Education enterprise: plural, singular, insular

Seema Singh — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:43:00 GMT

India yesterday launched some $1 billion National Mission on Education , (NME) -- a project meant to get all the institutions in the country wired since so far only the well-heeled have been riding on the Internet wagon. Good programme; better late than never, but the only worry is what if we mess it up as it is top-down in planning and execution and hurriedly launched in an election season.

I think the single most crucial thing here -- apart from, of course, the hardware, software, and mindware (I mean the mindsets of the stakeholders) -- is that the government should provide standards and match funds to promote teachers' training. The only way such programmes can contribute to India's economy is when our teachers inspire students to turn ideas into products and products into profits.

If NME is for the masses, the Singularity University, which will admit its first batch of students this summer, is for the brilliant and the affluent. A NASA (Ames Research Centre, to be precise) and Google collaboration and spearheaded by futurists, writers, and entrepreneurs Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, its curriculum is meant to be "very, very cutting edge" to attract the best and the brightest in Silicon Valley. Being a hop-and-skip from Googleplex makes it even more interesting. Read more about it here.

Now, if you are wondering what insularity has to do with this blogpost, here's a thought from a recent conversation I had on education with a computer science professor at MIT (Mass.). A senior IIT-Kanpur alum, who has spent more than 20 years at MIT and who wants to work with some institutes in India to raise the standard of research in our technical institutes, this MIT professor said he gets several proposals for setting up higher education centres in India.

Interestingly, some of these proposals are from the biggest industrial houses in India. Even though the business groups approaching him are pretty much insulated from the reality of "real" education, they still are interested in the business of it.

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Dissecting Indian science, publicly

Seema Singh — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:54:00 GMT

It's good to see scientists, who often avoid debating across the table, discuss through the press. The beneficiary, almost always, is the reader.

In two recent issues of Economic & Political Weekly two senior scientists literally pitch universities against national laboratories. Something a neighbourhood blog An Awkward Corner also discusses and which I had reported in a series earlier.

Gautam Desiraju from the University of Hyderabad, in this article, thrashes virtually all existing institutions-IITs, CSIR, universities... you name it. It's as pessimistic as it can get and he thinks the Chinese model of setting of large number of universities with dedicated financial resources should be emulated.

Pushpa M Bhargava, former vice-chairman of the National Knowledge Commission and ex-founder director of CCMB, on the other hand thinks Desiraju is "hopelessly wrong". His argument: but for the national centres of excellence, India's scientific achievements would have been worse.

As Indian science seeks course correction, this debate will continue. Lab Rats will hopefully pick up some threads.

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Lab Rats : education

Education enterprise: plural, singular, insular

Dissecting Indian science, publicly