Jaideep Mishra
The Economic Times
There’s much mention these days of the need to revamp education, training and skill upgradation in the opinion pages. A recent IIM Ahmedabad working paper looks at higher education and the high-tech industries in India.
The study finds that when it comes to the linkages between tertiary education and the high tech sector, the connections outside the labour market are seen as “weak.” Such a state of affairs is attributed to an outdated regulatory structure that effectively places research and fact-finding from beyond the domain of the university, and so discourages “good faculty” from joining.
The study notes three qualities of a world-class university. These are (1) a high concentration of talent, composed of faculty, students and researches from across the world; (2) abundant resources, from endowments, public resources, tuition and competitive research funding to enhance pedagogy and boost advanced research; and (3) favourable governance structures that rev up innovation, foster academic freedom and provide strategic vision and flexibility to allow the university to make decisions autonomously and manage resources without bureaucratic interference, say for instance on the issue of faculty compensation.
All three attributes are necessary to shore up quality. The study finds that the prevailing domestic situation is such that there are some attributes of (1), primarily when it comes to student excellence, some elements of (2) at some institutes of national importance likes the IITs, IISc and IIMs, but “rarely” any element of (3). Hence the unfortunate consequence is that India manages to produce a certain number of outstanding graduates, but is quite unable to achieve either of the other two complementary outcomes.
But while most of the research is conducted at public institutions, there is “little regard for market demands.” Further, the paper finds that of the top 10 public and private firms excluding CSIR accounting for over half the patents, only one is in the semiconductor/IT space. The rest is concentrated in the pharmaceutical and chemical sectors. Even in basic research, the capacity of our universities is clearly limited and skewed. About 80 percent of doctorates in engineering were from 20 universities, and about two-thirds of science doctorates from no more than 30 universities.
It is true that in recent years, rising competitive pressures in Indian industry has led to a growing number of alliances among corporates and research institutes especially in sectors like pharma and bio-technology. But on university autonomy there “appears to be little progress.”
The study does add that the growing size of the high tech sector in India–particularly the IT industry–has opened new possibilities for the corporate sector to transcend umpteen regulatory hindrances. But the potential is huge when it comes to firmer university-industry linkages. The bottom line is that research in industry and university is complementary and mutually synergic. Hence the need for proactive policy.
(An Arrested Virtuous Circle? Higher Education and High-Tech Industries in India, R Basant and P Mukhopadhyay, working paper IIMA, May 2009)
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