1. Opening ambit as appropriate.
2. At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, we stand poised between a collapsing past and an uncertain future, when established landmarks are disappearing and new ones yet to appear. We find the world is facing both quantitative and qualitative challenges – quantitative in terms of economic growth, technological innovations, demographics and climate change and qualitative in terms of a new paradigm of an evolving society governed by altogether different values and ethos from what we are accustomed to. Moreover, technological innovations in transport, information and communication have already led to the compression of the ‘economic’ and ‘learning space’ globally.
3. Arising from the inexorable pace of these change and the ubiquitous omni proliferation of ICTs, all socio-political institutions of our time including the universities and institutions of higher education, are currently experiencing a complicated and delicate situation. Just a few years ago, we could not have imagined a university without classrooms or a library without books. Nor could we have imagined a university existing 10,000 miles away from its students. Yet all of this is true today. I believe this is so as the traditional campus-based models of higher education are becoming outside the reach in terms of costs and time of millions of aspirants. As a result there are today over 10,000 institutions offering online education and training and several million students are taking at least one instruction course online.
4. Also, today there are more than 1000 corporate universities competing for global educational markets. Given the increasingly corporate culture in higher education, it is not surprising that ‘education’ has been included as a ‘service’ or a ‘commodity’ under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Though UNESCO has been striving hard towards protecting and strengthening higher education as a common good at the global level by promoting pluralism and diversity on the one hand, and equitable access, capacity building, and sharing of knowledge, at the other end, the GATT and WTO are striving equally hard towards reducing the barriers to ‘trade’ in higher education.
5. Higher education worldwide is thus in a state of flux as it is grappling with numerous challenges that confront it, such as responding to emerging societal demands, diversifying and enhancing revenue streams, improving and demonstrating quality while controlling costs, competing with new knowledge and skills providers and capitalizing on the opportunities arising from emerging technologies. This means that institutions of higher learning can no longer afford to operate in the familiar ways they are used to and conduct business as usual. Most of the universities will therefore need to engineer vital changes in the manner in which they work, in the knowledge they generate, the type of education and research they deliver and devising newer means of delivery including the manner in which they contribute to the local, regional and global communities and economies.
6. These challenges demand new conceptualizations of activities and new approaches to teaching and research and their delivery – in short, a renewal of the missions and methods of existing institutions of higher education confined not merely to new programmatic offerings or devising different curricula, or new pedagogical approaches, or more stringent measures of quality assessment, or even innovative of delivery or newer budgeting models and funding formulas, but to bundles of several of these and other fundamental elements and processes put together. A new paradigm must evolve that is developmental, human-centered, environmentally sound, and all-inclusive, so as to prepare learners to be contributors to knowledge generation and not just mere passive recipients of knowledge. In short, it will not only develop human capital but also social capital that will enable students to work responsibly together globally.
7. Let me now turn to India. In terms of numbers, we are doing fairly well. We have the third largest higher educational system and the third largest pool of skilled human resources in the world. But in percentages, the fact is that less than 8% of the youth in the 17-23 age group have access to higher education. In our Eleventh Five Year Plan, 2007-12, we therefore have set the target of doubling this to access 15% of the eligible population for higher education; this means a massive increase of several million additional student enrollments in higher education annually. To meet this challenge thirty new Central Universities, eight new Indian Institutes of Technology, eleven new Indian Institutes of Management, four prestigious global level Institutes for Science Education & Research and twenty new Indian Institutes of Information Technology are being established. In my Ministry, we are proposing to set up a CSIR Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (AIST) as a Research University. This University will focus on interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary areas integrating science with technology. It will be a networked University without a central campus.
8. I know that you will discuss diverse aspects of this mammoth upsurge in numbers of higher education aspirants in great detail. But I would like to remind you that this alone is not enough as it will necessitate massive initiatives to enhance the enrollment rates in secondary education and improve the transition rates between secondary to higher education. While we have made efforts to boost educational attainment at the school level, the growth in secondary and higher education enrollment in India will need to increase significantly at least for two decades or more, if we are to meet the targets that we have set. Consequently, it will also necessitate increasing and widening the participation, particularly from groups who are presently under-represented in secondary and higher education, including young people from rural, unskilled and disadvantaged family backgrounds. Our aim is that higher education should be made available to any person who has the desire and ability to pursue it. We are devising mechanisms for students from lower income families to access funds to finance their education and living costs on terms that are easier and fairer than those that are prevailing through the banks today.
9. Undoubtedly, globalisation is leading to ‘Borderless Education’. Enrolments in most Commonwealth countries such as UK, Australia, Canada and others have dwindled. Institutions from these countries are presently looking at India that has a huge market for higher education business. This is so as about 55% of the population is below the age of 30 and the bourgeoning middle class of about 400 million people is willing to invest in quality higher education. We already see signs of Indian colleges/Universities teaming up increasingly with foreign universities and offering them ready-access to educational market in India. Such higher education has become a profitable commercial proposition too especially for engineering and management fields. I would plead that even in the era of globalization, there is a need for a regulatory system to be in place to ensure that any foreign school/university desirous of operating in India goes through a quality and conformance check/audit by the University Grants Commission or any other similar body. It is only then that we can create high quality professional human resources.
10. At the same time, there is another aspect of globalisation that is favourable to us. The Indian demographics are such that our working population will continue to increase for another 30 years, whereas that of the developed world and also that of China will decline. Indian human resources will I believe in coming years, percolate globally. The higher education offered in India will thus have to gear itself up to provide for globally relevant programmes and quality levels to serve the population that would be globally mobile.
11. High quality education arises from two main factors – firstly the quality of the infrastructure, which is greatly dependant on the investments and secondly and more importantly, the quality of the faculty and teachers. The moot question is how to improve the quality of our faculty. I believe, the tenured system that we have in place in publicly funded higher education tends to bring in complacency; a little of instability in any system is good. I therefore feel that most faculty at least in Indian publicly funded universities should be on a contract system with an annual external third party performance review of the faculty, say every three years for their continuation or otherwise. This I am confident will bring in conscious and committed performance improvement. I also firmly believe that every public institution needs to be reviewed for institutional performance. Accordingly, systematic review of the performance by an appropriate external agency of the universities and higher education institutions is needed not only at the academic, technical and research levels but also at managerial and financial levels at least once every five years. This will help to bring in a sense of accountability in the system which presently seems to be missing.
12. I also believe that India needs a four-tier system of higher education as no one system can fully serve the mammoth needs of the country - almost a continent in terms of its diversity of both population and geography. The four tier system could comprise of: (1) public, (2) private, (3) public-private and (4) community colleges. The extreme version of privatization, in terms of divestiture, is not politically feasible. Nor is it possible to recover the full costs of higher education from students and their families. The possibilities for raising funds through philanthropy, endowment, and charity are also limited, though the scope for ”pseudo-privatization” is high where higher education is ”privately provided but publicly funded”. In recent times, we find a shift from "privatization" to "self-financing". There has been explosive rise in self-financing engineering, medical, management, and teacher training schools during the last 15 years. Self-financing colleges and centers of higher learning are to be welcomed, as they relieve some of the financial burden on the State and help the economy and society by providing professionally trained personnel.
13. But a word of caution. In all of these initiatives, the curriculum development process has to be alive and responsive to the profound changes taking place in science and engineering practice driven by fast developing information technology, intense global competition and the imperatives of environmental protection, climate change and sustainable growth.
14. The next issue that I would like to touch upon is of gender equity. Today, there are more women, be they students, researchers, teachers, in higher education than ever before. This is so despite the subtle interplay of gender power and survival of women in the classroom and the wider world of academics. Women in the academics often suffer from the ‘double bind’ (having to be professional and having to be ‘womanly’) and the ‘double burden’ (of labour at home and labour at work place). I am told that gender barriers are particularly acute within the science and technology and higher education careers. If more women are to be attracted to and retained in scientific careers, especially in India, more concern needs to be directed to the situation of women graduates in the work place where they experience cultural discomfort, segregation and unequal power relations. In the recent ‘Pay Commission’ for government employees, we have sought to address this issue to some extent but much more still needs to be done, especially at the societal level.
15. Since I am on the subject of science now, I am sure you are all aware that science is advancing at a phenomenal rate and knowledge, especially scientific knowledge, is doubling every 7-10 years. This implies that a person with a science qualification having a thirty year career ahead of him will need to renew his knowledge base at least three times over his working life. We should thus be catering to building the human resources in science that will crave for life-long learning so as to remain competitive.
16. On our part, we are doing our little bit. In order to attract the best and brightest to science, we have established 200,000 science scholarships per year for secondary school level students. And to further arouse their interest in taking up science at university level, we are arranging for summer camps for 5,000 of the brightest of these students with national and international icons in science. In order that at least few of these students, say 2000 per year, take up a career in science we have put in an assured career scheme that will give them stability for fifteen years after school graduation. We are hopeful that we should be able to alter the trend away from science at higher education in the coming decade.
17. Closing ambit as appropriate.