Dilip Thakore interviewed Dr. (Prof.) C. Raj Kumar, an alum of Madras, Delhi, Oxford, Harvard, and Hong Kong universities and founding vice chancellor of the top-ranked O.P. Jindal Global University (estb.2009). Excerpts: Although the wholly residential JGU’s campus has been under lockdown for over 60 weeks, the word is that you have been able to maintain learning continuity of your 8,200 students throughout the lockdown crisis. How satisfied are you with JGU’s learning continuity record during the pandemic? As a university deeply committed to promoting academic excellence, we switched to digitally-enabled classes in March 2020 immediately after the lockdown. We constituted a Planned Intervention in Virtual Learning and Online Teaching (PIVOT) task force to design a process-driven programme to cover all academic and administrative operations within less than a week after the lockdown was extended. Under our PIVOT programme, we held over 20,000 online classes, achieved 100 percent digitisation of the library and conducted 1,250 online examinations by the end of 2020. Moreover in the academic year 2021-2022, we have built digital capacity to fully support our current student base of 8,200 students and 910 faculty. Therefore, I am proud that during the 16-month lockdown period, we have not only ensured 100 percent teaching-learning continuity, but also created value for our academic community through numerous initiatives. Given JGU’s swift transition to digital education to maintain academic continuity during the pandemic, we have been awarded the QS I-GAUGE ‘E-Learning Excellence for Academic Digitisation (E-LEAD)’ certification. When do you expect to resume teaching-learning and research on the JGU campus? Reopening the campus of our fully residential university is subject to directives issued by the government of India and/or state government of Haryana. Meanwhile, we have been maintaining our campus with all preparations to safeguard the health and safety of students and faculty, and to welcome them on campus as soon as government regulations permit. We have also prepared a plan to reopen our campus in phases so that at any given point of time, to maintain the prescribed social distancing norms, only a select fraction of students will be on campus. We are fully prepared with a hybrid learning model of online and in-person classes. Additionally, we have upgraded JGU’s on-campus health infrastructure. We have built indoor influenza wards with essential equipment to handle any emergency and have constituted a JGU Medical Advisory Board comprising distinguished professionals from the medical sciences to advise us on ways and means to improve the health infrastructure and ecosystem of the JGU community. Going back 12 years, what were the major objectives of JGU when it was registered in 2009? Our vision was to build a multidisciplinary, research-driven university providing excellence in teaching, research and community service. More specifically in 2009, our major objectives were to provide a globally benchmarked environment of academic freedom to our staff and students. We set out to build an academic ecosystem offering an intellectually engaging, discovery-based learning environment for our students through internships in leading organisations; semester abroad programmes, participation…
