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Real Universities, Please?
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In 2005, the UPA government announced the formation of Indian Institutes of
Science Education and Research (IISER) at Kolkata, Pune and Chandigarh; the
first two started their operations last July. In September 2006, it
announced that five engineering colleges would be 'upgraded' to Indian
Institutes of Engineering Science and Technology. Just last month, it also
'awarded' new Indian Institutes of Technology(IIT) to the states of Andhra
Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan.

All this news should make us happy and proud that our government is finally
getting its act together on our higher education, right? Wrong! Absolutely,
horribly wrong!

Creation of these new institutions is premised on an over-reliance on Indian
Institutes -- a phenomenon which is best abbreviated to IIO. As a strategy
for positive change IIO is flawed, inefficient, and expensive. From the
point of view of nation building, IIO represents an utter bankruptcy of
imagination.

The flaws in IIO stem from its smug assumption that, somehow, small
institutions training a few thousand students in niche areas are enough to
feed the country's immense appetite for skilled manpower. This smugness also
makes it callously indifferent to the hunger for knowledge and skills among
our millions of students who languish in our universities and colleges.

From an operational viewpoint, IIO has historically been an inefficient
strategy. In any academic institution, certain facilities are common:
library, lecture halls, laboratories, sports facilities, amphitheatres, and
computing and internet infrastructure. The bigger the institution -- the
larger the student and faculty population that uses this common
infrastructure -- the lower the effective cost per user. With its emphasis
on small institutions, IIO has bred inefficiency. A similar argument applies
to the student-to-teacher ratio. Currently, IITs operate at about seven
students per teacher (going by the 2003 figures from the Rama Rao Committee
report).
As M.A. Pai points
out,
this ratio is three times as high in "most US public universities. " Clearly,
a poor country like ours has every right to expect -- in fact, demand --
that our institutions perform at the highest levels of efficiency. Engineers
and managers from our IITs and IIMs would demand no less in the products and
services they design, develop or manage!

More important than its inefficiency and narrow vision is the enormous cost
of IIO. Just ask yourself this question: if our government is so proud of
its IIO strategy, why doesn't it convert all our universities and colleges
into Indian Institutes of This and That? Let us do some quick math.

The three new IITs, for example, are estimated to
costRs.
1400 crores per year for the next five years! When fully operational,
they will have a student strength of about 14,000 (8000 bachelors, 2000
masters and 4000 doctoral students -- all of which are generous estimates),
giving us a price of Rs. 50 lakhs per student. Amortizing this sum over a
20-year period gives us Rs. 2.5 lakhs per student per year. That is just
fixed costs alone! Add to it about Rs. 1.5 lakhs per student as annual
running expenses, taking the total to over Rs. 4 lakhs per student per year!

To put this number in perspective, if our government were to lavish even a
quarter of this amount on every student, it would end up spending Rs.
100,000 crores -- roughly 3 percent of GDP. Put another way, this is eight
times India's current expenditure on higher
education(
0.37 percent of GDP)! Is it any wonder, then, that "IITs for all" is not the
favourite slogan for our higher education planners?

Ultimately, IIO blinkers us into an utterly unimaginative -- and some would
say, delusional -- worldview which devalues academic disciplines that are
not worthy of an Indian Institute. Isn't it absurd to even assume that
anything other than technology, science, and management (and, if I may
add, Hotel
Management !) is
unimportant for our country? Don't we need great economists to steer us
through turbulence of globalization? Psychologists to help us deal with
stresses from a fast-paced life? Artists to make our lives richer and more
enjoyable? And philosophers to make sense of our uniquely human condition
and our (almost) impending immortality?

We must demand that our next generation be exposed to the big, bold and
beautiful ideas from all disciplines. This demand is not just
pseudo-idealistic rhetoric; it is firmly rooted in reality. Consider: while
mature fields have a clearly articulated set of unsolved problems (though
the solution paths are yet to be discovered!) , it's the disciplinary
interstices that often offer scope for asking probing questions and for
making exciting discoveries. Take, for example, nanotechnology -- arguably
the most happening field in the sciences. It straddles physics, chemistry,
biology, and electronics. I can cite neurophysics and biochemistry as other
examples of such mixed fields in natural sciences. In the social sciences
too, scorching hot fields such as behavioral economics and
psycholinquistics straddle multiple disciplines. Do we have examples of hot
fields that span natural and social sciences? We sure do: econophysics,
sociobiology and social networks.

All these inter/cross- disciplinary fields hold great promise -- both in the
short term and in the long term. We must empower our youth to benefit from
-- contribute to -- the fantastic new developments in these areas. We must
dump IIO, and actively seek better alternatives.

One alternative is readily suggested by IIO's flaws we have discussed so
far. This alternative is an institution whose academic footprint spans
humanities and arts, natural and social sciences, and professions such as
law, management, medicine and engineering. In other words, a Real
University!

I can hear you groan, "you mean, like, a Delhi University?" . Don't panic,
I'm not recommending that we let a 100 DUs bloom. Serious problems plague
our universities, and many of them can be traced back to the hub-and-spoke
structure with a a centralized university and its affiliated colleges. This
structure has effectively isolated practicing researchers from teaching
bachelors students. Granted, we inherited this structure from the British;
but our former colonial masters dumped it a long time ago in favour of Real
Universities!

A Real University combines the great features of IITs (functional autonomy,
generous funding, co-habitation of research and undergraduate teaching) and
our universities (multiple disciplines) , and improves upon the result. It
will solve the problems of intellectual, disciplinary and physical
fragmentation: active researchers will teach bachelors, masters and doctoral
students, programs in a variety of disciplines will be on offer, and
economies of scale will operate in every way possible -- large campuses with
tens of thousands of students.

So, how do we create Real Universities? One option is to build them from the
ground up. The National Knowledge Commission has recommended precisely such
a course of action: creating what it calls National Universities -- some
fifty of them over the next several years. This recommendation deserves our
whole-hearted support.

But we do not have to stop with creating RUs from scratch. We can also
encourage other institutions -- by providing the right incentives -- to
convert themselves into RUs. For example, our universities can offer
bachelors programs. Similarly, IITs can expand into social sciences and
humanities. The elite research institutions (IISc, TIFR,...) can expand into
bachelors programs as well as into social sciences and humanities. And
finally, some of our more accomplished colleges can become RUs by adding
research to their portfolio of activities.

Do all our institutions have to be RUs? Of course not. Just as the developed
countries have their community and vocational colleges, liberal arts
colleges, and research universities, we must also aim for a diversity of
institutions, each with its own unique set of advantages. For example, our
colleges have done a good job of keeping the costs down largely by having
full time teachers. Not only can they be a low cost alternative to RUs, they
can also force the latter to keep their costs in check.

With greenfield and brownfield initiatives, we can easily bring -- within
the next five years or so -- at least one million students (10 percent)
under a modern system of Real Universities. If our state governments also
allow the universities under their control to be converted into Real
Universities, this number can easily be three or four times larger. Now, *
that* is an achievement that we can all be proud of.

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*by T. A. Abinandanan *
(Prof. of Materials Engg, IISc-Bangalore)
(Alumni-Metallurgy Dept,IT-BHU)