Knowledge panel slams Govt inaction

The National Knowledge Commission members point out that no headway had been made in creating an Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jan 19, 2008, 24:57:56 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The National Knowledge Commission (NKC), in a report submitted to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday, said that implementation of reforms in higher education was suffering due to the “rigid territorial mindset” in the government.

NKC chairperson Sam Pitroda added that when it comes to education, there is resistance at various levels in the government to new ideas, experimentation, re-engineering, external interventions, transparency and accountability.

NKC members pointed out that no headway had been made in creating an Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education (IRAHE), one of their main recommendations of 2006. This regulatory authority was to replace bodies like the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education, the Medical Council of India and the Bar Council of India.

An NKC official said if structural changes were not carried out in higher education, then hiking allocation for the sector (by about 19 times in the 11th Five-Year Plan) would be of no use, and “could well result in more of the same” type of institutions. He called for coming up with collaborative models for different streams of higher education rather than working in separate compartments.

The report has a set of recommendations for medical education, legal education, management education, open and distance education and public funded research.

To improve standards of medical education, the report has recommended a national exit examination at the end of four-and-a half years of medical study, and a mandatory internship in community and district hospitals. The commission also wants the government to set up more medical colleges, especially in states where they are scarce.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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