Awaiting Enlightenment - II
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
A few years ago, I visited my alma mater IIT Bombay, my first visit in decades. I walked around the campus and was astonished and saddened by its collapse - the buildings were in disrepair, the hostels grimy and stained, the infrastructure was crumbling: the place, it seemed, was falling apart.
This began my efforts to get the campus back to the green, beautiful, well-tended place I remembered, and I funded various initiatives, with the help of the incredibly engaged director, Dr. Ashok Misra. I funded the renovation of my old Hostel 8, the setting up of a school for IT and a new IT incubation lab. The IIT management and I also co-funded a brand new pair of hostels to expand the cramped residential spaces, and these were built in record time—in less than two years.
The result? Annoyance in the HRD Ministry, and questions from the then HRD minister on why such ‘lavish’ buildings were built. Our top colleges and universities suffer tremendously from this perpetual second-guessing from the government and the bureaucracy, which demand permissions for the most mundane operations. Dr. Nayyar, the former vice-chancellor of Delhi University, often bemoans the complete loss of independence for the faculty, deans and senior management at universities. ‘Their actions hang on the utterances of our politicians. Everything is political.’ And in the midst of all this, the very purpose of the university, educating the student, has been entirely forgotten.
In recent years, Indian universities have seen a growth of funds from budget allocations, but they need much more than that for things to change. Simply providing our universities with more money is rather like buying new furniture for a condemned building. Unless the government takes to more serious reforms - appointing a super-regulator to replace the present, confusing array of bodies from the AICTE to the UGC, encouraging more private investment on colleges and loosening the red tape on their entry, bringing in more transparency to standards and college administration, and giving government-aided institutions much more independence - the decay will go on, without pause.