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Higher education a sick child,
says HRD minister
WSN Network
New Delhi: The meeting of university vice-chancellors was hardly
prepared to hear human resource development minister Arjun Singh
call higher education the “sick child” of education.
The HRD minister’s admission resulted in a lot of plainspeaking from
Planning Commission member Bhalchandra Mungekar, UGC chairperson
Sukhdeo Thorat and vice-chancellor’s who shot down many suggestions
on the grounds that they were not practical enough. All of them kept
reminding that “inclusion and access with equity” should be
practised with honesty.
But Singh set the ball rolling. Addressing vice-chancellors at the
conference on “Development of Higher Education: Expansion, Inclusion
and Excellence”, organised by UGC, Singh said the time had come for
the country’s academic sector to come to terms with reality. “Higher
education is a sick child of education. It is not serving the cause
of the young people of India.
The academic world needs to come to
terms with today’s reality and the 11th Plan gives us enough elbow
room to experiment,” Singh said.
The minister suggested that the time had come for a “new turn in
higher education”. In this regard, he said change in curricula
should be undertaken just the way it was done in case of schools.
“As vice-chancellors, you have the opportunity and duty to find a
way out for it. To prescribe is not my ideology. Let us now
inscribe. Give the country a roadmap of higher education. Keeping
the divide in view, you should define what should be the content,
extent, methodology and basic ingredients of higher education,”
Singh said. Mungekar echoed the minister’s sentiment. “Between 1857
and 1986, we have presided over a failed education system. The
general education system has been divorced from the Indian reality.
It is now time to redraft the entire curricula,” he said.
“Today, not more than 9-10% graduates are employable. There is a
totally diverse economic and social reality. The task is to
drastically restructure the education system,” he added.
Giving an idea of what higher education would be like in the 11th
Plan, Mungekar said allocation for education would be increased to
5% of GDP by the end of the Plan and the proposal for achieving
allocation of 6% of GDP to education could be achieved by the end of
12th Plan.
17
October, 2007
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