Archive for the ‘Indo-US Cooperation’ Category
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.
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 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
Yale to bring global best practices here
Yale University on Thursday signed an agreement with two of India’s leading institutions, the Indian Institute of Management-Kozhikode (IIM-K) and the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K), to develop training programmes that will create academic leadership here. The programmes will be aimed at vice chancellors, deans and heads of various educational institutes, and will be facilitated through the setting up of Centres of Excellence for Academic Leadership (CEALs).
A series of workshops and training programmes will kickoff from January 2011, the funds for which will be channelled from the Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative which has a corpus of US$ 10 million in combined funding . The initiative was launched in November 2009 to create better ties between universities in India and the U.S.
Yale University will help shape the curriculum for the training, besides providing technical and research support, and even staff. As per the agreement, the implementation of activities and the newer areas of collaboration will be decided by a management committee comprising two members representing each partner. “Education is becoming more globalised every day. Local universities need to be exposed to global best practices to grow,” said George Joseph, Assistant Secretary, Yale University. The Ivy League university has already been conducting similar programmes for academia in China.
Source: The Economic Times, October 29, 2010
Tatas gift US$ 50 million to Harvard Business School
India’s Tata Group has announced a US$ 50 million (Rs. 2.2 billion) gift to Harvard Business School (HBS), the largest donation from an international donor in the school’s history. Besides cementing an already significant relationship between India and the world’s premier business school, the grant also sends out a strong message of Indian academic and economic involvement in the U.S. ahead of the visit to India of President Obama, who is also a Harvard (law school) alumnus.
The gift, disclosed in Boston on Thursday by Chairman Ratan Tata, will fund a new academic and residential building on the HBS campus for participants in the School’s broad portfolio of Executive Education programs. The School hopes to break ground for the building, which will be named Tata Hall, next spring.
Incidentally, Ratan Tata attended the School’s Advanced Management Program — one of three comprehensive leadership programs offered by HBS Executive Education — in 1975. He received the School’s highest honor, the Alumni Achievement Award, in 1995. On top of this, Harvard Business School’s current (and 10th) Dean is Rajasthan-born Nitin Nohria.
Clearly, the gift is not without some political undertones, coming on the eve of the visit to India of President Obama, who has lately railed about the flight of American jobs to India. Boston’s Democratic Mayor Thomas Menino, who joined Tata and Dean Nohria for the announcement on the HBS campus, said the Indian company’s generosity would have both a local and global impact. “Mr. Tata’s gift will create jobs right here in Boston, and the executives who study at HBS will go out into the world as ambassadors of our truly world-class city,” he said.
In fact, President Obama himself is expected to stay at the Tata Group’s flagship property, the Taj Hotel, site of the deadly 9/11 terrorist strike by Pakistan, during his visit to Mumbai next month, also as a gesture of solidarity with the Indian group which lost several employees in the attack. Ahead of the presidential visit, Larry Summers, one of his key economic advisors, who is also a past president of Harvard University, is already in Mumbai.
All these factors appeared to have played a role in the big Tata gift, although there has been criticism in some quarters regarding Indian business lavishing grants on American schools that are already wealthy beyond compare. Harvard University has an endowment of over US$ 25 billion, the world’s largest, and HBS’ endowments alone top US$ 2 billion. Last week, India’s Mahindra Group announced a US$ 10 million gift to support Harvard’s Humanities Center.
But the hoary university, which has many distinguished Indian alumni including two cabinet ministers (P. Chidambaram and Kapil Sibal), and several business leaders (Rahul Bajaj, Y.C. Deveshwar besides Tata and Mahindra among them), evidently has a special place in Indian hearts and minds. “The Harvard Business School is the pre-eminent place to be exposed to the world’s best thinking on management and leadership, and we are pleased that this gift will support the School’s educational mission to mold the next generation of global business leaders,” Ratan Tata said, in explaining the gift.
Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria expressed deep appreciation for the Tata Group’s “extraordinary generosity” saying, “This is an historic gift from a renowned organization revered for its significant economic, civic, and philanthropic impact.” Nohria, who is an alumnus of IIT Mumbai, reminded Americans that Tata Group is widely respected for integrity and innovation, not just in India — where it produced both the first indigenous car and the $2,000 Tata Nano automobile — but in a variety of business lines across several continents, from cars to hotels and from tea to information technology.
Tatas own three premier hotel properties in the U.S. in New York (The Pierre), Boston (Ritz) and San Francisco (Campton). Together with its IT operations, its enterprises have created thousands of jobs in recession hit U.S., a fact that is seldom recognized in America.
Source: The Times of India, October 16, 2010
New Indo-U.S. council to boost education
The enhanced partnership between the Indian and American governments in several spheres has also brought about significant changes in the education sector. The two countries are now working closely towards setting of an Indo-U.S. Education Council. The council will ensure greater cooperation in the sector.
Sibal, who had met U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and discussed bilateral cooperation in education, said the two countries were working towards “equivalence of educational degrees”. He said, “We are working towards evolving a basic minimum procedure for equivalence of degrees”.
As far as the foreign education providers’ Bill was concerned, the minister, who met the heads of various U.S. higher education institutions, said they were keenly awaiting the passing of the legislation. The Bill has been referred to a standing committee. “We must first decide whether this Bill is good for us or not. We will lose out on big investment opportunities if we reject this Bill”, Sibal said.
Source: Mail Today, June 10, 2010
New Indo-U.S. council to boost education
The enhanced partnership between the Indian and American governments in several spheres has also brought about significant changes in the education sector. The two countries are now working closely towards setting of an Indo-U.S. Education Council. The council will ensure greater cooperation in the sector.
Sibal, who had met U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton and discussed bilateral cooperation in education, said the two countries were working towards “equivalence of educational degrees”. He said, “We are working towards evolving a basic minimum procedure for equivalence of degrees”.
As far as the foreign education providers’ Bill was concerned, the minister, who met the heads of various U.S. higher education institutions, said they were keenly awaiting the passing of the legislation. The Bill has been referred to a standing committee. “We must first decide whether this Bill is good for us or not. We will lose out on big investment opportunities if we reject this Bill”, Sibal said.
Source: Mail Today, June 10, 2010
India keen on Indo-US Education Council
US under secretary of state William Burns on October 15 called on the Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal to firm up the proposal for setting up an India-US Education Council. Mr. Sibal is generally not even a whistle stop for senior officials of the US state department. However, with the government signalling its keenness to open up the education sector to foreign players, Mr. Burns’s second visit within four months is significant. The meeting focused on the proposed council. It will include representatives from industry and the education sector. Mr. Sibal will be travelling to the US later this month, ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit in November.
The areas of collaboration include research, distance education, vocational education, skill development, exchange of faculty, models of public-private partnership and also expertise for the setting up of universities. The ministry is keen to tie up with the world’s leading universities to ensure that its “innovation universities” are a class apart from the pack. Mr. Sibal would like to firm up MoUs with US universities to collaborate with the proposed innovation universities. Among the US universities that are being approached are Yale, Stanford and MIT. During his visit, Mr. Sibal will meet with American policy makers, including senators and congressmen, government officials and university officials.
India keen on Indo-US Education Council
US under secretary of state William Burns on October 15 called on the Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal to firm up the proposal for setting up an India-US Education Council. Mr. Sibal is generally not even a whistle stop for senior officials of the US state department. However, with the government signalling its keenness to open up the education sector to foreign players, Mr. Burns’s second visit within four months is significant. The meeting focused on the proposed council. It will include representatives from industry and the education sector. Mr. Sibal will be travelling to the US later this month, ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit in November.
The areas of collaboration include research, distance education, vocational education, skill development, exchange of faculty, models of public-private partnership and also expertise for the setting up of universities. The ministry is keen to tie up with the world’s leading universities to ensure that its “innovation universities” are a class apart from the pack. Mr. Sibal would like to firm up MoUs with US universities to collaborate with the proposed innovation universities. Among the US universities that are being approached are Yale, Stanford and MIT. During his visit, Mr. Sibal will meet with American policy makers, including senators and congressmen, government officials and university officials.
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