Sharad Pawar: India, US need to work together on higher education

Updated on: Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar has said that higher education is the most significant area where India and United States need to work together to resolve challenges like global warming, water, food security, healthcare and social security.

"These are not local issues but are global in character," he said, while inaugurating a conference as part of the ongoing Indo-US education conclave here on Tuesday. "The Obama-Singh 21st Century Knowledge Initiative has a key role in this context," he said.

Pawar said, "India needs a good inflow of talent and technology to meet the ambitious target of enrolling over 40 million students from the present 16 million students in higher education. This will need setting up of 1,000 new universities and 25,000 more colleges."

Pawar identified development of vocational education and employability skills as two significant areas at a time when technology intervention in every field has made it mandatory to employ trained manpower. "This offers greater opportunities to India and US," he said. "Partnership with US can also expedite the Indian objective of strengthening agricultural education," he added.

Union power minister Sushilkumar Shinde, who addressed the concluding session for the day, said, "The paucity of state-of-the-art research and development (R&D) facilities in India offers a great opportunity for Indo-US collaborations especially from the private sector."

He said, "India produces 0.6 million engineers and 40,000 doctors every year, but lacks good R&D facilities. Our spending of R&D is only 0.8% of the GDP with 80% of this coming from public sector and 20% from private sector.In developed countries, it is the other way as public share is only 18% in Japan and 30% in US and China. The scope exists for increasing private sector share in R&D efforts in India."

At the conference session, noted academician Pankaj Chande, who is president of the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) said, "Unless we have an academic structure matching the US requirements, collaborations will be difficult. Asking US universities to change according to India is not possible."

K B Powar, also a former AIU president, said lesser regulations in professional higher education can help foster better Indo-US collaborations. Distance education is one area which offers lot of potentialfor Indo-US engagement and is lesser regulated compared to professional studies, he said. A KPMG-Edge forum report on Indian higher education was released by Pawar earlier in the day.

Former University of Pune vice-chancellor Ashok Kolaskar said, "We need to identify focus areas for India where US is interested. For instance, energy, environment, nano and bioscience studies. Research patent output and the process for appointment of teachers also need to be addressed."

Times of India

Sharad Pawar: India, US need to work together on higher education

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