India needs 1,000 more universities and 50,000 more colleges to be built in the next decade to accommodate 50 million college-age students, said Mr Kapil Sibal, Minister for Human Resource Development, at Yale University.
This will help increase India's gross enrolment rate from the current 12 per cent to 30 per cent by 2020. “Under the circumstances, effective academic leadership is a serious need,” he said at the India-Yale Higher Education Leadership Program.
Mr Sibal is in the US for the India-US Education Summit, which he kicked off on Thursday along with the US Secretary of State, Ms Hillary Clinton.
Around 26 vice-chancellors, directors, deans and other officials of higher education institutions from India attended the Yale programme.
“Following the academic leadership programme at Yale, it is hoped that a sustainable national programme on academic leadership can be evolved in India through new national centres of excellence,” said Mr Sanjay Dhande, Director of Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.
Yale, IIT Kanpur, and IIM Kozhikode had entered a memorandum of understanding in October last year to hold academic leadership development programmes. The programme will be followed by another in March 2012 at Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode and additional programmes at Yale in 2012 and 2013.