[Assam] Knowledge and Indian Universities-HN DAS (The Sentinel, 04.11.2007)

[Buljit Buragohain]

Knowledge and Indian Universities
HN DAS 
Many academicians and educationists bemoan the fact that Indian universities fail to revise the syllabus in different subjects in response to changes in knowledge. In Assam and the Northeast, we lag further behind in this respect. This indifference to change is one among the many causes of majority of our brilliant students migrating to universities outside the Northeast.
This is also the cause of our students’ poor performance in competitive examinations and in the entrance tests to institutions of excellence including those for the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR). Lately, the number of students joining the natural science disciplines, such as physics and chemistry, in universities in the Northeast, have gone down drastically reducing the qualified manpower for teachers’ jobs in science streams in high schools and higher secondary schools, besides many other consequences and implications.
Assam’s technical institutions such as polytechnics, ITIs and even agriculture and veterinary colleges do not get their full complement of students because of a lopsided job market. According to an Assam Government survey, only 12 per cent of the students go in for the science stream and 0.4 per cent for technical and vocational streams, while 74 per cent join arts and six per cent join commerce. This is rather strange in an age of knowledge explosion when science and technology is leading the world. Today, information technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology are at the forefront of an unprecedented scientific revolution in the history of mankind.
It is fortunate that the recent developments in science and technology have been properly absorbed by the discipline of economics. In fact, the term now used to describe this particular branch is the ‘‘new economics of knowledge’’. One pioneer of ‘‘new economics’’ is Paul Romer whose 1988-90 epoch making paper, “Endogenous Technological Change,” made the greatest contribution to the theory of growth. Romer asserted that “it was knowledge, not physical factors, whose accumulation was the really important thing”. However, management guru Peter Drucker was the first to stress the significance of a knowledge economy in the early 1980s. It was also realized that technological progress is at least partly the result of economic forces. Some even claim that “technological change was a thoroughly economic process”.
The newer textbooks today reflect the economic consequences of these advances and also the inventions which have been made because of economic compulsions. These text books are designed with the object “to initiate students into a standard curriculum of currently accepted views”. They also analyse and synthesize an enormous fund of knowledge. Moreover, “thanks to a useful new distinction between atoms and bits”, there has been a “redefinition of the basic factors of production” so that “land, labour and capital” have become “people, ideas and things,” according to David Warsh’s 2006 masterpiece entitled Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations.
I have been a student of economics ever since I joined college. It was more than half-a-century ago that I bought a second-hand copy of Alfred Marshall’s tome Principles of Economics. This book I still possess. As I plodded through Marshall’s book, I also looked up parts of the other three earlier and long-standing textbooks of economics by Adam Smith, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. These four books held sway for more than one-and-a-half century until Paul Samuelson’s bestseller was published in 1948. Several generations of students of economics learnt the subject from Samuelson’s book which sold millions of copies. In course of time this was revised by Samuelson and William D Nordhaus. They “added to take in all that has changed”.
I was, however, slightly overawed by the works of the five masters and was more comfortable with easier textbooks, especially the ones by Benham and Kenneth Kurihara. Before passing the IAS examination of 1960 and joining that service in 1961, I was a lecturer of economics for a brief period at Gauhati University and Cotton College. I used to advise my students to read these latter textbooks and not the cheap notes which were published from Kolkata and were available in plenty. Some of the Cotton College economics students of those days did very well. One got IAS, another IPS, a third joined the World Bank, a couple of them became Principals of Cotton College, and a more well-known one became the Ombudsman of the Reserve Bank of India after I completed my term in that job. In mid-career when I had the opportunity to spend a memorable two-and-a-half year stint at the University of Adelaide, on study leave from the Ministry of Finance, Government of India, where I was then
 working, I found that Samuelson’s textbook was the most popular one with teachers and students in that university.
Six decades have passed by since Samuelson’s textbook was first published. The world, in the meantime, has changed beyond recognition. Tremendous advances have been made in science, especially in the emerging fields of information technology, telecommunication, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, biotechnology, nanotechnology, aeronautics, optoelectronics and a host of other areas. 
Unlike in the past, university students are now taking up interdisciplinary syllabi specially tailored to each one’s particular requirements. I become aware about the spread of this new phenomenon when I paid a notable visit to the Tsing Hua National University of Taiwan which is located about 46 km away from the capital city of Taipei. This university is considered to be one of the best in the world. It has produced as many as three Nobel Laureates and a fourth one got the Wolf prize in Mathematics which is rated as equivalent to Nobel. This university has established very close linkage with the research laboratories which the Taiwanese Government has very thoughtfully set up next to the university. A number of non-polluting industries are also in the vicinity. There is frequent exchange of manpower and know-how among these institutions, which leads to further advancement of science and technology and brings in wealth to that small but intelligent nation. When will we have
 such a university in India?
In American universities also, the number of students following interdisciplinary courses have increased considerably in recent years. I have noticed this in the Silicon valley universities particularly. The time has now come when India must upscale the standards of its universities and research establishments and revise the syllabus of different subjects so that their products will not only vie with the best in the world but will also devote themselves to the spread of knowledge among the lower strata of society in order to create a vibrant knowledge economy. 
(The writer was Chief Secretary, Assam during 1990-95)
   
  (The Sentinel,04.11.2007) 



       
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