Media Bytes

The ruling serves as a testament to the inherent tension between freedom and coercion in the pursuit of knowledge. Learning cannot be secured through surveillance. Compulsory attendance belongs to a paternalistic era that believed that students must be prodded into intellectual life rather than invited into it. A university worthy of its name should cultivate curiosity, not compliance. Attendance is not a measure of learning; at best it is a measure of obedience. A classroom that enforces attendance is already pedagogically bankrupt. Coercion produces neither seriousness nor scholarship. Coercion, indeed, is always the refuge of a pedagogy that has lost confidence. True learning cannot be mandated. It can only be cultivated.

- Shelley Walia, The Hindu, (2/1)

When you place the numbers side by side, ‘study abroad’ stops looking like aspiration and starts looking like a one-way talent and money pipeline-one that India funds, other countries benefit from, and Indian institutions struggle to counter. India is young, but youth is not the dividend. Capability is,” and “the headline population remains; the talent density thins.” “India, in effect, loses twice-struggling to pull global talent in, while steadily pushing domestic talent to look elsewhere.” “The solution is not to guilt our own students into staying; it is to make staying and coming here feel like a smart bet,” because “if India can convert its one-way pipeline into two-way circulation-the brain drain story stops being a drain and becomes an exchange.

- Saswati Sarkar, The Times of India, (7/1)

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