Full transcript of Hitesh Oberoi, Pramath Raj Sinha's interview at Rising Bharat Summit

Hitesh Oberoi, founder & trustee of Plaksha University, at Rising Bharat Summit

Anchor: Join me in welcoming three visionary leaders who are shaping the narrative of education in India. Hitesh Oberoi, founder and trustee of Plaksha University. Pramath Raj Sinha, founder and trustee Ashoka University for a session titled chapter and verse the future of learning and teaching in conversation with Nalin Mehta. Over to you Nalin, this is going to be a fantastic conversation.

Nalin Mehta: Thanks very much. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We are part of an ancient civilization that greatly valued education. Think of the old hymn from the Hith Updesh, Vidya Dadati Vinayam, Vidya Dadati Patram. Knowledge gives humility and humility gives you worthiness depending on how you translate that.

We've had universities like Nalanda, Takshashila, long before the Oxfords and Cambridges of the world or the Harvards of the world. But today we struggle to find places of educational excellence on scale in this country. We have about 43 million students in higher education, 58,000 institutions, but we are low on quality in curriculum, institutions, institutional facilities, faculty and so on.

So who better to talk about the future of learning and teaching in India than these two gentlemen on the stage. Pramath Sinha, the founder and trustee at Ashoka, founding dean of ISB in the previous avatar, now involved in multiple other initiatives. Hitesh Oberoi, co-promoter and MD and CEO of InfoEdge, also co-founder of Plaksha University, also co-founder of Ashoka.

So let me begin with you, Hitesh. What do you think is the greatest challenge of higher education in this country now that you've been involved in Plaksha for eight years now and Ashoka for a bit longer than that?

Hitesh Oberoi: There are so many issues, I don't know where to start. But if I were to pick one, because in my day job, I run Naukri.com, which is India's largest job board, as you know, and therefore we work with all the companies, all the employers, and on the one hand, and with all the job seekers on the other, I think there's a huge disconnect between academia and industry.

What is being taught in colleges and universities in this country is very, very different from what perhaps industry needs. There is too much focus on degrees, not enough focus on acquiring the right skills. Curriculums are outdated, pedagogy is outdated, infrastructure is stuck in the 90s in most institutions. So if I were to pick one thing, I think we need to bridge this gap between academia and industry.

Nalin Mehta: Pramath, from where you sit, you've sort of experienced a whole gamut of educational institutions, ISB with MBA education, Ashoka with liberal arts. You've also been involved with online and multiple other things. You also wear other hats as a businessman. What's your perspective on this?

Pramath Raj Sinha: You know, we've been talking about problems in education for decades now. I've come to the conclusion that because of the large numbers in our country, the current model of education where you need a classroom and a teacher the physical model, which has been around for centuries now, is just not going to work. It's an impossibility. It's like, you know, we were listening to Shiprocket. I don't know exactly what they do, but it must be in the quick delivery space. It's like saying that you're going to do Shiprocket with bullock carts. You just can't do it. You can't achieve the level of quality education at scale with 25 million children being born every year.

And so I don't have answers. But I think our problems are fundamentally, the core problem is that we are not able to get education to enough people who need it. In trying to get to all of those people with the meager resources we have in this old antiquated model, we are delivering poor quality. There's disconnect between industry and academia that Hitesh is talking about. People like us are solving this problem in a very, almost like a sandbox and a petri dish in a lab. These are all small experiments. And honestly, we are also doing the same. We are following the old model and trying to do something in a very protected, idealistic manner.

Nalin Mehta: So, let me push you a little bit on that, that sure, I mean, your efforts are like drops in an ocean and that it has to be like that. But what have you learned? Like, what is the problem, for example, that you're trying to solve at Plaksha and some of the solutions you've come to in this process?

Hitesh Oberoi: So, at Plaksha, see, there are maybe already some 5000 engineering colleges in this country. So, we didn't want to set up the 5001st engineering college. There's no shortage of colleges. Today, anybody who wants to become an engineer in India can become an engineer. It's not like how it was in the 90s, when it was very hard to get into engineering college. Today, anybody who wants to become an engineer, you'll get that degree, right? It is another matter that when you graduate, companies complain that only 20% of the engineers who graduate are employable and so on and so forth. So you get degree.

So, at Plaksha, Plaksha basically started with a group of maybe five or six of us who actually had been to IIT in the 90s. And what we saw around us and what we're seeing around us is that, in fact, a lot of our kids are going to overseas for higher education. And starting from undergrad itself, you know, during my IIT days, people used to go overseas, but after their undergrad, and if they got a scholarship, and so on and so forth.

Today, take DPS R.K.Puram, the school I went to, maybe 100-200 kids go overseas every year. The number was perhaps one or two, 30 years ago. And this is happening because I think institutions in India have not kept pace. And the reality of life also is that, like Pramath mentioned, government has limited resources. Higher education is highly subsidised in this country. You know, when I went to IIT, fees at IIT was lower than the fees I was paying in school. And that perhaps is still the case. And because of these limited resources, which are available, and they have to be spread over thousands of institutions, which are run by the government. I think institutions are not able to evolve, they're not able to keep pace in terms of their curriculum, in terms of their pedagogy, in terms of their infrastructure.

When I went to IIT Delhi, there were 1500 students on that campus. Today, the same campus has 10,000 students, 12,000 students, same campus, right? So, we saw these issues and we were like, yeah, we need one institution at least in this country, where we can perhaps try and address some of these issues as far as possible and try and build over a 20-30 year period, the Stanford of India or the MIT of India, and give people the experience they would get overseas in India at a fraction of the cost, right? Perhaps it will be higher, more expensive than an IIT, but if you can do it at a fraction of the cost at which these institutions give this kind of exposure and experience overseas in India to a few thousand people, then over time, more people will aspire to do the same. So that's really how it started.

Nalin Mehta: So Pramath, this question started with the answer that you had given earlier. So at Ashoka, what are your learnings at Ashoka in terms of finding solutions? Because Ashoka is also different from others.

Pramath Raj Sinha: So I think the higher education and you mentioned Takshashila, Takshashila was created 2,500 years ago. What we are just doing is bringing back the fundamental form of the purest form of higher education, which we as a civilization discovered. And that is that in college, you don't force feed people. You let people figure out and discover what they want to do and how they want to lead their life.

College is supposed to be… school is about when you teach people essential knowledge and skills that they will need to live in today's world. College also you do that, but it's at the choice of the student. You make them independent, you make them think, you make them take initiative and therefore you go out in the world and you tell them, okay, now go make the world a better place.

So the biggest learning at Ashoka is really that, that you give people choice. You do prescribe a certain method by which they have to exercise that choice. They can't go and do something random then come out with nothing in the end. But that was the essential form of education which we lost and all we are trying to do is replicate that. The subjects and so on are less important. Of course, we will teach AI and we will teach data science and we will teach science and history and so on.

But really this fundamental point of giving students agency. And by the way, when people go to places like the United States or the UK or Europe, that's why they are going there. I studied in both countries and I was surprised that from IIT where I was really restricted to go to University of Pennsylvania, I felt like I was completely liberated. I could do whatever I want. I went from being a metallurgical engineering to doing a PhD in robotics which had no connection and they allowed me to do that because I wanted to do it and I was willing to put in the effort.

Nalin Mehta: So let me ask you something about the funding model. I think at Ashoka, you guys have raised together something like 3500 crores over a 12-15 year period. At Plaksha, you raised 1500 crores over an 8-year period and the model is collective philanthropy with a bunch of people coming together. So how does collective philanthropy work? What patterns are emerging? What challenges did you face and why collective philanthropy as opposed to individual one? Pramath, if I can start.

Pramath Raj Sinha: Yeah, I can quickly start. Look, this whole experiment actually started with ISB and that was the first time that we tried to implement this and that was really driven by the fact that if you look at the great universities of the world, nobody owns them. No one person, no one entity, no one corporation, no one foundation, no one enterprise owns the university.

The moment you say that this is owned by Nalin or Pramath or Hitesh, the best academics will not join you because they don't want to work for some individual or some entity. They want to work for the university which is owned by no one. Yet, anybody who's part of the university, whether it's a student or a faculty or an alumnus, feel like they own the university.

Hitesh mentioned IIT. I mean, he's passionate about IIT Delhi. I'm passionate about IIT Kanpur and I'll fight him anytime to say we were better than them. And I have nothing to do with IIT Kanpur, nor does he have…

Nalin Mehta: But you guys also fight on the boards, on Plaksha and Ashoka.

Pramath Raj Sinha: No, we don't actually. But the point is that everybody owns it and yet nobody owns it. How do you replicate that? So our solution was, and plus you have to raise money. If one of us can put in all the money like an Azeem Premji or a Shiv Nadar or a Munjal to build a university or a Jindal to build a university in their name, we could have done that. But if you want to build a university where we don't have enough money to build it and you have to go and ask lots of people, you take money from lots of people, but you tell them all that regardless of how much money you give me, you'll only get one vote. So you don't have decision rights that are proportionate to the donation you've given. And that was tough to implement. But the success at ISB emboldened us to do it at Ashoka and then Plaksha is doing the same. That's one big thing that is a real innovation that actually nobody talks about.

Nalin Mehta:  So I want to ask you this a little bit more on this. So in theory, on the outside, collective philanthropy sounds very good. Okay, one person, one vote, no matter. But you also then have, for example, recently you've raised 70 crores with Biri Bansal for the centre. Ashoka has also got named centre. So what happens on those kinds of things, right? So does it really work like that or it's different?

Hitesh Oberoi: So, I'll just add a little bit to what Pramath said about collective philanthropy and then I'll answer your question. See, the other big advantage I see of collective philanthropy is that it allows individual philanthropists to dream big and to think big. Because a project like Ashoka will ultimately require maybe a billion dollars. Plaksha will require a billion dollars if you aspire to build a Stanford of India or a Harvard of India or whatever you mean, right?

And it's often not possible for an individual to sort of do that, right? At the same time, I've also realised that with collective philanthropy, many people are now partners in the project and they want the project to succeed. And the money is just one aspect. Enough of them contribute, enough of our founders and the Ashoka founders, for example, contribute with their time, they open their networks, they help us hire faculty, they help us place students, they help us connect with industry, our academics with industry.

So there are so many benefits when you have a lot of like-minded people working together towards a common mission, right? Now, as far as, see, what Pramath mentioned was that no matter how much money you give to the institute, you have one root, which is how collective philanthropy works at both Ashoka and Plaksha. But there are sort of, you know, there's a gift tree, for example, at Plaksha and also Ashoka that you can get naming rights if you donate more or if you contribute more. So for example, at Plaksha, we have a Bharti Airtel building, we have a Havells building, we have an HDFC center, Binny Bansal is now funding the Innovation Institute, Harish Shah has sort of funded the AI center, right? So, we've got this whole thing where you can, if you want, you know, you can sort of do much more for the institution. But from a governance standpoint, from a voting standpoint.

Nalin Mehta: So is the pool of funders increasing? Are you guys working on raising more funds?

Hitesh Oberoi: I think what is remarkable, Nalin, and I think it's driven by entrepreneurs, in that journey, because I started raising money, got involved in raising money for ISB 30 years ago. At that time, we would go to the usual suspects, you know, the big families, the big names. You look at the people contributing to Ashoka and Plaksha, that list is very different from the ISB list. So it's names that didn't exist, some even names today, who people don't know, you know, who is this person.

Nalin Mehta:  So in some ways, it's also a story of Indian capitalism.

Hitesh Oberoi: Absolutely. I think it's amazing to see and honestly, it's heartwarming. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala is one of our big donors. Yesterday, we did a lecture in his name in Bombay. A lot of people don't know that he was ready to give away most of his wealth in philanthropy.

Nalin Mehta: So let me ask you this and we are running out of time. So we're talking about reforming education, but there's also the thousand pound gorilla in the room, which is AI, right? So what is AI doing to jobs? What does it do to the idea of a university, the idea of a digital university within a long time? So if I can get both of you to comment on that.

Hitesh Oberoi: Like you said, AI is the thousand pound gorilla in the room today. And I've seen in my journey that every 10 years you have a brand new technology, which is very disruptive. So when I was growing up, we had computers. When I started, when we started doing Naukri, we got digital. 10 years ago, we got this whole mobile revolution, right? And now we have AI. AI, of course, is magical, you know, in the sense that when I first used ChatGPT, and I'm sure when all of you used ChatGPT for the first time, you must have been like, is this even possible? Is there somebody who's answering the question? Or is it technology, right? And that's the thing about technology, you know.

So now AI is a horizontal technology, in my view, so it will impact every industry, it will impact every function. So there will be use cases for AI in sales and marketing and customer service and coding and in physics and chemistry, in biology, you name every area, you will see people using AI. And AI, like computers and digital before it, will be net negative for some jobs, clearly, and you can, and some of us, like, we at our company are using a lot of AI in operations, we are automating a lot of operations, so some people there will become redundant.

AI, customer service, clearly a big use case, you know, some jobs will get impacted, and in many other areas as well. But with every new technology, there is also opportunity, right? And you already have so many startups, which are funded in the AI world, and every company is trying to use AI, including us, to do new things, to create new products, to create new features, to do stuff which was not possible to do earlier, to solve problems which are not possible to solve earlier.

Pramath mentioned about education and the model. AI can be used to educate every Indian. AI can be used to take health care to every Indian, in every village, perhaps not possible earlier. So with new technologies, new things become possible. And often you need those entrepreneurs and those thinkers and those creators to make those things possible, which will happen with time. And that will create new jobs. Now, the people who get disrupted by AI, will they get these new jobs? May not, right? Unless they're able to reskill themselves, unless they're able to upskill themselves, right? Which some will be able to, some will not be able to. And that is how it is always.

Nalin Mehta: So that's at the people who are already employed, but the people who are getting into the workforce now, Pramath, how would you define?

Pramath Raj Sinha: I think it's going to be a game changer for people who are anyway not getting an education and have no hope for a job. They will completely leapfrog going to school or college is how I think this will come. This is a game changer for India. We have to get this right. And we have to enable every Indian to be AI literate. If they don’t know how to do calculus, it’s okay. But they should know how to use these tools. And if they can use these tools, they can actually be citizens of the world.

Nalin Mehta:  Right. The final question to you, Hitesh, I'm wearing an InfoEdge hat. We are seeing GCCs growing in India, but that is also an impact on the IT sector. If you can comment on where you see the GCC market going vis-a-vis the IT sector.

Hitesh Oberoi: So give or take a couple of hundred, there are some 1700-1800 GCCs in India today. These are the global capability centers which have been set up by Fortune, first Fortune 2000, 5000, and now increasingly a lot of small firms as well overseas who have set up captive centers in India, where they're outsourcing work from the US and other parts of the world to India. In the beginning, and some of these centers are very big, they employ 40,000-50,000 people. Some very big companies have 20% of their workforce in India. So India has never more than 2-3% of the sales for any company, MNC. But in many cases, India is where 10% or 20% of the workforce is now based for a lot of companies.

And in the beginning, in the early years, most of these jobs which are outsourced to India were low-end IT jobs or low-end customer service jobs or low-end call center jobs. But over the last few years, a lot of these GCCs have moved up the value chain. Now we are increasingly seeing high-end jobs being outsourced to India, engineering jobs, research jobs, finance jobs.

Now according to a lot of reports and estimates, we don't really know how things are going to play out given the change in government in the US. But at least some time back, the consensus was that this number will double over the next 5-7 years.

Nalin Mehta:  Thanks very much. We are in an age of disruption and these two gentlemen are riding the wave of that. So thanks very much.