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Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal on Wednesday called for reforms in the education system to make it child-centric. He was speaking at the inauguration of the two-day CII Global University-Industry Congress, organised jointly by CII and AICTE.
“Education should not be institution-centric or Government-centric or teacher-centric, it should be child-centric. Unfortunately, our entire education system is trapped in a time warp. We dwell on the past and never think about the future and therefore we are at a standstill.”
He pointed out that investment in education will suffer in the absence of legislation. “The whole purpose of accreditation is to ensure that accreditation of institutions for quality is done professionally, away from the Government at arm’s length, through a process of legislation that allows independent organisations to assess the quality of institutions. This can’t be done without legislation.” He called on academic institutions and industry to create enough pressure to bring about the required legislation in reforms in education.
The Minister also released the ‘CII-AICTE Survey of Industry-Linked Technical Institutes 2013’. The purpose of the survey is to showcase the best practices of industry partnerships across AICTE-approved technical institutes. About 1,050 institutes from established engineering, management, pharmacy and architecture institutes, and from emerging engineering and management institutes, participated in the voluntary survey.
Linkage between institutes, industry
According to the findings of the survey, institutes find it harder to demonstrate strong industry linkage in their ability to file patents and other intellectual property rights, or the extent to which they make technology transfers to industry.
The southern region emerged the strongest performer, as the participating institutes from this region achieved an average score of 30.73, almost seven points ahead of the northern and western regions.
Institutes in the central region recorded the lowest scores on average, around eight points below the national average.
Based on the data for 885 survey participants (all participants except emerging engineering institutes, for which the specific data was not available), institutes have strongest linkages with industry in three areas — industry involvement in their governance, their activity to help place students in industry roles, and in the degree to which industry has involvement in their curricula, the survey noted.
However, all institutes appear to struggle to score highly in relation to industry involvement in their research activities.
Technology transfers to industry are also rare. Similarly, interaction between faculty members and industry is typically weak when it comes to training provided by faculty to industry (or vice versa), faculty involvement in company boards or industry councils, or the filing or granting of intellectual property rights.
The online survey was conducted through institutes logging in to the AICTE portal. Participating institutes provided information for evaluation across six dimensions: curriculum, faculty, infrastructure, research and consultation, placements and governance.
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