Politicians ruining sanctity of universities: B M Hegde

In a hard hitting keynote address at the South Zone Vice-Chancellors conference organised by University of Mysore and Association of Indian Universities, here at the Infosys campus on Friday, former vice chancellor of Manipal University, Manipal Prof B M Hegde said the content of the syllabus in universities has to change because every subject be it physics, chemistry, mathematics has changed.

”Nothing happens in a normal system. You cannot even breathe properly. Unless university syndicates and senates are rid of politicians and filled with educators and academics, real higher education cannot happen,” he said.

Stressing on the importance of primary education, he said that just mugging up and getting ranks or scoring high percentages is no good. “A public report on basic education (PROBE) in India was done some time back where it was found that 47 per cent of primary schools do not have proper teachers.

The schools have turned into gambling dens and drunkards are found on the premises. However, an equally interesting study found that the parallel schools run by underworld dons were much better as they could pay teachers handsome salaries of Rs 25,000 even in 1970s. These schools turned out to be so good that even rich people started sending their children to these schools,” he said.

Calling for opening education development bank of India (EDBI) like the IDBI, he said, “The industrialists take loans and majority do not bother to repay them. But poor people are honest. If they are given loans to educate their children then it is a guarantee that they will repay the loans. The bank will never go broke.” What everyone knows is about Aids. But how many people know about Nids? It is nutrition immuno deficiency syndrome and 60 million people suffer from this in the country. When 77 per cent of the people earn just Rs 20 a day how can one talk of higher education, he wondered.

Nexus

Talking about the grant-getters, he revealed that the ratings of the so called top universities in the world like Harvard, Yale, Stanford had dropped because of the unholy nexus between the professors and their business interests.

“Is this the kind of product that one wants from higher education where there is no morality or ethics,” he said and added “99 per cent of the PhD research in the country is repetitive and not refutative research.”

“There is no coordination between Association of Indian Universities and University Grants Commision. But both are fighting for the cause of higher education. Government of India has given much thought to higher education and hence in the 11th plan allocated Rs 44,469 crore to it. But we have spent only Rs 20,000 crore so far and another Rs 5,000 crore will be spent by the end of the year,” said UGC member Prof K Ramamurthy Naidu in his inagural address.

There is dearth of faculty in most of the state universities and hence the quality of higher education sufers.

However, the number of universities has gone up from a mere 20 to 350 universities and the colleges have gone up from 5,000 to 30,000. 15 new central universities are also coming up and from 16,000 faculty, it has gone up to six lakh, he said.

UGC

The UGC is coming out with the idea of not having more than 100 colleges for each university and empowering colleges to award degrees. But the idea has still not been implemented, he regretted.

There are nine universities with potential for excellence, and 60 colleges are in the pipeline to get this recognition. The advantage is that the university will get Rs 50 crore and the colleges Rs1.5 crore, he said.

Earlier, University of Mysore vice chancellor V G Talwar welcomed. President of Association of Indian universities P T Chande spoke and MLC G Madhusudhan spoke in Hindi.  Nearly 40 vice chancellors are participating in the two-day conference.