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Abstract
This article traces the intersections between higher education, social mobility, and the reproduction of inequalities in Coastal Andhra Pradesh, India. It explores the social history, political economy, and culture of education in the region, and the formation of a dominant social imaginary that equates engineering degrees, IT jobs, and migration with social prestige and success. This aspirational culture has shaped mobility strategies across social classes, the educational regime, and government policies aimed at greater inclusion. But state interventions in engineering education have produced contradictory outcomes, creating paths of mobility for some social groups but new modes of marginalisation and immobility for others.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on research carried out by the author as part of ‘Provincial Globalisation: The Impact of Reverse Transnational Flows in India’s Regional Towns’, a collaborative research programme of the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, and the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam (see www.provglo.org).
The paper draws on data collected during a small survey of students in five engineering colleges in Krishna and Guntur districts from December 2013 to January 2014. The project was coordinated by Dr P. Srikant and the field research was carried out by Sudha Samyukta, Balendu Rashmi, and Geetha Krishna. I thank all the team members for their contributions and valuable insights into this domain.
I am grateful to Dr S. Ananth and Dr P. Srikant for their ongoing contributions to my research and for sharing their deep understanding of contemporary Coastal Andhra, to Anju Christine Lingham for research assistance and editing, to WOTRO for financial support, and NIAS for administrative support.
Previous versions of this article were presented at the International Conference on Regional Towns and Migration: Interrogating Transnationalism and Development in South Asia, University of Amsterdam, 10–11 October 2013; and the workshop on Social Mobility and In/equality in Post-reform India jointly organised by the Centre of Global South Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen and the Department of Sociology, Delhi University, 7–8 November 2013. I thank the participants in these conferences, as well as members of the ‘ProGlo’ team – especially Sanam Roohi and Leah Koskimaki – for their valuable feedback and critical suggestions.
An earlier version of this article appeared as ‘Engineering Mobility? The “IT Craze”, Transnational Migration, and the Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra’, Provincial Globalisation Working Paper No. 7. Bangalore: National Institute of Advanced Studies and Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research, 2014.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The paper is based on field research carried out in and around Vijayawada between January 2012 and August 2014, for a total of about 12 weeks. The research included interviews with principals, teachers, and students of several engineering college, education consultants, local businessmen, journalists and academics, and other key informants. I have also drawn on Internet and published documentary sources.
2. Coastal Andhra is not an official administrative unit but is a widely accepted cultural and geographic region. It usually refers to the districts of Guntur, Krishna, and East and West Godavari districts and encompasses the agriculturally productive deltas of the Krishna and Godavari rivers. In this paper, ‘Andhra Pradesh’ refers to the state prior to bifurcation in June 2014.
3. An exception is the special issue of Anthropology and Education Quarterly, ‘Learning, Livelihoods, and Social Mobility’, Vol. 43, no. 4, 2012.
4. Before the 1990s, there were very few engineering colleges in India, all of them government or ‘government aided’ institutions. Seats were scarce and entrance highly competitive, which meant that engineering degrees could be accessed mainly by the elite and middle classes who had the requisite economic and cultural capital to gain admission.
5. For instance, VR Siddhartha and PVP Siddhartha Engineering Colleges, Vijayawada and Vignan University in Guntur district are commonly referred to as ‘Kamma colleges’.
6. An example is KL College of Engineering (another ‘Kamma college’), established in Guntur District in 1981 by Koneru Lakshmaiah Charities. The college recently achieved ‘deemed university’ status, making KL University one of the three private universities in the state.
7. An example is GITAM University in Visakhapatnam, which began life as an engineering college established by a prominent local entrepreneur turned politician, MVVS Murthy.
8. Dr L. Rathaiah, head of the Vignan Foundation for Science, Technology and Research, transformed his coaching centres (which provide training for various entrance exams) into intermediate colleges, and later expanded his enterprise into a large and diversified education group with 40,000 students. The Vignan conglomerate includes 15 schools, 9 junior colleges, 1 undergraduate/postgraduate college, an education college, 3 pharmacy colleges, and 8 engineering colleges, in various locations across Andhra Pradesh. See http://www.vignanuniversity.org/aboutus/vignangroup.html.
9. EAMCET stands for the Engineering, Agricultural, and Medical Common Entrance Test, which is conducted annually in Andhra Pradesh to regulate admissions to private colleges. According to one source, the coaching industry for the EAMCET alone is worth an estimated Rs 5000 crore (about $110 million) a year. http://www.deccanherald.com/content/127552/content/213841/F, accessed September 15, 2013.
10. IT and other companies visit the top engineering colleges each year to recruit students who are about to graduate.
11. See, for example, information posted on the website of VR Siddhartha College for the 2012–2013 graduating class. The colleges reports 429 campus placements, the majority in major IT companies such as TCS and HCL. Students and their families check these statistics carefully when choosing colleges. See, for example: http://vrsiddhartha.ac.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=548:placements-12-13&catid=1:latest-vrsec&Itemid=94, accessed July 25, 2014.
12. ‘Non-Resident Indian’ is the official designation for Indian citizens who live abroad for more than half the year. Non-Indian citizens of Indian origin are categorised as ‘Overseas Indians’ and can apply for ‘PIO’ (Person of Indian Origin) or ‘OCI’ (Overseas Citizen of India) status, which grant certain privileges in India such as visa-free entry and residence status. In this paper, I follow the popular usage of the term ‘NRI’, which in this region refers to anyone living abroad regardless of their citizenship status.
13. This expansion is an all-India phenomenon: in 1980, there were only 157 engineering and technology institutions the country, and by 2012 there were 5194. Most of this growth is accounted for by private engineering colleges and has been concentrated in south India. http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Time-to-end-proliferation-of-engineering-colleges/2013/05/05/article1575110.ece, accessed October 1, 2013.
14. Engineering colleges are scattered across the state, with the largest concentration around Hyderabad (especially in Ranga Reddy district), followed by Coastal Andhra. Guntur district has 68 engineering colleges; Krishna district, 45; West Godavari, 37 colleges; and East Godavari district, 46. http://apecet.nic.in/institute_profile.aspx, accessed September 18, 2013.
15. When the fee reimbursement scheme was introduced in 2008, it partially covered the tuition of students belonging to the backward castes (OBCs, SCs, and STs). In 2009, the scheme was extended to BPL families and was expanded to cover the entire tuition fee at the lowest level authorised by the government (Rs 35,000 per annum in 2012–2013).
16. The state government regulates admission to private colleges. Seventy percent of the seats in private colleges (the convener’s or government quota) are allocated by a centralised system and the fees are set by the government, while 30% of the seats are in the ‘management quota’ for which colleges are free to select students directly and charge higher fees.
17. http://education.oneindia.in/news/2013/09/18/andhra-pradesh-completes-first-round-of-engineering-admissions-006596.html, accessed November 5, 2013. Only 290,000 candidates appeared for engineering in the 2013 EAMCET, although there were over 300,000 seats available: http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130918/news-current-affairs/article/one-lakh-engineering-seats-go-vacant-0, accessed November 5, 2013. Over 200,000 students qualified in the exam (http://www.myengg.com/engg/info/26095/2-lakh-engineering-students-qualified-in-eamcet-2013/, accessed September 15, 2013. These figures suggest that engineering continues to be the most popular educational choice despite the crisis in this sector, but middle-class students in Andhra are increasingly looking at other career paths such as chartered accountancy and the IAS (government services).
18. For Andhra students, the US remains the most desired destination, but Australia is increasingly popular. On education migration from India, see Baas (Citation2010).
19. These data may be skewed because students who come from other towns but are studying in Hyderabad may record the city as their ‘home town’. Apart from Hyderabad, Vijayawada, and Visakhapatnam, no other AP towns were included in the study, which sampled only those cities that had at least 1500 F-1 visa approvals during the study period (Ruiz Citation2014, 6). Hyderabad sent 26,220 students to the US on F-1 visas between 2008 and 2012, of which 20,840 were for STEM courses, and Vijayawada sent 2181 of which 1867 were for STEM courses (Ruiz Citation2014, 24). I thank Dr Shoibal Chakravarty for alerting me to this very useful report.