Sunday Posts

Kapil Sibal is in full swing and he has cleared the draft of Foreign Education Providers (Regulation) Bill to be placed before the Union Cabinet. Once the cabinet clears it, the Foreign Education providers will be able to offer degree programmes independently in India. This, in Mr. Sibal's view, will save millions of dollars as Indian students will be able to study in foreign universities while staying in India. This will also expand the Higher Education offering in India, which will supplement Government's efforts to ramp up the number of seats and the quality of learning. This news was received well in India. This was always on the cards, but the previous drafts of the bill never saw light of the day because the previous education minister, Mr Arjun Singh, was never very keen on getting the foreign universities in. Instead, he allowed a corrupt License Raj to foster in Education, leading to rapid deterioration of quality of Higher Education in India. The current Minister...

Kapil Sibal is trying to fix education in India. Hard task, indeed, and a thankless one. Somehow, education never received the priority that it deserves in Independent India. Surprisingly so. When one looks at the nations emerging from colonialism, the most successful ones are always seen to have focused on education. India's recent success story also has a lot to do with its limited experiments with educational excellence with IITs and IIMs . But, then, Education, like every other country, is a political subject, and somehow it never got the political prominence it deserves. Compare it against the South-East Asian countries and one knows that we never cared much for education. For example, almost all Malaysian Prime Ministers held the Education portfolio before they became prime ministers - education was always a politically sensitive, high profile portfolio. To draw a parallel, I wanted to search how many Indian Prime Ministers actually held the Education portfolio before the...

When I picked up my phone this morning, I noticed I missed a call from a colleague of mine in Hyderabad. The call was oddly timed indeed - very early in the morning - and signified a sense of emergency. This was not one of those done by mistake for not being sensitive to time differences: I speak to this colleague almost on a daily basis, and he will know exactly what time is it. So, it must have been indeed an emergency. And, as I set myself to return the call, I had to glance over the day's news - just in case the office is not on fire and the whole computer system did not break down - and instantly knew what it was. Michael Jackson! I knew my colleague was a huge fan - and remained loyal through the years - and his untimely death, which saddened me as well, must have triggered his early morning condolence call. But, to my eye-popping surprise, the excitement was about Indian education sector, and not about Michael Jackson at all [and there was no fire]. Indian education has long...