first shopped around, there were no takers, recalls Pravina. “She’s the daughter of Fighter Man,” complained the families of the potential husbands.
The Raiyanis eventually found grooms for all. But they had to search outside their Bombay community, indeed, outside the country, where their father’s reputation didn’t proceed them.
Back at the Bombay High Court, where the temperature is rising, the court rules -- to no one’s surprise -- that moving up the hearing dates is impossible. The court is soon going into its summer recess. The judge brings down the gavel and calls for the next case.
Mr. Raiyani seems not to have heard, and simply continues pleading his case, explaining that the very future of the next generation is at stake.
The judge bangs the gavel down again and again, but whether it’s from exhaustion or defeat, he eventually gives up and lets Mr. Raiyani continue. Though the judges stand by their decision, there is a feeling in the courtroom that even they are powerless to combat a will so strong.
http://chronicle.com Section: International Page: A48