Going up in chalkdust

India urgently needs to walk the talk about creating a knowledge-based economy.

India urgently needs to walk the talk about creating a knowledge-based economy. Last week’s conference of vice-chancellors of central universities was a continuing lament of why this is not happening. Primarily, there is too much ‘coordination’ by the central government and its institutions like the University Grants Commission. This was expressly manifested by the HRD Ministry’s decision to prevent IIM Bangalore from opening a Singapore campus. There are some 500 university level institutions, including technical, medical and agricultural universities in India. Barely 10 per cent of these can claim to provide world-class education.

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It goes without saying that quality education will greatly enhance our human capital, and to this end, the UGC needs to rejig its priorities. First, it must establish criteria to assess the universities and institutions it funds, and make their appraisal public on an annual basis. Second, it must encourage greater autonomy to the institutions by insisting that they generate on their own at least a portion of their resources. Third, it must do something about third-rate universities where fourth-rate research supervisors churn out PhDs who are simply unemployable. Around the world there are ways and means to assess the quality of the output of researchers. There is no reason why these cannot be applied before allowing the universities to award these degrees. If India wants to play in the world league, it must put in place world-class filters to ensure that its top scholars meet certain accepted norms.

Unfortunately, the government’s chosen method to deny university autonomy is to refuse them permission to generate their own resources, or to deduct the money they make from their annual grant. This is linked to a refusal to accept that education is now an internationally traded commodity. Students spend vast sums to go abroad to study, while the poor quality of Indian institutes and blinkered policies keep foreign students from coming to India. There is a fallacious assumption that we must focus on primary rather than higher education. But there is no either/or trade-off. If the country has any ambition of becoming a knowledge superpower, it must dominate the entire educational spectrum.