WORLD CLASS UNIV.IN NORTH EAST- WISHLIST

guwahati, 9 june,09,
tuesday
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QUO VADIS UNIV. IN NE REGION
soul searching and visionaries

HRD minister's public announcement to set up as many as 14 world class universities and 384 model colleges might be welcome in certain quarters.Naturally, any proposal to set up institutions are prima facie welcome before the conseqential, result-oriented ramifications could be assessed in cool thought chamber.Insitutions are run by men and t is the quality of the men that reigns supreme.Can we do some honest evaluation of univs. in our region.

We went to central universities [ without naming] in the region. Offices,classrooms so and so forth could be found open for a few hours after 11 am and 2 pm. Salary hike- 80,000/ pm to start with, a meager 3,ooo per day is not making some stoic faces smile.Some universities in the Myanmar border, particularly one, make us refresh with Kampuchea's killing fields.Shoot outs, extortions,Berlin walls in the tiny spaces available, daily massive propaganda handouts a la Natzi, Goebellian style are in the daily news.It is central universty at the end of the day.People are in siege of the terror withn and terror without.How can you or me concentrate a wonderful pathbreaking economics or,philosophy or,physics paper worthy of world class evaluation in the midst of the killing fields.

Harvard, yale, Princeton,Cambridge,Oxford,Edinburgh,Moscow or Beijing universities are different.The halo of first top Indian universities like Calcutta,Madras, Bombay,Delhi,Mysore in that order had vanished only to be replaced by highly perturbed, politically motivated clones.National Knowledge Commission on 4 fields,TIFAC report need careful reading before we launch heritage or,other forms of universities.They are the knowledge inputs of 300 Indian top academics and scientists working in a team.

The problem is that basic university education has become a thing of the fast, although some IITs do shine like freaks.Indias HRD minister and the VCs have to do a little bit of soul searching, apart from gimmicks. NCHE is yet to be assessed.

World class would not become so overnight; they resulted from accumulated experiences and enormous creativiy of the faculties as a whole.A DULL slot and a black sheep would be the end.Infrastructures.Atthesame time, it may be noted that in the last 30 year old bookfairs- twice a year held in the city_ could be error of judgement also, I hardly could meet just a handful of teachers , nothing more-nothing less.The show business is not the indicator; the culture sustainable s that reallly matters.There is no room for sudden quantum jump in any discipline.Even the theory of justice today is the beyeproduct of 5000 year-long theoretical infighting across the continents and the real politics on the ground.

The region is a virgin soil.Whatever you seed in, mother earth or theintellectual earth would delver the goods.What we have been looking forward is the missing convictions and will to rise to new heights.World class universities have to emerge here also.Time is ripe.

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