How to improve India's higher education and research quality?

By zeashan haider zaidi -

It’s a well established fact that India is going downhill in science education and research, despite of relative huge increase in funding and being the major technical manpower supplier for IT and global research community, successfully undertaking Moon mission and so on. I am wondering how we can regain our lost glory and improve on that so far our science education and research is concerned. I am mentioning some remedies below that came to my mind.
1. Reduce spending of public money on higher education and research for non-performing institutes and universities. Only teaching (without any productive research in form of quality publications or usablepatents) does not justify huge spending by some so-called “elite” institutes/universities. All institutes/universities should be graded and judged as per their performance and public monetary support should depend on that. (UGC has started this but not with much cooperation from universities and so-called elite institutes and with very limited success so far).
2. Introduce strict accountability of public money for any research in any institute or university. And any research finding (mainly related to novel service or product) using public money must be mentioned in an open source (e.g unrestricted web site(s) for public access). If hundreds of corers of rupees are spent on “developing Bt- crop for insect resistance”, then public have the right to know what is the outcome from that huge spending of tax payers’ money. And if needed, a farmer or other researcher(s) should be able to access that information and more importantly the materials developed in such projects, as claimed by the researcher/institute.
3. Private institutes and universities must follow a minimum standard to give degrees.
4. Start “tenure track” system in Indian institutes/universities.
5. Increase spending substantially on primary and high school education (Both qualitative and quantitative). Increase the salaries of teachers at least at per with university lecturers and put stringent quality control while recruiting the teachers and introduce accountability among them. We must increase substantially the number of primary schools and quality of those and improve on physical infrastructures like school buildings, a minimum standard of school laboratory and library, a decent play ground, some internet connected computers in libraries etc.
6. Change the education system from the primary level (reduce work load, put more importance on physical activities, encourage original thinking etc). There should not be any form of evaluation (exam or so) till age 10 years (i.e till class 4 level). Subsequently the exam patterns should change and put more emphasis on original thinking and problem solving rather than emphasizing database-quiz type format. Basic education should be in mother tongue but English also should be compulsory from class 1.
7. Provide increased opportunities for students in rural and semi-urban India (in form of transparent information dissemination, transparent selection for fellowship/scholarships and recruitments).
For the long run:
Abolish reservation policy altogether. Provide quality primary and high school education free for all.
We have an obligation to give something back to our country which will have a long term impact on the whole society. These are few of my thoughts. Let’s start a vibrant discussion and let us know your opinion in this matter.

---------------jayanta chatterjee

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