Sudhir Dixit, Director, HP Labs India and a member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in an exclusive interview with India Education Review shares his views about higher education in India and the role of ICT in improving certain areas in the education sector.Q. What are your observations about higher education sector in India? How do you see the role of ICT in transforming this sector?
Sudhir Dixit: We are doing well as a country, especially because of the tremendous growth in the number of colleges and institutions. Earlier we didn’t have enough number of institutions for even the bright students. But, having said that, I still feel the quality has suffered as the growth of institutions has been so fast. But, I am optimistic that the competition in the education sector will sort itself out in the coming years. The students are also not enrolling in good numbers to Masters and PhD programmes and this is because of the opportunities of employment they are getting after their graduation. As people are not going for Masters and PhD, we are not creating good teachers and professors with advanced degrees to teach. I think the employers have a big role to play by incentivising employees going for higher education.
Q. In our country, professors and teachers are not paid well and therefore students go for jobs thus leading to paucity of teachers in the sector. What is your take on this?
Sudhir Dixit: Compensation in education will never get equal to the industry as even in advanced countries like US, UK or Europe, the industry cuts away the jobs but those countries still have the top institutions only because the people there have got passion for teaching. People should have the passion to teach and if people just go for the money, then no one is going to get right people on the job. We need to give good money but the people getting into the profession should also have the passion for teaching.
If people are not going for Masters and PhD, it is not the only fault of the academic sector; rather the industry has to be blamed. The industry keeps blaming that the Indian academic sector is not producing employable products. But actually the industry wants to get everything without investing anything, whereas, it is their responsibility to invest money into the education sector by means of donation, higher wages and salaries to those who have Masters and PhD degrees. If that happens people will surely go for higher education and this is the way to create good teachers.
Role of ICT is huge both from being able to offer quality education material from anywhere in the world and being able to bring qualified teachers from anywhere in the country. There may be immediate shortage but we want to look at long term solutions. Furthermore, ICT can offer the opportunity for establishing a good school to good content and teachers with use of internet. ICT literacy is also important for get employed these days.
Q. India has got good number of engineering institutions which are helping Indian students fetch good jobs across the world. Still none of the institutions are regarded at par with other higher education institutions in the world? What is the reason according to you?
Sudhir Dixit: As far as teaching is concerned, the Indian institutions are doing good job but they do poor job when it comes to research and publications. Unless our professors and lecturers’ work get published in the world journals, people will not even know the name of the institution. So, the problem is really circular and we do not have enough number of teachers with PhD degree to appreciate the value of PhD and research. We also lack the number of role models in higher education to look up to as we do not have many famous professors and teachers who are world renowned.
We need to have a system where we can award the best teacher. It should in accordance with their performance not just because they have been doing good academic job.
Q. Do you think that research and teaching is not happening at the same time because those who are doing research are not teaching and vice versa?
Sudhir Dixit: In countries like US, and other developed European countries the same professor teaches and does research. A professor alone cannot create everything and hence he is assisted by his students in his work. But what is happening in India is that though one is a very good professor, but if he is not able to attract Ph.D students work under him he will not be able to produce a research paper. So, lot of our good students are going to foreign institutions for research because they see that they will get better grant better opportunity, etc.
Q. Government of India is going to make accreditation mandatory. Do you see it paving way for India becoming a permanent member of Washington Accord? How it will help engineering institutions and students?
Sudhir Dixit: I think it is definitely a very good idea if you want to bring parity and high quality education across all the institutions. So, if every institution in India goes for accreditation, this will help students judge the institution in a better way before taking admission. This will bring the quality of education at par with the good institutions across the world. Accreditation will bring quality at a very high level thus any initiative that will improve the quality must be supported by everybody. The degree given by accredited institutions will not only help the students but will also help the employers as their productivity will increase. This will also increase the productivity of the country and at the global level, the image of brand India will improve. Then you will not get to hear that we are producing 50, 60, 70 per cent of graduates who are not employable.
Q. You said 50, 60, 70 percent of Indian graduates are unemployable and many of the experts have also been saying this. Being from the industry and working in the sector, how far do you agree with it?
Sudhir Dixit: I really don’t know how this number arrived or how this was calculated. I don’t agree with this number. I think it has been exaggerated, if it has been given by the industry and obviously industry will always want the best people to challenge the academic and I think the real number is significantly less than 70 percent. The blame lies on the industry also as it needs to invest o the students graduating out joining the industry to train them. We can’t expect everything from the academic community and we have to also look at our role as employer community.
Q. What are the significant changes required for the higher education sector in India especially in technical education?
Sudhir Dixit: The first thing that we should never forget is that we have to ensure that fundamentals are taught well. The second important thing is the curriculum and content should be revised regularly with recent advancements that are happening so that the students feel connected with what they are doing around the world. The third thing is we should use and leverage ICT to improve and augment both the quality of material and teacher. And this needs to be done soon because the demand of engineers by the industry in past 10 years has been so huge that nothing will solve the problem except ICT. Fourth, we must pay our teachers and professors well and we should devise a metric by which we pay for performance. The fifth thing I would say is that we should develop good university-industry co-operation whereby people from the academic institutions will be able to spend time with the industry and people from industry should also visit and learn at the local university and inspire students. This will go a long way in improving the quality of institution and bringing significant change in the way we deliver education.
