SCHEME OF SEMINARS
The AIU decided to organise the four seminars in four different regions drawing participation from all over India, maintaining a high proportion of participation from universities in and around that area. It was further decided to invite around 50 participants to each seminar, two delegates from each participating university, a Dean, Principal or Professor involved in the actual implementation of the programmes, besides the Vice-Chancellor.
Four universities in the four regions were selected to act as host universities for the four seminars. They were:
1. Seminar I during April 14-16, 1988 IIT, New Delhi, with the following topics for discussion
1. Human Resource Development
2. Consolidation & Expansion of Institutions
3. Academic Staff Colleges
4. Distance Teaching/Learning
5. Youth Services, Sports & Physical Fitness Programmes
2. Seminar II during May 19-21, 1988 Manipur University, Imphal, with the following topics for discussion
1. Improvement in Efficiency
2. Mobility of Teachers & Students
3. Making the System Work
4. Language Development & Cultural Perspective
3. Seminar III during June 27-29, 1988 University of Poona, with the following topics for discussion.
1. Teachers Training
2. Restructuring of Courses
3. Research & Extension
4. Education for Women, SC & ST, Backward Minorities and the Handicapped
4. Seminar IV, during July 25-27, 1988 Madurai Kamaraj University with the following topics for discussion
1. Education in Human Values
2. Autonomous Colleges & Departments
3. Evaluation & Accreditation of Institutions
4. State Councils for Higher Education
5. Evaluation Process and Examination Reforms
A brochure giving details of these seminars was prepared and sent to the universities. A steering committee was constituted'. which met from time to time, to discuss and finalise programmes for the seminars, to consider activities to be undertaken for the seminars and to constitute subcommittees, if any, and to discuss modalities for steering the seminars.
During the conduct of the seminar, it was realised that in order that specific and practical guidelines for monitoring and implementation emerge as a result of the four seminars, it would be useful to devise a proforma, to be sent to the participating universities in advance to help them come prepared with certain details and reach a consensus after discussion and deliberation. The members of the steering committee were entrusted the job of preparing proformas - one for each seminar - asking for details from the universities on different topics. The proformas required detailed responses from each participating university on the topics in the four clusters. Each proforma was prefixed by a brief questionnaire seeking information on the extent of discussion on NPE and POA carried out within the university, participation of the university (and its constituents) in committees appointed by the state/central government for the implementation of the NPE/POA, and grants already received by the concerned university for the implementation of NPE/POA.
The Steering Committee also drew up a checklist of priority areas that had to be discussed at each seminar in order to ensure consideration of all the crucial topics already identified.
What follows hereafter is a detailed report of all the four seminars. The first seminar at IIT adopted a pattern as reflected in its report while attempts were made in the subsequent three seminars to adopt a different pattern as reported below. It may be appreciated that even though the formats are not uniform throughout, the report faithfully reflects all that happened during the various sessions of each seminar.
14
FIRST SEMINAR.
Dates : April 14-16, 1988
Venue : Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi
Topics * Role of Higher & Technical Education in Human
Resource Development
* Distance Teaching/Learning
* Consolidation & Expansion of Institutions
* Academic Staff Colleges
* Youth Services, Sports & Physical Fitness Programmes
INAUGURATION 47 particpants from 25 universities including 11 Vice-Chancellors participated.
Since this was the first seminar in the series, Dr. N.M. Swani, Director, IIT, Delhi and Vice President, AIU, outlined the objectives of the proposed seminars. He suggested that it would help greatly if the seminar participants could bring to the seminar individual experiences of their universities in implementing the NPE including the constraints faced and the steps they had undertaken to overcome them.
Briefing the participants about the schedule of work for the New Delhi Seminar, Prof S K Agrawala, Secretary, AIU drew their attention to the important task of identifying parameters and machinery for monitoring implementation of the areas of NPE under consideration in the seminar. This was essential since the Hyderabad seminar had made only general recommendations which could serve only as guidelines.
Dr. Satya Bhushan, Director, NIEPA inaugurating the seminar brought out clearly the need to evolve a code of conduct for all the agents involved in the implementation of the NPE. He suggested certain imperatives like effective utilisation of resources and management of resources, and
measures to reduce wastages. He made particular reference to certain case studies that revealed:
- change or process of change is linked with ethos at the delivery point,
- changes cannot always be brought about by bureaucrats; it was essential to involve other agents of change,
- suitable organisational changes in structures are necessary,, internal reforms are necessary (along with external forces) to make the system more responsive.
He reiterated that every step for implementation must have a built-in process of democratic culture as well as a participative dimension. Critically viewing simple collection of statistics, he said a target-oriented approach for both monitoring and evaluating progress of implementation is very necessary.
Session-I
Topic: Role of Higher & Technical Education in Human
Resource Development In his presidential address in the first session on 'Role of Higher and Technical Education in Human Resource Development' Prof Moonis Raza, Vice Chancellor, University of Delhi, enumerated several critical issues such as working hours, work-leisure concept, performance reflected by level of technology, quality of education, and the kind of 'import substitution' in intellectual area of development of human resource.
He said 'higher education performs the mother-role to all sectors of education. Quoting figures like 'for every one student in agriculture there are 16 liberal arts students and 3 to 5 technology and medicine students, he said the imbalance in matching manpower requirements and the outputs of the education system has to be brought out.
Mr Anand Sarup, Chairman, National Book Trust and former Education Secretary and one of the architects of the NPE, in his keynote address, traced the historical background of the NPE and suggested networking as one of the basic necessities of implementation of the policy in addition to the removal of all kinds of constraints enumerated in the
18
Challenge of Education document. He recommended that the agency for implementation must also be the agency for monitoring the progress of implementation. He appealed to the participants to constitute themselves into small committees to deliberate on issues like what has been implemented so far, which of them have been successful and which of them have been failures; which of them could be implemented without any financial assistance from other sources; which of them could be implemented only when there are environment changes and lastly, how to monitor and evaluate the progress of implementation.
A lively discussion took place in which attention was drawn to efforts in establishing many institutions for implementation, lack of resources, phasing of programmes, centre-state relationship in implementation, etc.
Session II
Topic : Distance Teaching/Learning Dr. G. Ram Reddy, Vice Chancellor, Indira Gandhi National Open University and Past President AIU, in his keynote presentation, outlined the three aspects of distance education which the NPE incorporated, viz: correspondence courses that are run by Directorates of correspondence education of various universities; Indira Gandhi National Open University; and coordination and maintenance of standards in distance education. According to Dr Reddy, some correspondence courses still suffered from being classed as a second- class system, without autonomy to plan and implement courses, using only print material. In order to improve standards of these correspondence courses, they must be helped with training for preparation of resource materials (lessons, audio-visuals, etc), provision of well-equipped study centres and overall improvement of study materials.
The State Open Universities, when they are established, must be persuaded not to duplicate courses and materials already developed by the National Open University and to the extent possible make use of those materials, if necessary translated into regional languages. The UGC is responsible for maintenance of standard's of correspondence courses in the universities, and the National Open University is responsible for standards in State Open Universities. In this context it becomes all the more necessary that norms and standards are to be laid down for distance education in general.
A lively discussion followed in which several points of view were raised including the need to improve- existing correspondence courses facilities at the study centres, preparation of instructional material in Hindi and regional languages, improving the delivery system, starting not only
19
degree programmes but continuing education programmes as well.
Session-III
Topic : Consolidation & Expansion of Institutions In his address on 'Consolidation and Expansion of Institutions' Dr S K Khanna, Secretary, UGC highlighted the programmes and activities of the UGC. The UGC had programmes of consolidation for universities and affiliated colleges through developmental grants. The UGC had given up the procedure of sending visiting teams to the universities and held direct discussions with Vice Chancellors and their teams. Guidelines giving norms for establishing new colleges and departments and assistance provided in new thrust areas identified by NPE had been circulated.
Prof Sampath, in his keynote address on the topic, particularly in technical education, called for academic freedom, flexibility in conforming to prescribed rules and regulations, speed in implementing innovative measures in education and training programmes, encouraging merit in admission and selection, special care for the under privileged and meaningful research programmes. In technical education, primary emphasis should be on linkages of academic institutions with R & D units, industrial consultancy, technology transfer, net-working and the like. It is necessary to identify and reward good teachers and to provide incentives to those who take teaching seriously although leisure-time research activity should also be taken as a criterion. The problems of obsolescence, provisions of new equipment and infrastructure, maintaining and utilizing existing facilities are areas of important concern in the NPE, and attention should be paid to implement various programmes in technical education.
Discussion followed in which participants came to a consensus that no new college or university should be established unless it satisfies the norms laid down and approved both by State Government and the UGC.
Session-IV
Topic : Academic Staff Colleges Introducing the theme of Academic Staff Colleges in his key note address Prof C J Daswani, NCERT, New Delhi, traced the background to the concept of Academic Staff Colleges supported by the UGC to translate the Policy
20
perspective of providing training to newly recruited teachers. The document accepted and circulated by the UGC discussed in detail the need for such training programmes, the content and scope of short-term orientation courses, and the extent of coverage of teacher population under these programmes. He described the `Poona Model' of 8-weeks of training in summer, winter and the subsequent summer vacations with the modular concept of training, lead-lectures, peer-group discussions and assignments in various areas of training, incentives provided to teachers and the motivation shown by them.
After detailed discussion of the topic, the consensus was that something close to the Poona model must be tried out in various Academic Staff Colleges in addition to their own ways of organising similar training programmes. There was also unanimity that since the programme is new, every effort must be made to work out a uniform set of norms for standards in these courses, in provision of infrastructure and in monitoring the progress of work in these colleges.
Session-V
Topic : Youth Services, Sports & Physical Fitness Programmes In her presidential remarks in the session on "Youth Services, Sports & Physical Fitness Programmes', Dr. Sneh Bhargava, Director, AIIMS dealt with the importance of physical fitness and suggested that universities should pay a lot more attention to it than they had in the past, since the NPE not only lays emphasis on physical fitness and sports. but has made a provision of substantial financial resources.
Mr. A K Pandya, Director General, Sports Authority India, (SAI) talked of various programmes of sports activities including scouting of talent below 12, offer of incentives to 200 potential sports- talented boys and girls with free education and board and lodging, provision of coaches by SAI for various tournaments and above all, making available the infrastructure of stadia and other facilities in cities and towns for use by educational institutions,
Mr. G S Sivia, Deputy Secretary (Sports), AIU, in his address dealt with sports in society and the place of sports in Higher Education. He listed various programmes of AIU in the matter of inter-university tournaments, organising inter university athletic and sports meets, and promoting consciousness of sports in colleges and universities.
Discussion followed in which it was made more clear that several programmes have been inadequately implemented and the seminar called for better implementation in the remaining period of the 7th plan.
21
GROUP DISCUSSION Five groups were constituted to make recommendations on the five topics discussed in the sessions. Each group addressed itself to the issues raised during the open discussions, and examined the various issues by formulating and answering the following questions:
i) What has been implemented/has not been implemented?
ii) What can be implemented without financial inputs?
iii) What can be implemented only with financial inputs?
iv) What can be implemented only through environmental changes?
v) What mechanisms can be devised to monitor the implementation?
PLENARY In the concluding plenary session, reports from various groups one in each of the topic areas, were presented and adopted.
22
SECOND SEMINAR
DATES MAY 19-21, 1988
VENUE Manipur University, Imphal
TOPICS * Improvement in Efficiency
* Mobility of Teachers & Students
* Making the System Work
* Language Development & Cultural Perspective
INAUGURATION The second seminar was organised at Imphal from 19th to 21st May, 1988. Twenty seven participants from 14 universities, including nine Vice Chancellors participated. The Seminar was inaugurated by the Hon'ble Chief Minister of Manipur, Shri R K Jaichandra Singh. Prof K J Mahale, Vice Chancellor, Manipur University presided. Prof S K Agrawala, Secretary of the Association of Indian Universities introduced the themes of the Seminar to the participants.
The Chief Minister emphasised that every country develops its own system of education to express and promote its unique socio-cultural identity and also to meet the challenges of the time. India has been no exception to this. In order to achieve the desired objectives, the Education Policy of 1986 has suggested removal of disparities, reorganisation of education at different stages, technical and management education, reorienting the content and pedagogy of education, teachers' education and the management of education, as the key areas requiring maximum attention. He mentioned that in the State of Manipur, the implementation of the policy had been taken up in right earnest. The important features of such efforts were: rationalising the school education system; delinking pre-university classes from degree colleges; vocationalisation in selected higher secondary schools; setting up a secondary model school in each district; introducing new syllabi in the school classes; supply of free exercise books to students studying from classes 1 to 8; free supply of uniforms to girl students belonging to SC and ST classes, etc.