Located in Rajgir in Bihar's Nalanda district, Nalanda University was resurrected in November 2010 by a special Act of Parliament. It has been designated an "institution of national importance". It is envisaged as an icon of the "new Asian renaissance" - a creative space that will be for new generations a centre of "inter-civilisational dialogue". The team that was formed to oversee this project in June 2007 was termed the Nalanda Mentor Group and was chaired by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. In July 2012, the United Progressive Alliance-II appointed him the first chancellor of the university.
Of late, the revered institution has been in the news for none of the right reasons. Sen has, rather prematurely, withdrawn his candidature as chancellor for a second term on the assumption that it is unlikely to be renewed. Sen claims that for him the project has been a "labour of love" but there are some questions that spring to mind.
The biggest question that arises is what kind of international university is built by pumping in a couple of crores a year. In a recent media interview, Sen claimed that "the total expenses of Nalanda University over four years, from its founding in 2010 to the end of the last financial year (2013-14), has been under Rs 25 crore." Even building toilets - as we have learned of late as a nation - would cost more. If that's the total fund the government is willing or able to commit to this project, it may be another 100 years before it gets anywhere at all. And if this is the kind of money it is willing to commit to "institutions of national importance", one shudders to think what happens to the rest.
Ask any private university that has come up in the last few years and they will tell you what kind of costs are associated with building something of this ambition and scale. In Shiv Nadar University in Greater Noida, which has a total of 1,500-odd students, the investment so far has been Rs 1,000 crore. Over the next five years, another Rs 2,100 crore is expected to be invested and even then, its ambition to be a world-class global university could be far from met. Surely, with his experience of American and global universities, Sen could have brought home this point to the government.
Institutions of global repute are also not built on massive, empty tracts of land. Four hundred and fifty five acres of emptiness is not the goal. To build an institution of this stature, size and ambition, you need an army of academicians, professors, assistant professors, staffers and at least four to five years of back-breaking work. You need a committed team of people leading from the front. You need to create a buzz so that you have a long line of students queuing up for admission. So little has Nalanda been in the news - till this needless controversy was stirred up by the chancellor himself - that you could have been forgiven for having forgotten its very existence. We - those who read and are exposed to the business and general press - may still have heard its name, but ask a bunch of students and they will draw a blank. Nalanda University is not making the rounds at schools to try and attract students (unlike many private universities who do so regularly by holding workshops) and very few parents or students are even aware of its existence. It's practically a state secret.
This is, of course, evident in the numbers it has managed to attract. Currently, Nalanda University has a total of 13 students after two dropped out (15 were apparently chosen out of 1,000 applicants in 2014) and 11 faculty members. The chancellor and the vice-chancellor - if newspaper reports are anything to go by - do not reside in Rajgir, leaving the daily functioning of the university to its own devices and these 11 faculty members, with presumably some skeletal staff to manage.
It may be early days yet but Sen can certainly not rest on the strength of what he has built in Rajgir till now. It may be known in Rajgir or even in Bihar but on a national scale, it looks like Nalanda University will remain another expensive government experiment in the field of education.
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