Page 47 - EducationWorld January 2023

Chitkara University Punjab
Amity University, Noida

PRIVATE VARSITIES CATALYSING

Vidyashilp University, Bengaluru

OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat

ing — have blown the early movers advantage that India had entist Dr. Norman Borlaug in Mexico and adapted to Indian
in higher education. This dismal conclusion is supported soil conditions by ICAR-affiliated universities.
by the depressing fact that India’s academy has not pro- However despite the success of the Green Revolution
duced a science/technology Nobel Prize winner since Sir (critics allege it has severely damaged soil quality across
C.V. Raman conducting research in Calcutta University was large swathes of rural India because of its heavy reliance
awarded the physics Nobel in 1930 for research studies in on chemical fertilisers), the on-ground reality is that wheat
the phenomenon of light scattering. The only other Indian yields in India are 4 tonnes per hectare cf. 6/h in China
to be awarded a Nobel Prize for studies conducted in India and Egypt and New Zealand’s 8/h and 9/h respectively.
is Rabindranath Tagore for literature in 1913. Moreover, ICAR with its head office in Krishi Bhavan,
The failure of India’s public universities to cash their Delhi, has transformed into an inaccessible fortress and
early movers advantage is also testified by the grim reality its admittedly superbly equipped affiliated 75 universi-
that not a single major world-beating invention — com- ties whose model farms report high per hectare yields,
puter, Internet, cell phone, jet aeroplanes, motor car etc — have almost abandoned field extension work. They have
has emerged from the country’s universities whose number morphed into citadels of well-remunerated faculty engaged
has risen to 1,072. in esoteric research which seldom translates into widely
Some successes have been claimed in agriculture pro- disseminated farm practices. In 2020, when your editors
ductivity by a dozen universities grouped under the banner published a detailed lead feature to investigate the track
of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, who claim record and research dissemination practices of ICAR, the
they are the authors of India’s much trumpeted Green Rev- council’s top brass — despite the council being a publicly
olution which has quintupled foodgrains — rice and wheat funded agriculture research and education institution —
— production in India from 50 million tonnes per annum in resolutely declined all interview and access requests (see
1950 to over 250 million tonnes currently. But the weight of https://www.educationworld.in/indias-ivory-tower-agri-
evidence indicates that the primary research into develop- culture-universities/).
ing a new genre of high-yield, disease resistant semi-dwarf The standard excuse of Indian academics and education
Mexican wheat strain was conducted by American agri-sci- ministry mandarins for the dismal ranks awarded to India’s

JANUARY 2023 EDUCATIONWORLD 47