Next generation of universities will have to be within cities and built in such a way that people go in and out of the university, says Sanyal
Taking a dig at the current way of the functioning of universities, Principal Economic Adviser to the Ministry of Finance, Government of India called for rethinking of universities and termed the newly built universities as "real estate expansion" plan. Sanjeev Sanyal, who was speaking at the last day of the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit on 'Repositioning Indian Talent Pool on a Global Frontier' affirmingly said that the next generation universities will have to be within cities.
"Today when we build universities, the way we do it is we take 300 acres of land somewhere, build a large wall around it and we think of it as some real estate expansion plan. This is a silly way to build a university. We need to build universities close to where industry talent and innovation are. Next generation of universities will have to be within cities and built in such a way that people go in and out of the university."
Giving an example, he said, "There is enormous amount of give and take that happens between academia and industry at Boston or Cambridge university. You cannot imagine Boston without MIT or Harvard. What benefit would Kharagpur or Kanpur have for having an IIT there? I do not know anyone that continued to live in Kharagpur afterwards. Because we have conceived our universities not as ways to gather human capital but merely as a place isolated from rest of the world where some kind of teaching happens. A top college at Delhi university is built on just 17 acres of land. We got to stop thinking of universities as somewhat separate from the rest of the economy."
Taking yet another dig at some of the higher educational institutions, he said, "Indian talent is not going to stay in India if their quality of life is not good. We need to get our cities to the cutting edge where pool can have a quality of lives, schools, homes, places for entertainment in order to get the talent pool stay here and contribute to the Indian economy. Otherwise all that we are achieving by having IITs and other institutions are pumping up American frontier not our own frontier. Look around you and you will find all the talented people have left. No point in generating this talent pool if we cannot deploy them here. So this is why we need to build world class cities and create urban spaces and clusters which are simply livable."
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