Obama leads U.S. universities to India

Yale University and Duke University are among dozens of U.S. colleges that India is recruiting to help educate its population with more than 550 million people under age 25. Duke, Brown University and the University of Chicago are planning offices, research centers and campuses in India. The presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University and Cornell University have traveled to India to raise money and establish collaborations. Yale President Richard Levin visited India last week to set up a joint program that will educate Indian college leaders.

President Barack Obama will make a three-day state visit to India, starting tomorrow (November 6), accompanied by U.S. university officials eager to strengthen their ties to the country. Institutions want to “get in on the ground floor” as India’s economy and education system mature and the nation becomes a global power, said Dipesh Chakrabarty, a University of Chicago history professor who is leading the university’s efforts to plan a research center in New Delhi, India’s capital.

“We see India as a tremendous opportunity for higher education,” said Robert Brown, President of Boston University and a member of the delegation traveling to India, where he aims to open a campus, in a telephone interview. “There’s tremendous demand, a growing population in the middle class, an English-speaking, well-organized educational system — all the things that you need to interface with a private American university.”

Read the full report on Bloomberg site – http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-11-05/universities-tag-along-with-obama-to-india-to-set-up-ties-like-yale-duke.html

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/

India will do well to learn the U.S. vocational education model

“India is a developing country with a developed talent” — that’s what Jack Welch, then chief executive of General Electric Co. (GE), said a decade ago. That sentiment is behind education emerging as one of the key areas of collaboration between the U.S. and India.

Sample this: Human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has travelled to the U.S. twice in the last six months along with top bureaucrats and academics. Several U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale, have reiterated the need for better educational tie-ups. In October alone, three top universities — those of Yale, Illinois and Cincinnati — have toured India to further academic collaboration.

Yale, a favourite among Indian institutes, signed an agreement on October 28, 2010 with the Indian Institute of Management-Kozhikode (IIM-K), and the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K), for an academic leadership programme under the “Obama- Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative.”

Richard Levin, President of the three-century-old university, also met Indian CEOs in Mumbai to boost Yale’s India-centric academic programmes back home. Illinois interim Chancellor Robert A. Easter met Sibal and has shown interest in partnering with an innovation university on bio-science and biotechnology and agriculture. India proposes to open 14 innovation universities, which are research-oriented campuses that will enjoy a high degree of autonomy.

These developments strengthen the idea that Indian higher education is getting globalized. According to Sam Pitroda, Adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on innovation and infrastructure, Indian education is passing through a phase similar to that of the Indian economy in 1990s: It’s time to “deregulate education” and push ahead with the reform agenda, he says.

The Indian economy, expanding at around 8% a year, needs a large, trained workforce to sustain the growth momentum. It will need to step up research and development (R&D) and innovation, which generally emerge from educational institutions, an area where India needs to catch up with the rest of the world. According to official statistics, India has 157 researchers per million people compared with 633 in China and 4,526 in the U.S.

Collaboration with the U.S. should bring about a research orientation in Indian universities and other top institutions. “Asia is rising in the 21st century both as an economic power-house and an intellectual hub. Higher education in India is on a reform path and it’s essential for India to maintain its economic growth,” Yale President Levin said, adding that his university wants strong ties with the country. “The top Indian institutes have to become research-oriented while keeping their teaching excellence intact.”

Debashis Chatterjee, Director of IIM-Kozhikode, said that education follows disparate themes in India and the U.S. — value for many and value for money, respectively. “These two models have existed for long separately,” he said. “But what we require is co-existence. While India has talent, the U.S. has money to invest on them for a greater good.” He says the U.S. can get more bang for its buck in terms of investment in research and innovation. “The Indo-U.S. relation is a win-win proposition in higher education,” he says.

The U.S. has a good record on vocational education, which is something India can benefit from as the country faces a major dearth of skilled manpower. According to the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) and human resources firm Ma Foi Randstad, less than 20% of the workforce that enters the labour market every year in India is skilled.

India’s target of training 500 million people by 2022 can get a boost if institutes in the country collaborate with those in the U.S. Vocational education should be integrated with higher education to do away with the mindset that skill training is all about making your hands dirty. For starters, Virginia Tech had announced on September 20, 2010 it will open three centres of excellence in Tamil Nadu, which are likely to be operational in two years.

“India has a huge young population and the economy is growing fast. This (India) is the right place to invest in now,” said Narayanan Ramaswamy, Executive Director (Education) at consulting firm KPMG. “They want (to be in) India as the country will be the hub of human capital for the world. You will see more partnerships.”

Last month, Cincinnati announced US$ 1 million toward scholarships for Indian students gaining admission in the September 2011 session. Further, Ratan Tata and Anand Mahindra have donated a total US$ 60 million ($ 50 million and $ 10 million, respectively) to Harvard University. The move came after their companies have taken significant steps in expanding their global footprint. “Reliance, Tata and Infosys are global brands now. You cannot ignore them,” Levin said.

This also comes at a time when India has moved draft legislation in Parliament to allow foreign institutions to set up campuses in the country and provide independent degrees. Sibal, who has initiated a number of education reforms in the last 16 months, sees this benefiting Indian students.

Apart from students getting a quality education, the Bill will create a sense of competition among foreign and Indian institutions on quality, research and student satisfaction. At any given point of time, over 100,000 Indians are studying in the U.S. Last year, a little over 32,000 Indians got student visas to the U.S., and it is expected that the government will discussing raising this number during Obama’s visit.

Source: Mint, November 5, 2010

Sibal unveils minority education strategy

Human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has asked his ministry to formulate a minority education strategy focusing on reviving dying crafts practiced by Muslim artisans, many of whom now live virtually in penury. The strategy will focus on hamlets of traditional artisans and craftsmen. It will include training them in modern skills needed to keep their craft alive, and on taking these crafts to modern educational institutions, government sources have said.

“We want to make these traditional arts and crafts a part of mainstream education so that today’s students learn about them study them, and take these crafts forward,” an official said. Knowledge is passed on from generation to generation in the families of these artisans, but is not expanding beyond these select families. The new strategy is based on concerns that the knowledge held by them may soon expire unless taught to a broader segment of students.

Sources cited the example of Islamic architecture, which is understood and practiced only by families involved in building and maintaining structures like mosques. “There is a need to include this knowledge as a part of mainstream education in architecture schools,” a source said.

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) is keen to involve leading Muslim educationists and philanthropists in this project. “We will soon call a meeting with select Muslim educationists and philanthropists,” a source said.

Source: Hindustan Times, November 5, 2010