During the fourth National Assessment and Accreditation Council awards ceremony, the University Grants Commission pointed this out.
During the fourth National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) Accreditation awards ceremony held on Sunday, the University Grants Commission (UGC) chairperson Prof. Ved Prakash pointed out that fragmentation is ‘killing higher education’.
“We are killing higher education by fragmentation. Disciplines like agriculture and law have already moved out of the university system. However, our reaction to this is setting up exclusive universities,” he said.
“This is due to lack of policy research,” he added, urging the academicians to look at higher education in a holistic manner.
“Higher education is no longer on the exteriors of national agenda. It is now the centre of all planning. What we need are visionary policy initiatives,” he said. The requirement right now is to have visionary policy initiatives, he added. Stressing on the fact that vocationalisation of higher education is not working, Prakash said that there is a need for people with the right skills to respond.
“There is severe shortage of skilled workforce and unemployment existing together. It is up to us (institutions) to deal with this,” he said. He added that the country is not able to attract scholars from different parts of the world as “research and innovation components are not strong.”
“With the focus on ensuring excellence and equity, our approach to higher education in the 12th five-year plan will be stratified to ensure inclusive growth of education. We have asked for `1.84 lakh crore (against `85 lakh crore in 11th five-year plan). Let us see how much we actually get this time,” said Prof. Prakash.
On the current gross enrolment ratio (GER), he said: “We have already touched 20%. The target in the 11th five-year plan was to reach 15%, and we managed to reach 17%. In the 12th plan, we want to add two million children into education every year by increasing the intake capacity of existing institutions,” he said.
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