| 
India's Higher-Education Minister Warns Off '3rd-Grade'
Western Universities
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/NEW DELHI
Issue
cover-dated May 5, 2008
New Delhi: India doesn’t want “third-grade”
Western universities or other foreign universities that aren’t
interested in complying with the country’s higher-education
regulations, Arjun Singh, the minister in charge of higher education,
told a local newspaper. He added that inferior Western universities
want to come to India because it is a “virgin area” and because
they cannot compete in their own countries. “I am not opposed
to it [foreign institutions], but the real universities should
come,” he said.
The normally media-shy minister has
lately been granting interviews to the press, after the country’s
Supreme Court upheld a law imposing additional admissions quotas
on public universities, a development that many see as a personal
victory for Mr. Singh.
The higher-education minister opposes
the unrestricted entry of foreign higher-education providers,
is against large tuition increases at India’s public universities,
and is in favor of government controls on admissions and tuition
rates at the country’s private higher-education institutions.
Asked whether foreign universities
interested in setting up shop in India did not want to be bound
by regulations, Mr. Singh told the newspaper, “they certainly
were not very favorable to complying with our regulations.”
He also said that the government planned to impose quotas for
disadvantaged classes on local, privately financed higher-education
institutions as well. “That is absolutely on the agenda,” he
said. “The bill is ready.” He added that not imposing quotas
on those institutions, which have greatly increased in number,
would lead a huge share of the country’s disadvantaged people
to be left out.
Mr. Singh said that the increase in
quotas was no less than a social revolution. “Education,” he
said, “is the only equalizer,” and the country will ultimately
gain from the quotas. “We don’t want to have an elitist society.”
-Click here to read
more articles-
|
