Tewari suggests Fgn universities set up campuses in India

Chennai, Feb 8 (PTI) Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari today suggested allowing foreign universities to set up campuses in India as it would help increase competitiveness among Indian universities. "I think it would be worth a while to seriously reflect on allowing foreign univerisities to come up and set up campuses in India. Would that help transform the academic environment across our own universities?, I think the answer is yes," he said. Tewari said when more institutes of academic excellence come in, (Indian) public-private universities would have to remain competitive to continue and attract students. Permitting foreign universities function in India would help improve educational standards in the country by promoting competitiveness, he said. He was speaking at the "ThinkEdu Conclave" organised by The New Indian Express Group here. Noting that there has been a general decline in higher education standards across India, he said "one of the principle reasons is very intense amount of politicisation which has afflicted our academic ethos". "The reality is that you have teachers and professors who are more interested in doing everything but teaching and you have students who are equally more interested in doing much everything else but learning..", he said. "Therefore, there is a very strange kind of perspective to admire whereby some essential attributes which should make up an academic institution are completely missing from the academic milieu and our ethos", he said. He said across universities, there has been a "complete absence or dwindling" of research which is supposed to really ignite young minds. "So you have a model which inherently depends on government financing and over a period of time, it becomes flawed and then it becomes a self-perpetuating dinosaur, which is only trying to feed those people who are employed with it in various capacities,", he added. PTI VIJ APR PAL