If India is to build a stable liberal democracy, if we are to empower the vast mass of the Indian public, if we want to give ourselves a more equitable and fair society, and if we want sustainable economic growth, then our university system desperately needs to be reformed. The UPA government has understood this. Its plan to massively expand the university system is recognition that the idea of a liberal, empowering, just and sustainable India depends on a vibrant, expanding higher education system.
Critics have argued that quantity will come at the cost of quality. This is correct, but as Kapil Sibal, the minister for human resources development, has recognised, there is simply no alternative. Over the longer term, quality should improve. One way of dealing with the fall in standards is to bring in foreign talent. India's university system is depressingly Indian. You can walk the corridors of academe and not see a single foreign face amongst the faculty. Our university system does not embody universality. Like Indian industry in the 1960s and 1970s, it has shut out foreigners and has suffered as a result.
India's universities need to be made more 'universal' if they are to flourish. The latest ranking of world universities shows that India has a long way to go in higher education. Its once proud university system, the best in Asia after the Second World War, has fallen on very bad times. It is not that Indian university education has languished altogether. The IITs (even though they have a lot to answer for), IIMs and a host of other universities such as Delhi and JNU have brought high quality higher education to India. Nevertheless, relative to the rest of the world, India has fallen behind. It has also fallen behind in terms of India's demographics. Our much-vaunted 'demographic dividend' and 'youth bulge' will turn into a social and political nightmare if we do not expand and improve university education.
Bringing in foreign talent will help our university system. If we look around the world, we will see that no university system of any repute is insular, certainly not as insular as India's. Even China, with its authoritarian political system and its relative lack of English competence, has thousands of foreign faculty.
Historically, there is no major university system that has been self-sufficient. This is particularly true of the American university system which drew and continues to recruit massively from Europe and other continents. A university must be as universal as possible in terms of recruiting talent. Recruitment in India must be opened up not just to NRIs. It must be opened up to everyone Asians, Africans, Arabs, Europeans, Latin and North Americans that has the English language competence to teach in India.
The presence of foreign faculty will not only help bridge the gap in quality teachers. It will also have an impact on Indian colleagues. Good quality teachers from abroad will have a powerful demonstration effect. Indian universities, like Indian schools, suffer from teacher absenteeism, from lack of professionalism in terms of classroom transactions, from a lackadaisical approach to supervision and from abysmal research. Foreign colleagues, just in the normal course of their functioning, will both embarrass and inspire Indian counterparts.
More than any amount of exhortation from the HRD ministry or vice-chancellors or articles in newspapers, it is this that will energise the Indian faculty. Of course, hiring foreigners will cost us money. It will also require adjustment in our horrible visa and residency rules. We could save money by hiring foreigners on a part-time basis, at least in the beginning; see the experience of the Indian School of Business. And surely it is not beyond our home ministry, mad as it is, to amend our approach to visas and residency. India's national interest requires that we find the money and construct an entry system for foreign teachers. Above all, it requires that we change our attitude to the presence of foreign faculty in our universities.
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