The Prime Minister,
Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee, today called for extensive reforms
in higher education to make it qualitatively superior and able
to meet the present and future challenges. He suggested that the
fee structure should help the poor and not subsidise the rich,
the governance of educational institutions should shed anti-excellence
culture, and teachers should show greater degree of discipline.
In this context, the Prime Minister asked the University Grants
Commission, the apex body in the field of university education,
to push reforms with a global and futuristic outlook. He even
suggested that the UGC be renamed as the University Education
Development Commission to convey its new mission.
Shri Vajpayee was
speaking at a function, here, to celebrate the Golden Jubilee
Year of the UGC. He inaugurated, electronically, the new UGC campus,
which is to come up at New Delhi. One important aspect that the
Prime Minister said needs prime attention is to create a partnership
between universities, national laboratories and industry, and
one between the public sector and the private sector. While the
former would act as a golden triangle for enhancing India's
research and development activities, the latter would allow the
best use of available infrastructure and human resources. Referring
to the present trend of a large number of Indian students going
to foreign lands to get quality education, thus leading to enormous
outgo of foreign exchange, the Prime Minister said, there is need
to make India an attractive destination for large number of foreign
countries. The government, he said, is prepared to introduce necessary
changes in its rules and regulations to achieve this purpose.
Speaking on the occasion,
Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi, Union Minister for Human Resource Development,
stated that it was important to make higher education more relevant,
especially for bulk of the student population, approximately 83%
in the formal education sector, pursuing traditional disciplines
like Arts, Pure Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences, Law
and Commerce. As an important policy initiative in the 10th
Plan, universities would be encouraged to make the present three-year
structure of undergraduate education more flexible. The aim would
be to allow students to pursue both degree and utility oriented
certificate and diploma programmes together.
Dr. Joshi activated,
by means of remote control, the UGC-Infonet, a nation-wide network
for digitally inter-linking all universities under the UGC's purview.
He stated that the UGC Infonet would also provide, through 16
mirror sites spread across the country, access to research materials
and research journals in e-format through a repository of digital
databases. This step would provide indirect subsidy to each university,
as they would be saving around 50-60 lakh rupees every year, since
subscription to journals is extremely expensive.
The Minister
also inaugurated, electronically, the Inter-University Centre
for International Studies, Hyderabad. Dr. Joshi stated that the
Inter University Centre for humanities and social sciences would
be the first of its kind. Here, SAARC, South and Central Asian
Countries could play a very important and pro-active role, in
collaboration with experts across the world, to visualise the
future of mankind as it is seen by one-third of the humanities
of the world. This centre would serve as the nerve centre for
exchange of research in the areas of humanities and social sciences.
Professor Rita
Verma, Minister of State for Human Resource Development, released
a CD-ROM on the Technology Database of Indian Universities. This
is the first attempt of its kind in the country towards showcasing
emerging technologies and potential of researchers from Indian
Universities.
