A rank shame
Deepak Pental Posted online: Thu Oct 18 2012
After QS and Times Higher Education published their rankings of universities across the world, higher education has become the subject of fierce debate in India. The highest ranking institutions from India are the IITs, but even these do not figure in the top 200. The general refrain — why does no Indian university find a place among the top global universities?
Unfortunately, given our present policies on higher education and our institutional dispositions, high rankings for Indian universities is a distant dream. To begin with, only take a look at the key features of the top global universities. Highly ranked universities are research intensive; some have a long and distinguished history of research, others, mostly in Asia, have raised their research standards in the last 20-30 years. Almost all the top universities are comprehensive. Not only do they teach and research the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, they also have very strong programmes in engineering, medicine, law and management. These universities admit students at the undergraduate and the postgraduate levels and are committed to excellence in undergraduate education.
None of the Indian universities fulfil these criteria. We either have institutions with hundreds of affiliated/ attached undergraduate colleges, like the Universities of Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay, Pune, or institutions like the Jawaharlal Nehru University, which only teaches postgraduate courses, or stand-alone institutes like the IIMs, which specialise in teaching management courses, and the national law schools, which only teach law. Then there are a large number of research-only institutes, which contribute almost nothing to teaching.
Compared to global trends, our record in developing comprehensive universities is abysmal. For the 11th five-year plan, the government announced new initiatives in higher education, which included setting up 16 new central universities and 14 world class universities (these are still on paper only), 8 IITs, 20 IIITs, 7 IIMs, and so on. Why did we shy away from seeding comprehensive universities with both undergraduate and postgraduate degree courses, and both liberal and professional courses? The stark reality is, in contrast to the global model, the dominant model of education in India separates liberal and professional, undergraduate and postgraduate, research and teaching.
The fragmentation of education into specialised institutes is justified by some as they feel universities are too unwieldy. However, this fragmentary approach is inimical to the idea of generating new knowledge by creating interfaces between traditional boundaries. If we want to improve our higher education system, we need to put our faith in comprehensive universities, mount a major effort in the improvement of undergraduate education, develop competent faculty at all levels of education and create the right ambience for research in at least some of the existing universities, the IITs and the newly set up IISERs.
We should make it national policy to stop opening new research-only institutes, except in technology intensive areas like space and nuclear energy. The mandate for institutes of higher learning should be both teaching and research. The IITs have the best chance of making the top grade at the global level as science and technology are the key areas in which nations will compete. A recently released report by the department of science and technology shows that India contributes only 4.25 per cent to global research in engineering, compared to 16.4 per cent by China. The government therefore needs to support industry-IIT research in areas that will be key to India’s future economic growth. To meet the demand for quality faculty, every year we need to pick the best 200-300 engineering graduates and sponsor them for doctoral work in the best technology schools around the globe. This approach has been used by Japan, Korea and China with great success.
Faculty development needs to be extended to the traditional universities. Around 200-300 students need to be sent abroad every year for doctoral work in areas like computer science, IT, bioinformatics, quantitative genetics, applied mathematics, econometrics, nuclear physics, education and other areas that are of contemporary importance and suffer from a faculty shortage.
All developed countries with a strong university culture have a well-established competitive grant system for funding research. The National Science Foundation in the US and research councils in the UK are good examples. These agencies fund projects comprehensively, that is, all the expenditure on administration and utilities is taken care of. In India, we have a reasonably competitive funding system. Funding for R&D has been raised by the government, scholarships for PhD students have increased, there are new schemes like INSPIRE to attract young students to science. However, all the government departments providing grants through a competitive system are over-bureaucratised, multiple schemes are floated and no effective proposal tracking systems exist. The concept of comprehensive funding has not been implemented. But worst of all, different ministries keep adding new research institutes under their tutelage rather than working on an effective and rapidly moving competitive grant system for the universities and institutions of higher education.
Reforms are urgently required at the university level to encourage research. Faculty with research projects should be given full charge of managing their projects, including the finances of the project. Universities should only develop general guidelines for purchases. Vice-chancellors and directors should spend their time raising funding for the universities and implementing reforms rather than signing files related to the research projects.
Strengthening undergraduate education is vital. All the undergraduate degree courses in natural sciences, humanities and social sciences need to be of four-year duration — bringing them on par with the so-called professional degrees. Poor mathematical and computational skills and low language proficiency are major weaknesses in our undergraduate degrees
All the new Central universities, if they desire to make a mark at the global level in future, should teach undergraduate courses and have four-year honours degrees. Integrated four-year BSc-B.Ed and BA-B.Ed degrees will be most useful in producing teachers for schools. With the right to education being implemented, lakhs of competent teachers will be required in schools. The three-year BA/ BSc degrees can be retained, but with equal emphasis on knowledge and skills to make students ready for jobs in the manufacturing and services sectors. The number of exams for admission into universities and institutes needs to be reduced drastically. In the last eight years, a host of committees have given many pertinent recommendations on academic reform; these need to be implemented without further delay.
Education and research will receive much higher allocations in the 12th plan. That is the good news. It is time we develop policies and the institutional will to compete with the best.
The author teaches genetics and is a former vice-chancellor of the University of Delhi, express@expressindia.com
