Medical courses at IITs? UGC draft guidelines get a thumbs up

Higher education centres say multidisciplinary learning could aid research, resolve faculty crunch

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have backed the University Grant Commission’s (UGC) draft guidelines on multidisciplinary education to boost research and help produce professionals including doctors and engineers who are up to speed with both technology and social sciences.

Inviting feedback and suggestions from various stakeholders including teachers, students, researchers and those involved in related fields, the UGC on Saturday released the guidelines for transforming HEIs into multidisciplinary institutions. Citing international trends, the guidelines call for phasing out stand-alone and domain-specific HEIs to create HEI clusters and multidisciplinary institutions to enhance teaching, learning and research.

HEIs including the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and public universities believe that the move comes at a time when certain disciplines are facing a dearth of quality faculty due to poor PhD rollout along with a rising need for collaborative research in a post-pandemic world.

“You can no longer work and research in silos. Today, surgeries are being conducted by both humans and robots in collaboration. IITs do not normally get into medicine. But we believe the next-generation research is happening at the intersection of multiple disciplines including engineering, medicine and even social sciences,” said Abhay Karandikar, director, IIT Kanpur. He pointed out that humanities and other sciences have also become important for studies such as cognitive behaviour and epidemiology and the guidelines could address this need.

IIT Kanpur is setting up a medical college and research facility with an attached hospital in the next 2-3 years, for which it has already raised Rs 300 crore from its alumni.

According to Karandikar, if implemented well, the UGC guidelines could also address the faculty crunch plaguing certain streams.

While disciplines such as sciences, humanities and management find high-quality faculty and PhD output, others such as computer science and electrical engineering are facing shortages, despite a good increase in overall PhD scholars in the last 4-5 years, he said. “As we move towards multidisciplinary institutions, it will automatically feed towards more and well-rounded output with PhD programmes themselves turning multidisciplinary and thereby churning out quality faculty,” Karandikar told Business Standard.

The UGC policy document also suggests de-affiliation of colleges from universities and transforming them into autonomous degree-granting multidisciplinary institutes. For this, the guidelines suggest opening departments needed for subjects that include languages, literature, music, philosophy, Indology, art, dance, theatre, education, mathematics, statistics, pure and applied sciences, sociology, economics, sports, translation and interpretation.

According to public universities, the move will reduce bureaucracy in higher education and lead to leaner and healthier universities that are able to focus on teaching and quality research.

All HEIs have been divided into either teaching universities, de-affiliated autonomous colleges, research universities or multidisciplinary educational research universities. Parimal Vyas, former vice chancellor of The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda is of the view that India has wrongly focused on specialisation resulting in an imbalance of students, which is what the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 looks to resolve through the UGC draft guidelines. “However, the challenge will be structural reforms in terms of not only a bank of credit, as mentioned by the document, but also clarification of minimum credit required in a year and enhancing not just student mobility across disciplines and institutions but also teaching and administrative positions.”

Meanwhile, higher education experts are of the view that the guidelines should begin with the phasing out of standalone domain-specific institutes by allowing them to operate in a cluster.

“Can a student study different disciplines and programmes from IIT Kharagpur and Presidency College at the same time? Can institutes begin forming clusters and students be allowed to use credits from one institution to study in another?” asked Narayanan Ramaswamy, partner and national leader for Education and Skill Development, KPMG in India.

The clusters can be created out of standalone, domain-specific institutions that may not have the wherewithal to convert into multidisciplinary entities, he said. “As such, application of knowledge is going to be important with an engineer or a doctor requiring an understanding of other domains for enhanced employability.”

On its part, the UGC draft guidelines envisages such clusters.

“Internationally, the culture of establishing and sustaining a multidisciplinary university is increasing fast, thereby maximising productivity with enhanced focus towards research and development, innovation, and incubation. It is therefore pertinent for the higher educational system (HES) to phase out standalone, fragmented and domain-specific HEIs and create HEI clusters and multidisciplinary HEIs instead,” the document says.

What UGC draft guidelines say

• Need to phase out standalone, domain-specific HEIs
• Create clusters of HEIs of varying disciplines
• Proposes creation of multidisciplinary HEIs by launching varied courses
• IITs must take a lead by opening humanities, medical science and management departments
• Proposes to de-affiliate colleges from universities to push them towards autonomy
• De-affiliated colleges could grow to be multidisciplinary autonomous degree granting institutions