Interdisciplinary studies needed in higher education: Academics

Updated on: Friday, July 01, 2011

Senior academics today mooted a concept to infuse the culture of interdisciplinary studies in higher educational institutes, to leverage India's chances of creating a skilled and employable global workforce.

"Education is all about making men and not craftsmen," Prof. Abhay Pethe, Department of Economics from Mumbai University, who chaired the panel discussion on 'Internationalising Higher Education' said.

Stressing on the importance of infusing the culture of interdisciplinary studies in our higher education institutes, he said a subject like humanities should also find a place along with the engineering and pre-sciences.

"Rigour is the only insurance in a changing world," Prof Sabyasachi Bhattacharya of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) said, adding therefore while these linkages are important, academic rigour and depth must not be sacrificed.

The panelists unanimously agreed on the importance of flexibility and autonomy in the system of higher education to improve curricula and unleash creativity in state and central universities.

Skills development was another area which was posed as a serious concern during the round-table conference organised jointly by Observer Research Foundation and the British Council at St Xavier's College.

Pethe mentioned that there is still a lack of a sense of "dignity of labour" in Indian society and there is no room in our higher education system for a plumber or an electrician to upgrade his/her skill-sets to further their career goals.

"This (skill development) was established as an area in which we can learn and benefit from collaborations with international universities. Especially for a country poised to reap benefits of a massive demographic pidend, vocationalisation of higher education will be a necessary and daunting challenge," the academicians said.

The panelists also pointed out that only 10 per cent of the central funding goes towards higher education and they demanded for this to be rationalised.

The panel agreed that there was almost a hierarchy or a caste system of sorts among higher education institutes in India, with the IITs and IIMs being the most privileged and other less known institutes suffering from a lack of human and monetary resources, that needed to be addressed.

Bhattacharya observed that this apartheid could be traced back to the policy blunder of separation of research from teaching.

Both these aspects need to go fully hand in hand and one cannot achieve excellence without the other. Additionally, public debate on the subject of education in general and higher education in particular have ceased to exist, he said.

Instead decision making has been left to special commissions, expert groups and steering committees, and once they produce reports there has been little or no progress in implementation, he added.

Panelists noted that fundamentally, very little had changed in the education debates since the recommendations of the Radhakrishnan Commission in 1949 up to the Kothari Committee Report in 1966.

Interdisciplinary studies needed in higher education: Academics

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