News Analysis India

Tag: ThinkEdu Conclave 2021

  • INTERVIEW | ‘We could have rebirthed sanskrit’: Subramanian Swamy

    Express News Service
    The new National Education Policy (NEP) is nothing but a khichdi, said veteran BJP leader and Rajya Sabha MP Subramanian Swamy. He added that the Indian education system has not changed much since Thomas Babington Macaulay devised the Minute on Education in 1835. Swamy was discussing the Indian education system and what changes it needs to be more ‘Indian’ with Senior Journalist Kaveree Bamzai at The New Indian Express’ ThinkEdu Conclave 2021.

    When asked whether the NEP incites hope for a viable change in the Indian education system, Swamy said, “These are all like khichdi — a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The question is: when you go to a class, does your teacher make you think? Here, whatever the teacher says, you memorise and reproduce in the exam and you will get the marks. The room for original thinking and research is not there,” said Swamy.

    But this begs the question, what needs to change? There are two things, said Swamy.

    “It should not be necessary to get a bachelor’s or master’s degree to get a job which is reasonably decent. I think 75 per cent of our people go to college to get a bachelor’s degree while in the United States, it is 35 per cent, in China, it is 45 per cent. That does not mean China is less literate. They train people for technical things so they get a job. Here the minimum qualification for mechanics is BA. Those who go to higher education must be committed to research,” he said.

    “The second thing is that you need to give a very decent salary to teachers. Maybe in Delhi University you get a decent salary or in JNU you get an even decent salary. But in the primary schools, if you compare with US and China, you’d see the difference. Much of the thinking process is developed in schools and if they go to college, they go straight into writing papers,” he said.

    “This system has not changed much since Macaulay’s time. And had stated his objective quite clearly  he said I want to create people who are Indian in blood and colour and they should dress in British attire, should speak English and not Sanskrit and they should adopt British morals,” he said.

    “Mughals had burned down our libraries but the British were a little smarter about it. They wrote an alternate history while the Mughals just burned down things. The alternative history is that we are not one country or one people. The north is Aryan and the south is Dravidian. These are the words they had taken from us. Dravidian is a word that Adi Shankara introduced. It means a place where the three oceans meet. There is no word called Aryan. There is only the word Arya which means anybody who is a cultured person,” Swamy added.

    “You become an obscurantist if you talk about the past and this is the format in which we have been functioning. We are still struggling, the education system has the same books with the same untruth and nonsense in it. The English language which we are using out of compulsion makes it easier. We could have given a rebirth to Sanskrit as the Jews did with Hebrew,” said Swamy.

    The Chinese have innovated furiously in the past few years while India has been lagging behind as Indians don’t push themselves enough towards innovation, said Swamy.

    “The Chinese have also adopted some of the Sanskritic principles. They gave autonomy for basic research in Physical Sciences. And the Chinese have gone very far ahead. We were ahead of them till 2005. After that, the decline started and during Narendra Modi’s period, the gap has widened,” added Swamy.

  • INTERVIEW | ‘We need to unleash the capitalist engine in India’: Kris Gopalakrishnan

    Express News Service
    It is going to be challenging for India to create operating systems like iOS, Android or Windows and also to create something like Facebook or Twitter, said Infosys’ co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan.

    “It is going to be challenging because we need a new paradigm. We also need the marketing muscle and the investment dollars to make these into a global entity. I’m not saying that it can’t happen, it is just difficult for us to do,” Gopalakrishnan added. He was in conversation with Senior Journalist Kaveree Bamzai at the virtual ThinkEdu Conclave 2021.

    Gopalakrishnan spoke about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and what India can do to become a superpower in that sphere.

    “Firstly, we need to have sufficient capacity and capability in AI and ML knowing that tech, how to use it, contributing to the development of the tech, the hardware infrastructure necessary to run the algorithms. As a nation, we are investing in it. Secondly, we generate huge amounts of data but it is not stored by Indian entities. It is collected and stored by entities outside the country. We need to figure out how this data is available to our researchers and start-ups to come up with new solutions. The government is looking at policy around data and localisation requirements,” he said. 

    Elaborating on a concept called a positive virtuous cycle and why India needs to create it, Gopalakrishnan explained, “Positive virtuous cycle means that we create new knowledge, innovative companies, scale them up, create wealth and then that wealth gets invested back into research. This is how Silicon Valley works, how capitalism works. We need to unleash that engine in India. We need to create a positive virtuous cycle of research, innovation, entrepreneurship and start-ups and also motivate our youth to focus on these areas.” He also stressed how the new National Education Policy (NEP) is headed towards that.

    “NEP is talking about problem-solving skills, creativity, multidisciplinary studies, transferable credits. All these are important changes to create the right skills, enable research and gives flexibility to students to take up subjects that interest them,” he said.

  • ThinkEdu Conclave: NEP not imposing ‘one nation, one language’, says education secretary Amit Khare

    Express News Service
    It is not imposing the idea of one-nation-one-language but accepting the plurality and diversity of India that the National Education Policy focuses on, said Education Secretary Amit Khare. Khare was speaking at The New Indian Express’ ThinkEdu Conclave 2021.

    Sastra University’s Vice-Chancellor Dr S Vaidyasubramaniam, TNIE Editorial Director Prabhu Chawla and Senior Journalist Kaveree Bamzai were part of the conversation. “What the NEP emphasises on is teaching in the mother tongue and the regional languages it isn’t one-size-fits-all,” said the secretary.

    “It is rather one nation, multiple languages. But why not use our languages? One programme, which has been started this year, is the Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat programme why not people from the north learn languages of the southern parts of India or eastern India learn about west India,” he added while answering Chawla’s question about whether the policy will strive to unite India by teaching them languages from across India.

    “The idea is to facilitate talented students who are from a non-English background (study in their mother tongue) so that the talent is not wasted. The online courses of the first year would be available in regional languages,” he added.

    Khare said that the beauty of this policy is the flexibility it offers not only in terms of languages but courses as well. There are various components of this policy that will come into effect at different points in time, he said and added that the next year will see at least 10 of them.

    “The Academic Bank of Credit (ABC) is actually the ABC of the entire higher education system. If we want to have a multiple entry and exit system and a multidisciplinary system, the ABC is a must. Otherwise, it would be difficult to manage the students’ records. The work on the ABC is on and it will be there before the next academic session starts,” he said.

    “Those institutions who join the ABC and have accreditation of at least ‘A grade’ will be allowed to have a multiple entry and exit system within the institution. Applying it across institutions will take a little more time because different institutions have different types of courses,” added Khare.

    Replying to Dr Vaidhyasubramaniam’s question about whether there will be a change in the eligibility criteria of IoEs, the secretary said, “Some changes are being considered for the eligibility criteria because under the existing criteria not many institutions would qualify.”

  • 2020 will go down as the year India got NEP: Union minister Ramesh Pokhriyal

    The world may remember 2020 as the year that brought about COVID and a pandemic that rocked our lives but India will remember the year for another reason, said Union Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal.

    “While 2020 will be known as the year of COVID-19, it will also be known as the year when India launched the NEP amid a pandemic,” Pokhriyal said. He was delivering the inaugural address at the ninth edition of the ThinkEdu Conclave 2021.  

    ALSO READ | ThinkEdu Conclave 2021: The science that’s behind Indian epics

    Prior to Pokhriyal’s address,  The New Indian Express Editorial Director Prabhu Chawla spoke about how far ThinkEdu has come over the last nine years. He said, “We step into our ninth edition with mixed emotions – happiness for hosting eight epic editions and sorrow for being coerced into hosting this edition virtually only due to COVID. We have sparked debates and even generated controversies. This year, we have brought illuminating discussions and conversations about new ideas from India’s finest thinkers – scientists, businessmen and storytellers. And all of it to discuss lessons for a new world – a world where education will set us apart.”

    In his address, Pokhriyal reflected on India’s rich past and how the NEP aims to restore  some of the lost glory. “Among the various things that the NEP is set to transform, it will aim to make India more self-reliant, unite the citizens and also help make India a global knowledge superpower. We want to ensure students at the grassroots and also at the higher echelons of academia are exposed to quality education,” Pokhriyal said.

    Speaking about Indian universities making it to the Top 100 of the QS Rankings, Pokhriyal added, “Students usually prioritise higher salary packages as an estimate of their potential. But after the NEP is implemented, we will have more patents by tapping into our capacity for academic probe and research. This year, 12 Indian institutions have made it to the Top 100 in QS Rankings and in the future, more Indian research institutes will be represented internationally. For this purpose, academic research will receive funding of Rs 50,000 crore over five years.”

    ALSO READ | Union Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal inaugurates virtual ThinkEdu, says India didn’t let students lose a year

    Elaborating on his vision for the NEP, Pokhriyal explained, “Through the NEP, we will not only find and develop talent but help produce top-notch content. Without quality content, talent doesn’t have much worth. When content and talent will unite, it will lead to new patents. That is the day when India will become truly self-reliant. NEP is the foundation on which India’s future development, as envisioned by the Prime Minister, is based. NEP is national as well as international. It is impactful, interactive, innovative and inclusive.”

  • ThinkEdu Conclave 2021: A bit of rebelliousness is good, Swami was one

    Express News Service
    Referring to students of a certain elite Indian institution who have written in favour of freedom of expression, Makarand R Paranjape, Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, said, “As if all that is important is to preserve some artificial notion of freedom of expression to the extent that you have turned the entire institution into a platform to attack a particular ideology, party or leader. Swami Vivekananda is saying that this is not the purpose of education, it is to know yourself deeply.”

    Accompanying him in the session titled Swami Vivekananda: The Modernity of Tradition was S Vaidhyasubramaniam, Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed-to-be University, while Prabhu Chawla, TNIE’s Editorial Director and Senior Journalist Kaveree Bamzai chaired the session.

    Vaidhyasubramaniam proceeded to highlight his views on the purpose of education, which he said was to, “create enlightened individuals who can understand India and present India to the world as India gains the leadership position”.

    Having set that as the backdrop, he asked Paranjape what was his idea of Indian education. “The foundation of Indian pedagogy was a deep inquiry into the self. This ought to result in a transformation, not just in the narrow sense but that of personality and character,” he said and added, “I have taught at JNU for 20 years. We see the kind of youth we are producing today, some people even called them the ‘Tukde-Tukde Gang’. A bit of rebelliousness is good because even Swamiji was a rebel. But somehow, the idea is that young people should be rebellious in a certain manner, which is irreverent and produces a certain kind of individual.”

    ALSO WATCH:

    When Chawla asked Paranjape how we can dismantle the Indian education that has been enslaved by the West, the latter pointed out how Swamiji embraced the fact that the West, in terms of science and technology, was progressive.

  • ThinkEdu Conclave 2021: ‘Job of an IAS officer never goes stale’, says ex-CEC SY Quraishi

    By Express News Service
    Former Water Secretary and Sanitation Specialist Parameswaran Iyer and former Chief Election Commissioner and Writer SY Quraishi sat down with Kaveree Bamzai to discuss their experiences in the IAS and why young people today should opt for the IAS as a career, during the ThinkEdu Conclave 2021. 

    Quraishi says that the IAS is a unique institution and an extremely important service, “An IAS officer has to always be on their feet. There is no substitute to grassroot work. My grassroot-level work helped me while I worked at the World Bank,” he said.

    On what advice they would give to aspiring IAS officers, Iyer said that it was a fascinating career and one has the opportunity to make an impact on the ground and that no other profession offers that opportunity.

    “Every officer goes through a remarkable journey and they transform the lives of people on the ground,” he said. Quraishi added that after all these years, he would still choose the profession over anything else.