World-class institutions needed in country

Bhopal, mar 30: Visionary leaders and global mindset are the two most indispensable things needed for establishing the world-class institutions in the country, said Professor PB Sharma Vice Chancellor Rajiv Gandhi Technical University. He added that firm determination and inclusive government support is all needed for setting up the education institutions matching with global standards. He was elaborating the requirements for the establishing world-class institutes as announced by the HRD Ministry recently.

Pr Sharma pointed out that renowned education institutions of the country have evolved around excellent leaders, which are hard to locate these days and attributed this situation to the negligence of our institutions. "Instructional leadership is a hard currency in India and is in short supply at," opined Pr Sharma. Notably, Union HRD Ministry has allotted the state with one central University, one world-class University for Bhopal and IIT at Indore. Professor Sharma lamented the fact that two of the reputed proposed institutions for the capital; Life Sciences Institute and All India Institute of Medical Science are gathering dust in all these years. He singles out that the five dimensions of quality an institution of higher learning, namely, quality of teaching learning environment, quality of faculty, quality of infrastructure, quality of research and quality of institutional governance together make up for the total quality of the institute.

Faculty being at the core of education and research in institutions, Pr Sharma added that quality of the faculty is reflected in efforts employed by the institution for regular updating of knowledge of the faculty, contribution to original research, undertaking of industry relevant R&D and research publications in reputed journals leading to citations by other researchers around the world. World-class quality needs to be reflected all around from classrooms & laboratories to central facilities like library, computer centre and also in the seminar room, hostels and offices of the faculty, said Sharma.

Stressing on high-class connectivity, he added campus wide Wi-Fi and Wi-Max networking and 6-10 Mbps of broadband connectivity should be provided in institutions of higher learning. Faculty should be encouraged to develop their lecturers/learning resources and stated that students should have access to the best of knowledge and material available in the world. He specifically stressed on code of conduct for academic, professional and campus, which is not given any importance these days, he added.