SAARC countries give approval for South Asian University

SAARC approves a South Asian University and discusses more areas of cooperation in education, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Apr 3, 2007, 23:23:06 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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First major breakthrough in educational exchange across borders was achieved with SAARC nations agreeing to set up a South Asian University (SAU) in India, while discussions were held on sharing of experiences in school and girl education programmes.

The agreement signed proposes a unique model of higher education for South Asia with undergraduate education in the native country and post-graduate education in SAU. The agreement also gives India a year’s time to frame-up the basic concept of the university and the courses to be offered in consultation with SAARC secretariat in Kathmandu. India will have to bear the initial costs of setting up of the university.

HRD ministry officials say no decision has been taken on where the university will be set up. While the HRD ministry is proposing Dwarka in Delhi as an appropriate place for setting up the university, the Ministry of External Affairs has suggested Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan in West Bengal. “The city for the university would be decided after discussions with MEA,” said a HRD ministry official.

The agreement signed unanimously advocates teaching of conventional as well as courses unique to the South Asian region. According to officials, a committee of heads of regulatory bodies of higher education in South Asia will prepare a broad outline of the courses to be offered. This committee will also act as a regulatory body for the university.

Government officials said that the students in SAARC region would get much more than the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s announcement of easing visa restrictions for them. Discussions are on for prioritising admission of students in colleges and universities of South Asia without any restriction on a model similar to the one adopted by European Union.

Sharing of ideas on exchange of ideas in the area of school education and learning from the success stories in the region were also discussed. India and Pakistan has already decided to exchange the schools textbooks and the syllabus taught in the two countries. There is also a talk of uniformity in school and college education system in the region to foster better exchange of faculty and teachers. “We can learn a lot from school education system in Sri Lanka where participation of the girl child is very high, a HRD ministry official said.

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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