New Education Policy and India's spearheading into Research

The introduction of the new education policy after more than 30 years again ignited the question of the condition of Education in India. As India aspires to be a superpower of the 21st century, this question becomes more critical. The first question that arises in mind after hearing education is how do define education. A report was submitted in UNESCO in 1996 argued that education is based on four pillars throughout life

i) Learning to know - acquiring a body of knowledge and learning how to learn

ii) Learning to do - acquiring occupational skill and a package of skills that enables one to deal with the various challenges of working life

iii) Learning to live together - developing an understanding of other people and

iv) Learning to be - developing one's personality and being able to act with autonomy, judgment, and personal responsibility.

If we look in our roots, the definition of education emphasis on character building rather than assimilation of information. I am quoting Swami Vivekananda here. He said "Education is not the amount of information that we put into your brain and runs riot there, undigested, all your life. We must have life-building, man-making, character-making assimilation of ideas. If you have assimilated five ideas and made them your life and character, you have more education than any man who has got by heart a whole library. If education is identical with information, the libraries are the greatest sages of the world and encyclopedia are the greatest Rishis"

In this read, I will be focusing the discussion on higher education. Higher Education is a critical contributor to sustainable livelihoods and economic development of the nation. Higher Education must form the basis for knowledge creation and innovation. Quality higher education must enable personal accomplishment and enlightenment, constructive public engagement, and productive contribution to society. The future workplace will demand critical thinking, communication, problem-solving, creativity, and multidisciplinary capability. Single-skill and single-discipline jobs are likely to become automated over time. Thus, there is an immediate need for a nation like India to focus on multidisciplinary areas.

There are several problems we have to tackle before India should spearhead towards that goal. First one of that is the fragmentation of the higher education system. Over 40% of all colleges in the country run only a single program, far from the multidisciplinary style of higher education that will be required in the 21st century.

To make matters worse, thousands of the smaller colleges hardly have any teaching faculty at all, and there is little or no education taking place - thus severely affecting the integrity of the higher education system in the country. This fragmentation of the system leads directly to a severe lack of resource utilisation, and affects the ability to carry out high-quality multidisciplinary research. Second one is too many silos i.e too much early specialisation and pouring of students into disciplines. Most engineering and medical colleges are stand alone institutions. Even in institutions that offer programmes across more than one discipline, there are silos that separate disciplines within these institutions, e.g. students in engineering are generally not encouraged or even allowed to take courses outside of their single programmes e.g. in the arts, humanities, social sciences, or even in the pure sciences. Such rigid boundaries violate the essential requirement of multidisciplinary education. It is producing thousands of students with identical educations rather than true individuals and humans exercising their own creativity, and developing their own talents and interests. Third is the lack of funding in scientific research. Spending on research and development of different countries can give us an idea. Countries such as US spends 2.74%, china 2.19%, japan 3.14% and South Korea 4.29% of there GDP with average lies between 2-3% whereas India spends 0.85%.

The quality and amount of scientific research happening in the country can be often judged on the basis of the number of papers published and the number of patents filed. In the terms of Patent applications in 2018 India stands at 7th position while China is at first position followed by US, Japan, South Korea and Germany. The situation in case of scientific and technical paper would not that grim if we ought to look on position with India is at third place with China again having the first position followed by US. However, if we dare to look at the number of papers, that is a different story. China has a tally of 426,165 papers followed by the US having 408,985 papers while India lacks behind by nearly 300,000 papers with a tally of 110,320.

US being a world power is common knowledge, but the reason behind it other than its size and the military is its tremendous advantage in scientific research, Nobel prizes from its 1901 inception through 2013, The US has won 371 Nobels, mostly in the sciences; the US thus accounts for 4 percent of the world population but 34 percent of its Nobel laureates. America boasts 32 of the top 50 universities in the world, magnets for the world's best students. This is the result of many factors: wealth, a culture and economy that encourage innovation, education, vast state- and private-funded research programs, and a political culture that has long attracted highly educated migrants.

Now the question arises what has been done in new education policy to address these issues: first and foremost important is the establishment of A National Research Foundation (NRF) which will grant competitive funding for outstanding research proposals across all disciplines on par with a similar body in America national Science foundation (NSF).

Second is Quality transformation of open and distance learning and expansion for access: the best possible materials, resources, and web-based platforms are available throughout the world through technology and is not remain limited to their own resources.

Third is as A university has only one definition worldwide, namely, a multidisciplinary institution of higher learning that offers undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. programmes, and engages in high quality teaching and research. The present complex nomenclature of HEIs in the country as 'deemed to be university', 'affiliating university', 'unitary university', and so on will be phased out. Universities will be characterised only as public, private, or private-aided; and as multidisciplinary research universities.

Fourth is the establishment of Online digital repository: To ensure efficient utilisation of resources and to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, all content developed for ODL will be included in an online digital repository. Fifth is a mechanism for the recognition and accumulation of credits earned through MOOCs(Massive Open Online courses). Other than that many other initiatives such as Internationalisation of higher education, Encouraging institutional collaborations, Facilitating the entry of international students and researchers research collaboration, Inviting foreign universities into India etc.

We can only hope that these initiatives land on the ground and we see our country at its rightful place.