Universities for National Strength

Impactful higher education requires single-campus universities—ideally designed as townships—that conduct research and training across all major fields of knowledge. These institutions must be built on binding conventions that uphold rational inquiry, excellence, and the public good as enduring principles, regardless of changing circumstances.

In today’s global context, higher education must make a dedicated effort to strengthen national power. A strong, capable nation is best positioned to make a lasting and positive contribution to the advancement of humanity.

In this context, it is a fact that the role of native big corporations is vital for national power. Large-scale corporations, through their constant pursuit of efficiency and innovation, churn people's potential into agency; therefore, higher education must contribute to this goal. Higher education must repurpose itself strategically to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship and impart the necessary skills for various roles in corporations. To add another point: in this era of fierce international competition and conflicts, having formal entities incorporating the functions of both universities and business corporations would give a clear edge to the nation.

To support this vision, training in sciences, technology, and engineering must be rigorous, hands-on, and outcome-oriented. Institutions of higher learning must be well-resourced and foster a focused and positive academic environment. Achieving excellence requires individuals to fully dedicate themselves to their chosen fields.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Unversity to celebrate humanity

The gurukuls sent their pupils to beg for themselves and their preceptors. The venerable sages could have gotten any sum of wealth from the kings only by hinting, but, instead, they sent out even the princes under their charge with begging bowls in their hands. Gurukuls taught them humility and made them realise that they depended on the householders and would serve them. Today, the high-end public universities privilege themselves at the cost of society and churn out graduates only to lord over whom they can. A university worth its name must privilege commoners, not itself, and prepare its graduates for the purpose. They must see that their graduates personify humility and not snobbery as the case is. A university must be a running celebration of humanity.

Niraj Kumar Jha 

A University

A university is a community of scholars working with the universe of knowledge, i.e. discovering, refining, preserving, and disseminating the knowledge. At a university, scholars are divided by their specialisations but united by the purpose of integrating and advancing knowledge at any level of human existence. Each specialisation contributes to the knowledge, its methods and purposes. And, being a community, the members of the university learn from each other even by their most casual interactions. Thus, the knowledge advances more in an informal manner in a university. A university is above all an association for the mission: the collective good.

A nation's state and the people's life depend on the quality of universities. Greater goodness has no other means to itself. It must not be missed that university at its core is not an administrative unit or a specialised institution of learning. And, great universities grow supported by nourishing soil. The issue is to allow universities to take their own shape organically. They must be fully autonomous and largely self-sustaining and guarded against any influence which inhibits the faculty of any member in a negative way.

The functional universities where knowledge is alive and speaking sustain societies in their goodness. It's not the other way round.

Niraj Kumar Jha

Needed Great Universities for India

India is a unique nation. Save Asia, India is populated by more people than any of the continents. In terms of area too, with 3,287,469 square kilometres of land, India occupies 2.4 percent of the total land area of the world. Both these figures make India an enormous country. What magnifies the uniqueness is that the country with the 2.4 percent of the land on the planet supports 16.7 percent of the world population.

This uniqueness poses a gigantic challenge by itself and the challenge in turn makes India more unique. The challenge is further magnified by the acute diversity. India has great number of people who live the most advanced life style at par with any stratum of the global community and at the same time, India is inhabited by a great number of primitive peoples, who live in absolutely natural state. We have also sizeable numbers of people, who are among the richest in the world, and we have the biggest numbers in terms of the absolutely poor too. Even in the very capital city of the gigantic country, starvation deaths have been reported. I am not talking here about ethnic diversities – of looks, habits, culture, religious affiliations, languages etcetera which leave any foreign visitor bewildered in India.

Yet the challenge is not that we are too many or too diverse. Our civilization has made us to survive and thrive on this very land for millennia. And this is the same civilization which makes us a great functioning democracy, a rare feat even otherwise. It must be underscored that the nation-state as it emerged in the West was a mono-ethnic entity and nobody could have even imagined earlier that India would survive as a democracy amidst such deprivations and diversities. Thanks to our civilization heritages, we are a very proud democracy of the world.

Again a point deserves to be underscored. Each of we Indians is equally worthy and valuable as any other person in the world.

What is our challenge then? Our challenge is opening space for a billion aspirations to play. And this is not something unachievable. Since 1991, with little bits of periodic unshackling the Indians have made global strides. The point to ponder over is how to ensure that all aspiring souls get decent outcomes of their endeavours? 

This is basically a managerial problem. Any good company knows this and therefore hire suitable minds at the steepest cost to run their business efficiently. Any country, and if the country is India with its population and complexity, would certainly require incomparably greater expertise to make the coexistence of so many people smooth and their collective self to rise to its deserved place. But for governance, we don’t hire super experts and the greater fact is that they don’t exist. People elect and the elected ones command a bureaucracy to run the affairs and expertise is the least of their concerns. What can then be done?

We need great infusion of knowledge in the society – both general and specialized. And we cannot import some critically required knowledges from outside as they are not manufactured anywhere, as nowhere else such numbers in such complexity are managed.

These days there are talks of propelling some of the Indian universities to global top ranks. This is certainly a great move. But what we really need is that we must have great universities in general in order to meet our knowledge needs. They must have to rise above from their functional role of imparting some rudimentary skills or more practically from their ritualistic role of conferring degrees.

Niraj Kumar Jha