Obama agrees to send 1,000 academics a year to India

The United States is to send 1,000 academics a year to India after President Barack Obama, on his trip to India, firmed up initiatives proposed last year during Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s US visit. But there will be a hefty price to pay for the sharing of academic expertise.

The central government-sponsored Global Initiative of Academic Networks, or GIAN, hopes to help students across streams to get exposure to the best faculties from abroad. As per the proposal at least 1,000 US academics will be invited and hosted every year to teach in centrally funded A grade universities and colleges in India, including the Indian Institutes of Technology, or IITs, and the Indian Institutes of Management, or IIMs.

According to officials of the Indian Ministry of Human Resource Development, or HRD, details of the programme are still being finalised but emphasis is being laid on offering a good package to attract the best talent.

Names of eminent scholars and academics will be sent to respective institutes for evaluation by a peer group. This will then go to different streams comprising professors and other experts. The final approval will be given by the streams, said the official from the HRD Ministry.

Salaries, including accommodation, may be as high as US$8,000 for a fortnight session and US$12,000 for 20 days, said officials at the HRD Ministry.

It has been estimated that a comprehensive package will be close to Rs0.8 million per semester. Institutions will largely be free to invite faculty members from across universities but desired checks and balances will be built in to ensure that only eminent academicians are invited.

Scepticism

However, there is some scepticism about the proposal in academic circles in India. Many expressed their reservation at such a collaboration and wondered largely about the quality of people that would finally be invited to teach.

According to Professor Uday Athavankar, who recently retired from the Industrial Design Centre at IIT Mumbai and had been teaching there since 1970, though not much is known about the GIAN proposal: “If we look at it in a different light a foreign collaboration will benefit IITs in areas where we have not been able to do much research. I personally feel that foreign collaborations are not necessary unless they are in technology-intensive spheres or areas where we have not experimented.”

Athavankar added that on a more positive note, such a collaboration could benefit India as it had done China, which ‘leap-frogged’ after inducting foreign academicians. But he cautioned that “we would have to be cautious about the selection process and how it is done and who is finally invited”.

He said that when the IITs were set up, they had benefited from expertise from Russia, the UK and elsewhere. “We had people of immense repute come and collaborate,” he said. He said if the initiative proposed under GIAN allowed India to ‘leap-frog’ then it would be an “asset to the country”.

Most academics from the IITs and IIMs are concerned about the quality of people that such a huge initiative would bring in. Professor Vijay Naik, who currently teaches chemical engineering at IIT Mumbai and is a former vice-president corporate research for Unilever, said: “Having really good faculty come over is desirable but if [it means] calling in academics on a massive scale, I am not sure.”

He said that recruitment for IITs is a problem even if they look abroad for talent. “I don't think there is very good talent. What we need is people who can set experimental programmes. Indian traditions are geared more towards teaching than identifying problems and discovering something new in an empirical manner.”

Naik felt that if this was an ad hoc announcement without much thought having gone into the nitty gritty of it, then it might not work. “I only hope it is not part of making education a market asset,” he said.

One-sided

Even the colleges that normally did not get faculty from abroad to teach on campus and could benefit from such a venture, felt that the entire scheme was one-sided.

Mitra Mukherjee-Parikh, associate professor and head of department of English at SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai, said that while on the face of it, it was always good to have an exchange of high-ranking academicians that would benefit students and faculty members, there is an issue with the fact that this entire proposal was “not being spoken of in terms of an exchange”.

“This presumes the fact that US universities are the repositories of knowledge,” said Mukherjee-Parikh, but “knowledge is never one-sided.”

She warned against using knowledge, even if highly technical in nature, blindly. “There is after all a cultural, a social context, to it which matters in application finally,” said Mukherjee-Parikh. What is needed is an exchange of faculty members from both sides which would enrich students in both countries, she said.