Bihari students migrate to other states in huge numbers for higher studies. This causes a huge loss in terms of Money going out of the state. This was not always the case, though. Until the mid-1980s, fewer students left Bihar for higher studies. In those days, the state boasted of good academic institutions such as Patna College, Patna Women’s College and Science College in Patna, St Xavier’s College in Ranchi and St Columba’s College in Hazaribagh to name a few. Bihar also had excellent schools in St Michael’s in Patna, Vikas Vidyalaya in Ranchi and, above all, the famous residential school at Netarhat in Gumla district.
Some of them are located in Jharkhand now. The lists of alumni from these schools who have excelled in different fields at the national and international levels gives an idea about the quality of education that these institutions once imparted.
Take Patna College, for instance, which was referred to as ‘the Oxford of the East’ in the past. On its 150th anniversary recently, it had an impressive list of alumni who had done Bihar proud over the decades.
The state’s first chief minister Srikrishna Sinha, Sir Ganesh Dutt, Anugrah Narayan Singh, Moinul Haq, Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Yashwant Sinha and Muchkund Dubey are some of them.
Similar is the case of Patna Science College which was also considered as one of the best in the eastern India.
The same colleges, however, do not attract the best of talent now. Like all other great institutions in the state, they seem to be surviving on their past laurels.
Today, no college from Bihar makes it to any list of the top academic institutions in the country.
The reason behind it is simple: sharp decline in the overall quality of education. Many believe that the degeneration set in after the state government withdrew English as a compulsory subject from government schools towards the end of 1970s.
Until then, most of the state-run schools such as Patna Collegiate and G D Pataliputra in Patna as well as the Zila Schools across Bihar were centres of excellence which gave missionary schools a run for their money.
But the decision to shun English made people withdraw their wards from government schools and enroll them into private institutions.
Besides, large-scale takeovers of private colleges by the erstwhile regime, prolonged strikes by the teachers and inordinate delay in publication of results took the sheen off these institutions.
A student usually had to spend about five years to complete his three-year Bachelor degree course even in the premier Patna University.
The quality of the faculty in the university, which once boasted of stalwarts such as historian Prof Ram Sharan Sharma, also left much to be desired largely because of rampant nepotism in recruitment.
All this left the students disillusioned fuelling largescale migration in the 1980s. The situation has improved a bit since then.
The academic sessions are, at least, regular now. Many new academic institutions such as Chandragupta Institute of Management, Chanakya Law University and IIT-Patna have also come up under the Nitish Kumar regime.
Others like Nalanda International University, Central University and the Bihar centre of Aligarh Muslim University are in the pipeline. However, the students’ migration rate hasn’t changed much.
The state government will have to give a fresh lease of life to the old institutions while laying the foundation of the new ones.
(Based on the inputs by Giridhar Jha published in Dailymail )