Being Ambitious: Consolidation leading towards transformation aiming for reforms-12th Plan Strategy for Higher Education

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The 12^th plan has accorded high priority to Education and higher education in particular. As issues of access, excellence, expansion are at the centre of the new initiatives being taken in the higher education sector there are some key thematic issues which needs special attention in the coming few months. While there are many desirable goals, the efforts should be aligned to the implementable schemes and strategies. The prime focus via the point of departure or strategic shift for the 12^th plan would be from creation of new institutions to their consolidation, focus on quality and raising the bar for high quality institutions to make them globally competitive. Also, for the coming plan--the document of which will be ready by 1^st April 2012--the key bottom-line emerging out of recent public policy discourse is about having flexible strategy which will have a good feedback mechanism so that it can react and adapt rapidly to country`s changing requirements.

Among many crucial issues, the very urgent issues attracting immediate attention are firstly the improvement of quality of teachers and secondly the strategy for skill development in alliance with the growth of higher education in the country. Key institutional issues are    a) allowing flexibility in the kind of interdisciplinary experiments we can make with different disciplines in academic set up, b) creating research culture in the universities and reversing the decline of social sciences and humanities, c) strengthening increasingly ignored higher education provided by the state universities with their affiliated colleges forming around 99% of total higher education sector, d) increasing the number of community and vocational colleges e) focussing on the absolute numbers of enrolment and ways to strategize for achieving 10 million enrolment at the end of this decade 2020 rather than focusing on 21 percent enrolment figure and f) encourage private participation in the higher education through different incentives and regulatory framework. 

There is great need to provide additional infrastructure or strengthen the same in existing institutions. Addressing leadership and governances issue in the context of reform process remains the basic concern of the government in the midst of dynamic changes in the higher education sector. With the leap in technology and ‘death of distance’ we must accelerate the distance education programs more vigorously. National Knowledge Network with its ambitious plans of 1GBPS, embarking on massive distance education programs will be possible. There is need of having barrier eliminating consortia approach in total approach towards higher education in which collaborative alliance with the other crucial partners like DST is going to be important in creating the intellectual wealth to promote innovation. Boosting the IPR chairs in the universities will help in visualising the new opportunities in exploiting the IPR potential in the higher education sector. Nurturing the culture in which book reading is at the centre of knowledge acquisition, Book Promotion Policy will enable government to create more awareness about this issue. Developing, conserving and enabling translation of Indian languages will also ensure the securing and disseminating education and knowledge in regional languages, not only in the 22 scheduled languages but also other languages.

There is need to have a clear understanding about the qualitative impact of the initiatives about the higher education are going to have in terms of 12^th Plan strategies. While the issues of access, equity, relevance, quality, internationalisation in higher education, assessment and accreditation are pivotal for the rejuvenation of the higher education sector in country, we must realise that we cannot be complacent or be satisfied with small targets in higher education. The challenge in equity lies in bringing the huge population of SCs/STs/women/children/differently abled/vulnerable sections/economically backward sections of the society in the mainstream of higher education. This will help to move in the direction of democratization of higher education.

The concern on quality of education is alarming as out of 577 universities and around 34,000 colleges (approx.), only 164 universities and 4000 colleges have subjected themselves for the accreditation. Within these institutions also, the number of universities and colleges getting C & D status is greater than getting B & A. It remains to be reminded again and again that support for higher education from states is very low compared to what centre has given now, ironically true compared to the almost 99 % of the higher education is dependent on the state universities and affiliated colleges. Incidentally number of students enrolled in central universities is only around 1, 39, 000, less than one percent of the total students enrolled in higher education. (Planning Commission has suggested to the stakeholders a possibility to create joint funding of state plans by central and state governments while central funding focussing on governance and academic reforms.) Moreover, the states do need to change their ambivalent attitude towards higher education. Strengthening higher education is not possible without addressing the qualitative aspects of the primary and secondary education. To increase the transition rates from secondary to higher education, we need to evolve new strategies which would address the major weaknesses of the current system.

While there are around 8000 colleges awarding degrees in professional technical education and more than 3000 awarding polytechnic degrees, the challenges of the technical education are many. Some of the new ways to expand technical education would be to bring community around these already existing technical education institutions. Going ahead, forming the clusters of different institutions to share the faculty and other resources would be possible alternative. Involving industry to train the students to have quality skills according to the requirements of the industry will help to improve the employability of the students enrolled there. Building skills with the help of technical education institutions will be very beneficial to the community around those colleges. Around 90% of the technical education institutes are in the private sector. Government needs to invest more in this sector and also continue to promote private participation with the oversight on quality and other regulatory issues and moving towards formulating more PPP model mechanisms to address the expansion issue. Major intervention is needed in terms of allowing industry in setting up the R&D centres in technical education campuses by involving the faculties and the students of that specific technical education institution. So, incubation centres can be established by different funding schemes and incentives arrived from time to time by central regulation and understanding of the technical education institutions in states.

Faculty development forms the core of the agenda for realising the quality in primary, secondary and higher education in the country. While holistic scrutiny of the skills and knowledge levels of the teachers at the recruitment level is not possible, very little happens about quality training of the teachers after recruitment. The regular periodic training sessions conducted by Academic Staff Colleges are not very successful. As recognised by Yashpal Committee and National Knowledge Commission, the university and college level leadership needs to be inspired for the changes we wish to see to be brought out by them. In this direction, a ‘National Program on Leadership Development and Governance Reforms’ can be launched. Empowering the teachers through the quality training and enabling them to take initiatives in terms of ways to promote excellence are crucial steps for consolidating the gains made in the eleventh plan.

Maintaining quality, pushing for excellence in existing institutions and creating new centers of excellence and universities is crucial for 12^th plan. Focussing on the urgently needed numbers in recruitment and further on developing skills of the teachers remains the catalyst to realise the other changes we want to see on the ground in the context of 12^th plan. We cannot ignore the vital link between primary, secondary and higher education. This needs more attention because there is lot of overlapping of course structure. We need to have special attention for scientific research and we could look forward for having separate science universities or we can strengthen newly established IISER.

GER improvement can only be done by state universities and by incorporating more open and distance learning. Even if each university takes responsibility improves enrolment by 10, 000 it will help to have quantum jump of 10% growth in GER.  We can learn from other countries experience especially in community colleges example of USA can be imitated where they are providing education to 14 million students through more than 5500 community colleges while India is having around 13 million of its population being educated through existing more than 4000 colleges. A good institution must have enough number of students so that it can conduct different programs on its campus. We need to pay more and more attention to girls hostels. India has many old colleges and universities. Also, reputation and quality of old colleges needs to be re-established. But during the course of time, many institutions languished because they did not catch up with the changing realities and they could not connect to the education they are providing to the challenges in industry, society and research. A lot needs to be done on the part of faculty positions by improving and revising the guidelines in that direction.

Skill development needs huge advocacy because country as a whole, there is still huge disconnect between the challenges on that front and related potential we have. There is need of attaching some kind of premium to the skill development initiatives. Large chunk of the faculties are either too young or too old, middle segment having both energy and experience is still missing. Along with the plans set to establish 5000 skill development centres and 1500 new ITIs, focus should be on how higher education institutions can be leveraged for the skill development. Centre can attach conditionality for approval for the new engineering colleges related to the kind of contribution they can make towards skill development in their localities.

Very few higher education institutions in the country today understand how they are addressing the real needs of the country. We need no blind imitation. There is greater urgency to break the barriers we have created over the decades between university and real world. Our higher education system is burdened with the past. The need of lateral entry in different disciplines of the higher education is greater than ever before. The fresh, innovative approach must be adopted towards the classroom teaching by looking towards new alternative in distance education. Indian higher education institutions are not offering any innovations in any sense. The universities should move in the direction where knowledge gained must be associated with the craft and hands on in that particular sector of discipline or profession.  

The focus must be addressed towards removing the weakness of the higher education system. As 99% of the higher education stems from state universities, there is need to have model act for uniform implementation for state universities to improve their capacity and performance in the context of rising demographic challenges. The research facilities are very poor. The strategy for equity and inclusion is not satisfactory. Time has arrived when the issue of National Education Finance Corporation needs to be accelerated for addressing inclusion and equity. Currently there is huge pressure on autonomy of colleges so state university guidelines should be revised in a way to reducing the stress on the autonomy of the colleges.

Steering motto for the 12^th plan must be consolidating the achievements made until now. Country of this size needs large institutions and half islands of success. Higher education should be seen as a sector which brings people, societies and regions together aiming towards national integration. Holistic development of higher education demands attention towards mobility of faculty, students, technology and resources. Concept of Teachers without Borders can be promoted to accommodate vast talent pool outside the formal educational system to enable and incentivise their participation in knowledge delivery processes. Therefore consolidation of existing data is relevant is immediate requirement in that context. Publishing annual India Education Report will be welcome step in that direction.

Higher education without quality is a waste of resources. We do not need Ocean of mediocrity and islands of excellence. Problems in higher education started when true meaning of regulation was interpreted in terms of disciplining and controlling institutions rather than enabling them to reach upto quality benchmarks and strive for excellence. Ignoring performing institutions is not going to motivate them to excel and therefore nurturing a culture where there is a natural incentive based on proactive action for performance is needed. Capacity building of the teachers is at the core of whatever kind of academic reforms we have in our mind. New adaptive pedagogy which understands potential of technology for delivery of knowledge, cumulative assessment and revision of the curriculum is very crucial to consolidate the knowledge base and thus catalysing the changes required for organising the research environment in the universities.

Industry participation in the higher education is very much neglected. The growth of whole service sector depends upon the skill development and the kind of professional training they are getting in higher education. There are a huge number of students who are simultaneously involved in job and distance education. Many of the people are who are employed are reluctant to enter into some kind of distance education program because there is lack of incentive in terms of economic security and about relevance of those programs for the career growth. Biggest challenge ahead of economic growth objectives of the country remain in the terms of human resources. There is huge section of population which is disadvantaged people. Creating and mainstreaming the special schools for them is one of the important requirements to accommodate the aspirations of that section. If we wish to achieve 30% GER, then the norms for setting universities must be made more flexible. Especially the conditions related to land and capital can be more flexible off course without compromising the quality and other regulatory compliances.

The corporate world always experience quality higher education as inadequate for their functional requirement so they always train the people being recruited. Therefore it is not economical for industry to invest in that person all again for training and upgradation of their skills. So, introducing soft skills in the curriculum may be one of the ways to address this difficulty. Significant revisiting of faculty recruitment process is very necessary because there seems to be little correlation between subject expertise and the kind of teaching skills needed in higher education set up. There is need to enthuse greater respect for teaching in general and motivation to teach must be a prime mover for talented people in the experts of discipline and profession.

There are huge regional, sub-regional imbalances and knowledge disciplinary imbalances. There is extraordinary fragmentation of the higher education. The concept of university seems to have been diluted and umbrella status of centre for learning and research is being superficially used for very narrow purposes of vocation and study. It should once again be reminded about huge disconnect between primary, secondary and higher education. Government needs to have special attention towards the schemes incentivising the participation of the private sector in the higher education. Everything about improving standards and access of higher education is about public interest, so the concept of Private, Public and Public Private Participation should be revisited to reformulate their contexts in changing paradigms.

Huge spurt in the number of Ph.D. have thrown the challenge of deteriorating quality of research in the country. This needs to be addressed immediately. The issue of credit transfer has to be approved because it provides greater mobility to acquire knowledge and positive push for the cross sectoral employment and knowledge acquisition opportunities. As mentioned earlier, the much desired interdisciplinarity and the promotion of the culture of liberal arts is very much crucial for spirit of enquiry in academics.

Higher education needs fundamental change. Higher education is not asking for transformation and not for reforms. It is seeking transformation of organisation of higher education and research in institutions, consistent revisiting the content of higher education and regularly ensuring the social reach. Priority in the transformation should go to the undergraduate students. We do not have mechanism of teacher training and it should be formally established in universities. Our university system needs to have Human Resource Planning and Management Centre in order to utilise existing potential up to an optimum level and address the university faculty requirements. There is need of disaggregation of the data of the kind of enrolment achieved and the kind of visualised in the next few years. Then only we will be able to address the issues of inclusion.

We are having uneven expansion of the higher education system at the expense of quality of the academics. UGC affiliation programme needs to be strengthened. There is huge increase in the admission of professional colleges but the enrolment in basic sciences, core disciplines of social sciences and humanities. The basic issue of concern is that we are moving towards the kind of higher education where the understanding about the basic sciences or social sciences is being compromised at the cost of aggressive entry of professional courses.

Absorptive capacity of the state universities and other institutes is a matter of concern. Research funding in social sciences is a different ball game altogether. It should not be compared to the kind of funding patterns and criteria developed for the science technology sector.

What happened to secondary education is going to happen to higher education in the flow of elite to massification to universalization. There is more emphasis on infrastructure and less on quality of education and human resources being nurtured. There are very few journals of higher education and comparative higher education. There is great need to have flexibility and porousness connected to the kind of professional skills needed and the kind of academic courses being conducted. India is natural for developing and least developed countries in higher education. So, it is not desirable to always look towards west. We should also develop and work with the other countries sharing our experiences, resources and expertise.

Forecasting and developing the industry potential needs metrics of measurement. These metrics are helpful in measuring feedback from the stakeholders and thus empower them to promote change. Therefore there must be efficient mechanisms which frame the indicators of learning outcomes. Goal is to visualise the parity between learning, employment and research-development objectives. The kind of ecosystem in the current higher education sector does not have the elements which will support the innovative and different thinking initiatives. Online teacher training programs can be used for skill transfer and quality improvement. Judging learning outcomes is extremely important. The distinction between examination and evaluation must be made in order to improve the assessment of the both students and teachers.

Eventually, vision for the 12^th plan is “Society and Higher Education should go together.”

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"I wish to reach my wife to gift her before fashion changes" : Dynamic world of speed, efficiency and supercomputing !

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Advances in computer technology have revolutionalised the transfer of information rendering national borders to critical new knowledge. As the pace of new knowledge and discoveries picks up, the speed at which knowledge can be accessed becomes a decisive factor in the commercial success of technologies. Computing has become a symbol of our creativity and productivity along with being a expressive barometer of the competitive position of the organizations and the country in the world of knowledge economy. Supercomputers, in particular, are extremely important to design and manufacturing processes in diverse industries like oil exploration, aeronautics and aerospace, energy, transport, automobiles, pharmaceuticals and electronics to name few of them.


(With the acknowledgement to Copyright of Niels Drost, 2010 for the work Real-World Distributed Supercomputing published by NOW):-  “Ever since the invention of the computer, users have desired higher and higher performance. For an average user the solution was simply a matter of patience: each newer model computer has been faster than the previous generation for as long as computers have existed. However, for some users this was not enough, as they required more compute power than any normal machine could over. Examples of high performance computing users are meteorologists performing weather predictions using complex climate models, astronomers running simulations of galaxies, and medical researchers analyzing DNA sequences.


To explain some of the major challenges encountered by high performance computing users, we use an analogy: making coffee. What if I was responsible for making coffee for a group of people, for instance a group of scientists on break during a conference? If the group is small enough, I could use my own coffee maker, analogous to using my own computer to do a computation. However, this will not work if the group is too large, as it would take too long, leading to a large queue of thirsty scientists. I could also brew the coffee in advance, but that would lead to stale and probably cold coffee.

 The obvious solution to my problem is to get a bigger, faster, coffee maker. I could go out and buy an industrial-size coffee maker, like the one in a cafeteria, or even a coffee vending machine. Unfortunately, these are very expensive. In computing, large, fast, expensive computers are called supercomputers. Fortunately, several alternatives exist that will save money. Instead of a single big coffee maker, I could use a number of smaller machines (a cluster in computing terms). I could also rent a coffee maker (cloud computing), or even borrow one (grid computing). In reality, I would probably use a combination of these alternatives, for instance by using my own coffee maker, borrowing a few, and renting a machine. Although combining machines from different sources is the cheapest solution, it may cause problems. For one, different coffee machines need different types of coffee, such as beans, ground coffee, pads, or capsules. Moreover, these different machines all need to be operated in different ways, produce coffee at different speeds, and may even produce a different result (for instance, espresso). In the end, I may be spending a considerable amount of time and effort orchestrating all these coffee makers.

Recently, cloud computing has emerged as a high-performance compute platform, offering applications a homogeneous environment by using virtualization mechanisms to hide most differences in the underlying hardware. Unfortunately, not all resources available to a user offer cloud services. Also, combining resources of multiple cloud systems is far from trivial. To use all resources available to a user, software is needed which easily combines as many resources as possible into one coherent computing platform.”

Now my story begins about what India wish to do about the supercomputing in coming few years. :- Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons. Apart from these areas, other notable frontiers of research where supercomputing is being used are: In ccomputational fluid dynamics for optimization of turbines and wings, noise reduction and air conditioning in trains, in fusion for plasma in a future fusion reactor (ITER), in Astrophysics for studying the origin and evolution of stars and galaxies, in solid state physics for superconductivity, surface properties and semiconductors, in Geophysics for earth quake scenarios, in Chemistry for catalytic reactions, in medicine and medical engineering to simulate and control blood flow, neurysms, air conditioning of operating theatres, in Biophysics to research on properties of viruses, genome analysis and in climate research for modeling, currents in oceans among the many other applications.

Relevant here is the distinction between capability computing and capacity computing, as defined by Graham et al. Capability computing is typically thought of as using the maximum computing power to solve a large problem in the shortest amount of time. Often a capability system is able to solve a problem of a size or complexity that no other computer can. Capacity computing in contrast is typically thought of as using efficient cost-effective computing power to solve somewhat large problems or many small problems or to prepare for a run on a capability system.

In 2005 India was on 4th position in the world in terms of supercomputing capacity, in 2010 country slided to 24th position. We always take pride in the fact that when supercomputing technology was denied to India in the 90s, our brilliant engineers at CDAC made us proud of them by creating PARAM for us. Even in 2007 we had third largest supercomputer and since then India’s performance in this strategic sector has downgraded such that time has arrived to ask question are we languishing far behind what we envisioned? We need to improve on the fronts of capacity (human and computer/networking resources), capability (manpower skills) and identifying the challenging areas where we wish to focus our attention for problem solving in either R&D or other applications. So, as things stand today, out of first top performing supercomputers in the world, USA has 274 in list, China has 42 and imagine India four.

When it comes to building and using of supercomputing facility in India there are many serious stakeholders: DRDO, DAE, Dept. of Space, DST, DBT, financial sector, E-governance initiatives, international collaborative projects like ITER, telecom and others. With the increasing realization about the technological and financial viability to use network as a computer rather than just building network of computers use of distributed computing has been envisioned for massive applications. Moreover, Indian strategy is focused on using supercomputer more oriented towards memory centric operations compared to processing and analytical operations.

The transformational journey of supercomputing strategy is based on fourth paradigm in supercomputing going from computer centric to data centric. Initiatives like National Knowledge Network will only add to our experience about creating, hosting, sharing, transmitting, broadcasting and conserving the huge amount of data in the back end. Here, potential of integrated capacity of large number of computers in a network can be visualized yielding enormous amount of outcome which increases exponentially over a short period of time. And it is very difficult to handle the exponentially increased high speeds and high performance computing at greater degrees of operation. Therefore sharing has emerged as a new champion of performing very critical and complex tasks. Due to sharing, seamless integration of data and high precision experiments is possible.

It is desirable and positive step that country is thinking seriously to invest in the frontiers of supercomputing and thus consolidating the initiatives in the emerging areas of the research and development, real challenge lies in the developing the absorptive capacity for the large amount of funds being released from the centre and complementing them with attraction of right mix of talented people with motivation by having good infrastructure in place in time. Largest number in the universe is Avogadro’s number which is around ten to the order of 23. This was the strong belief of scientific community up till now. But with the help of large supercomputing facilities it is possible now to calculate the numbers beyond the degree of Avogadro’s number. In a way, from the perspectives of growth of fundamental science and addressing the issues of inclusive society, we need supercomputing.
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