India’s new genre multidisciplinary universities benchmarked against the world’s best are a breath of fresh air with the potential to check, if not stop, the annual migration of an estimated 8 lakh school and college-leavers for higher education abroad. Since the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, based on the Kasturirangan Committee draft report, recommended transformation of India’s 45,473 undergrad colleges and 1,168 universities into multi-disciplinary higher education institutions (HEIs), multi-disciplinary HEIs have become the flavour of the season. It’s the good doctor’s — actually an outer space scientist — contribution to India’s higher education system that today every college principal and university vice chancellor has drawn up plans to transform the HEI under her care into a multi-disciplinary institution. In retrospect, one wonders why it took the neta-babu brotherhood which controls Indian higher education with an iron hand, so long to figure out that by definition, a ‘university’ is a higher education institution providing advanced learning across a wide range of subjects and disciplines. The Oxford English dictionary defines a university as “a high-level educational institution in which students study for degrees and academic research is done”. Yet perhaps the latter day Wikipedia definition is more accurate — “an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards degrees in several academic disciplines”. India’s ancient and much eulogised universities — Nalanda and Taxila — were reportedly such multi-disciplinary HEIs in which students were free to study subjects across disciplines of their choice. Nevertheless post-independence India’s omniscient politicians and bureaucrats who controlled industry, business, education and everything else through Soviet-style five-year plans, licensed a large number of public single discipline HEIs — IITs, NITs, IIMs, AIIMS, engineering and medical colleges and universities. As a result, IITs teach engineering subjects, IIMs business management, medical colleges, medicine. The few private sector HEIs such as BITS-Pilani and Manipal Academy of Higher Education were restricted to teaching engineering and medicine and allied subjects and despite being granted ‘deemed university’ status, were not permitted to describe themselves as universities simpliciter. They were obliged to always describe themselves as ‘deemed-to-be-universities’ on pain of being derecognised. Moreover, public and private HEIs — colleges and universities — were encouraged to focus on teaching. For research, the Central government established 38 national laboratories and 39 outreach centres under the aegis of a Soviet-inspired Council for Scientific & Industrial Research (estb.1942) as “an institutional arrangement to keep the Science, Society and Industry on the same page”. Unsurprisingly, CSIR quickly metamorphosed into a giant bureaucratic organisation with a well-established pecking order. Over the past 82 years, it hasn’t produced any earth-shattering or game-changing invention despite its head count having grown to 7,683. Against this backdrop of a complete hash of higher education in post-independence India, it’s also unsurprising that the country’s 45,473 colleges and 1,168 universities are certifying millions of ‘tunnel vision techies’ with little understanding of wider development issues confronting the nation, and/or unemployable arts, science and commerce graduates with 40 percent ‘educated unemployed’ having been the norm for half…
