Last week the former foreign minister of Singapore, George Yeo, resigned as the chancellor of the government’s pet project, the Nalanda University, in Rajgir, Bihar. Mr Yeo apparently resigned as he felt that the university’s autonomy was being infringed upon and that he as chancellor had not been given adequate notice of the change in leadership of the university. President Pranab Mukherjee had unilaterally reconstituted the board and removed former chancellor Amartya Sen from it.
This is the second time the university has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Last time we heard of it was when its chancellor, Amartya Sen, resigned on the grounds that he was unlikely to get a further extension.
I don’t know how many readers have been following the progress — or rather the lack of it — of Nalanda University. Set up by an Act of Parliament in 2010 to revive the old glory of what used to be a haven for Buddhist teachings in the 5th and 6th centuries under the Gupta empire, Nalanda University has been in the making for the last nine years now. In nine years, the university has largely failed to attract students — with 13 students having graduated from its two programmes on offer so far. Newspaper reports say there are 30-odd faculty members. A Business Standard reporter who visited the campus in 2015 said that it was not for the “faint-hearted” — so deserted was the campus and area.
So, my advice to the government is this: stop this pointless bickering. Let’s admit Nalanda has been a failed experiment and move on. Do not commit further time, money and resources to something that has and will remain a chimera. If the ministry of human resource development, bureaucracy and academics find themselves at a loose end and don’t have much to do, I can give them a few ideas.
Fix some of the existing stuff that is slowly falling to decay. Start by looking right under your nose. Delhi University is in crisis and needs a lot of fixing (I won’t elaborate on this as I have written about it in the past). Fix Allahabad University — I remember my father and everyone from his generation raving about it; now no one ever mentions it. Calcutta University — don’t mention it near any alumni unless you have hours to kill as they lament its fall from grace. Whatever happened to Banaras Hindu University and Aligarh Muslim University? Both used to be spoken of with high regard in the 1970s and 1980s. Talk to anyone who studied or taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University during those years and they will tell you the university simply isn’t what it used to be. If the bureaucrats and politicians open their eyes and look around them, there are any number of universities in the country that have lost their past glory and are in a desperate state of decline.
Build a few Ashoka Universities (I refer to the one in Sonepat) all over the country. Or if that’s not doable by the government, at least encourage and assist the private sector to set up a few hundred Ashokas. In four years, privately founded Ashoka has become the university of choice for a large number of students with many choosing it over the best colleges in Delhi University. From what I understand, it now takes one in 12 or 13 children who apply every year. It’s a classic example of what can be done in a very short period of time with the right intent and execution.
Setting up the new Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) all over the country without some kind of preparation in advance has been one of the stupidest moves by the government in recent years, but even now something can be done to salvage the situation if someone puts his mind to it. This is something to be tackled on a war footing if the government doesn’t want the reputation of the older and more established IIMs carefully built over the years to take a hard knock.
But perhaps the biggest task before the government — and this is something the private sector cannot step in and do on its behalf — is to start regulating and sieve out the junk universities and programmes on offer. What kind of education are some of the private universities providing to students? Are students actually learning something? Are they marketable after earning their degrees? The government’s complete failure to regulate has a monumental cost associated with it — a cost we as a country can ill afford.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
