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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Luncheon Keynote Address
Higher Education Summit for Global Development
Welcome:
Nina Federoff, Science and Technology Advisor, Secretary of State
Speaker:
Sam Pitroda, Chairman, National Knowledge Commission of India
April 30, 2008
NINA FEDEROFF: I would like to introduce our next speaker. I'm not going to attempt to pronounce his full name; he is known to everyone as Sam Pitroda. He did his undergraduate work and master's in physics and electronics in India, and then came to the U.S. to study electric engineering at Chicago. Sam's an inventor and an entrepreneur. In the 1960s and '70s, he was involved in developing digital switching systems in the United States, which went on to become the key to global networks to integrate voice and data. He holds more than 75 patents.
As advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, Sam Pitroda helped transform India's telecommunications and information technology infrastructure. Indeed, he's widely credited with bringing telephones to all the villages of India.
Mr. Pitroda is the chairman and CEO of WorldTel Limited, an international telecom union initiative. He is also the chairman and founder of CSAM, Inc., which has developed a suite of patented mobile transaction technologies. He was the founding chairman of the telecom communication in India; he also oversaw the national technology missions related to drinking water, literacy, immunization, oil, (seeds ?), and dairy. In those roles, he helped transform India's developmental policies and philosophy.
Sam Pitroda is a tireless champion of the basics for everyone: food, clean water, shelter, education, and technology. Sam now chairs India's National Knowledge Commission, an advisory body to the prime minister of India. Its objective is to transform India into a knowledge society, through education at all levels, through access to knowledge. He will speak to us about the crisis in higher education. Sam.
(Applause.)
SAM PITRODA: Thanks, Nina. Dignitaries, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I bring to you greetings from the prime minister of India and people of India. It is, indeed, a special privilege to be here with you all to talk about education. This is more like a feast, meeting so many interesting experts in one place, sometimes you don't even know where to start. I am delighted to be part of this group. I thank the organizers for giving me this unique opportunity.
In the time I have, I would like to spend a little bit of time on three topics: one, crisis in higher education, two, National Knowledge Commission that we have in India, to give you a little feel for what is that we are trying to do; and three, some of the new challenges ahead of all of us.
I sincerely believe there is a crisis in higher education the world over, but then there are different perceptions, the regional imbalances, and many dimensions to this crisis. There is a crisis because access to higher education is limited. It is expensive, predominantly for the top of the pyramid. Take, for example, India: We have 550 million children below age of 25 and we cannot provide enough seats in colleges and universities, to some extent even in schools, for these kids. It costs a lot of money to get a good education. I have two kids who went through schools in the U.S. - boy went to MIT and Harvard, son went to Michigan - and I know how much it costs and it is all after tax. (Laughter.)
The quality of education, leaving as high top 5-10 percent of the institutions world over, predominantly in the advanced countries, is pretty poor. If I get a graduate from one of our schools in UP or Behar (ph), I don't know what I can do with that student. In many of the top schools, also, it is 30 percent content and 70 percent connections. Content all over in higher education needs to be re-looked at, in light of globalization, privatization, free-market economy, and new technology.
There are shortages of teachers all over the world; good teachers are hard to find. Once you find them, hard to keep them. There aren't enough students going into maths and science programs everywhere. We don't get enough of our students to go get Ph.D.s because they can four times more salary than their parents right out of college, so we cannot really interest them into higher education.
There are shortages of funding all over. Everyone is looking for endowment funds, private people to add more to their funds. Again, leaving aside top few, most of the universities are struggling for more funds. The concept of manufacturing that Ford Motor Company invented is still very valid in education. You bring in 500 kids, put them to production line, they come out, you put a stamp, and that's not workable in today's time and age.
There is lack of innovations in higher education systems; there is need for private-public partnership. There isn't enough research in most of the schools. We don't have, for example, in India good liberal arts schools. As a result, we have issues in leadership at all level. And I believe research, which has to be the focus in higher learning of institutions of learning, is really not getting the right attention because today, it is multidisciplinary. It requires collaborations, and it is happening at much higher speeds than ever before.
In some countries, like India, higher education is also highly politicized. There is very little freedom and flexibility that university vice chancellors get. There is very little autonomy; selections of vice chancellors is based on political considerations, entry is regulated, quality is not really a concern, and it should be exactly opposite. And it should be easy, quality should be controlled. So all of this, to me, says there are lots and lots of new opportunities in higher education.
In India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh decided to launch the National Knowledge Commission about two-and-a-half years ago to look at knowledge institutions and infrastructures that India would need in the 21st century. India is growing at the rate of 8 to 10 percent, and we have shortages everywhere. We don't have enough software engineers, contrary to what people think; we don't have enough truck drivers, welders, carpenters, plumbers, and the list goes on and on.
As a result of this, we decided to set up this commission with seven members. We meet once every two months for two full days, and we look at five aspects of knowledge: access to knowledge, which include things like literacy, languages, translations, libraries, portals, networks, reservations, quotas, affirmative action programs. For example, in India we have 54,000 libraries, and most of our libraries need a lot of work. We are building a national knowledge network to connect 5,000 nodes with one-gigabit facility to interconnect all the universities, all of our science and technology labs, medical research, agricultural research, and libraries. We are building a portal on water; we are building a portal on energy, environment, education, teacher training, and so forth.
Second topic we look at has to do with all concepts in knowledge: primary education, secondary education, distance learning, vocational education, higher education, open courseware. Then, we look at creation of knowledge, as to who creates knowledge, how knowledge is created, which include innovations, entrepreneurship, science and technology, patents, copyright, trademarks. Then, we look at application of knowledge in agriculture, health, small and medium-scale industries, and we also look at traditional knowledge. Finally, we focus on governance, as to use knowledge to improve governance.
So sum total, we have about 30-40 topics. On each topic, we would have a working group, five to 10 people, sometimes 20; experts - like on library we would have 20 experts, on intellectual property we'd have 30 experts - who would go out and spend six to nine months talking to various people in the country and outside. They would come back with a white paper, which in turn would get debated, discussed, at the commission. And the output of the commission would be a three-page letter from me to the prime minister, saying dear Mr. Prime Minister, these are the 10 things we recommend your government to do in this area. All of this information is available on the Net; you can go to www.knowledgecommission.gov.in, government of India, and you will see a lot of these recommendations.
In higher education, we really have key fundamental challenges. Expansion, we have 380 universities; we need 1500. Excellence, we need to improve quality and equity and access. We need to provide for poorest of the ability to go to the best school possible. This includes scholarships, tuition programs, loan programs, so on and so forth.
We are building 50 new national universities, of which 30 have already been announced by the government. There are many private initiatives now. We are also building one of our old institutions called Nalanda in Bihar, which was the oldest university. We are reviving that. As a result of the National Knowledge Commission, and also as a result of the need from the ground and industries, we will spending over $60 billion on education in the next four years to come. This is the highest ever in the history of India, five times more than what we spent in the last five-year plan.
Traditional knowledge is also equally important. We are documenting all of our herbal medicinal plants. There are 12,000 plants which are unique to the Indian climate, grow only in India. So we are computerizing, keeping genetic pool intact, so on and so forth. Vocational education is very critical to us. Today, we need 500,000 trained truck drivers and schools deal with 200, 500. Just in the city of Delhi, we need 10,000 trained bus drivers; we don't have them. So our problems to some extent are mind-boggling. We need people for retailing, airlines, hospitality, nurses, and the list goes on and on and on. We do need international collaborations. We need to invite all kinds of people to come network with us in providing the kind of help that we need.
Twenty-five years ago, after having spent about 20 years in Chicago, I decided to look at India with focus on IT. I was convinced that information technology brings about openness, accessibility, connectivity, networking, democratization, decentralization, and as a result, social transformation. I went back, even changed my nationality from U.S. back to India, spent 10 years with the prime minister in building needed infrastructure for IT and telecom. Then, we had 2 million telephones for 750 million people. Today, we are adding 8 million new telephones every month.
This is possible because of the cost structure. Then, power line cost was about $1200 a line, and we focused on reducing costs substantially; today, costs per line are below $100. So in a country like India, cost is the key parameter for access. IT success story has given Indians a fair deal of confidence, global recognition. Today, we have $350 billion worth of foreign exchange reserves; 20 years ago we had $2 billion. I think all of this demands that we pay more attention to building the next generation of infrastructure. Telecom took us about 15 to 20 years. We believe knowledge will take us about 20 to 25 years.
That brings me to the third topic, what are the challenges? I think the first challenge in education is to change the mindset as to what is education all about? Unfortunately, when we think of education today, we think of blackboard duster, chalk, classroom, textbook, teacher, exam, coursework, grades. I think all of these things don't have meaning anymore. Kids learn very differently. I have a six-year-old grand niece in Ohio. She was visiting us a few weeks ago and she said, she wrote a paper on the first lady doctor in America. I said, how do you write a white paper if you're six years old? So I said, why? She said because every doctor that we go to, dentist, my pediatrics, they are all male.
So I asked my mom and she said, I don't know. So she said, I went to Google and I found Elizabeth and I started digging. This is a six-year-old. When she goes to school, her teacher is going to look at her very differently. And she's going to say, wait a minute, this is not what I want to learn. So I think we have lost contact with our customer. Our customer is very different today. We need new models of learning. Teacher has been spending time on creating content and delivering content. Today, content is being created, and I'll talk a little bit about MIT's open course well, and I have had an opportunity to work with MIT on this.
You look at that content and you say, should teachers really spend a lot of time in creating new content with electronic delivery and online content? What should be the role of the teacher? I believe the teacher has to be a mentor. And then the ratio between teacher and student will change substantially. Do we really need textbooks, print all the textbooks, buy textbooks worth hundreds of dollars? Is it relevant today to have printing presses to print textbooks for the schools? I think all of these concepts need to be questioned.
We really need to use technology more effectively. There are two areas that IT technology has not delivered. One is health and the second one is education. We have not really had the gains of the IT technology in these two areas. Our health costs in the U.S. are going up and up and our education costs are also going up and up. So we need IT to be the driver so we can provide education on wireless devices, iPods, cell phones, laptops, everywhere. We need new search engines. We need education-related wikis; we need textbooks on the net; and we need to reduce cost of delivery substantially.
Open courseware is a great resource; I don't think we are using it effectively. So much wealth has been created, we just don't look at it. Unfortunately, not many people recognize, appreciate, and use it. If a noble laureate from MIT, Harvard, or wherever, is going to prepare a course on something fundamental, there isn't much a teacher in India can do to improve it, so don't even try it; just take it, modify it a little bit, and move on. We need borderless technology for borderless education. We need kid-centered, student-centered delivery system.
Who decided that it takes four years to get a degree, B.S.? I don't know who decided it, but we still follow it. The whole world follows it. Why does it take two years to get a Master's? I remember, when I came to the U.S. in '64 to get a Ph.D. in physics, I was told it takes seven years to get a Ph.D. in physics. I had a young girlfriend in India and I quickly changed my mind. I said, I'm not getting a Ph.D. So I went to my professor and he said, well, it will take you a year and a half to get a Master's in electrical engineering. I said, that's what I want to do.
All of these things need revision. We need focus on productive global citizens as the output of the education system. Sometimes I think about 3 million prisoners in America and it boggles my mind that a great, rich country with a great tradition of education has one in every 100 human beings in prison. Where are we going wrong? We are focused more on producing people we need in the industry and not really focused on the value system, productive citizens. You look at what goes on in business and you realize that values are very critical. Morals are very important, and if schools don't teach this, who's going to teach all of that?
Innovation always happens at the edge and not at the core, and I think we need a great deal of innovations in education. The 21st century university is going to be very different. Today, we are trying to build the same kind of universities everywhere else. And I think a 21st century university is going to be more based on network and not on buildings. We need to really think through the university model of 2020.
Finally, there are two more points. We need more innovations; we also need local considerations, local language, local content, local applications, and a bigger role for the local participants. So we can't take the U.S. model of the university and just transplant it, it's just not going to work. So we need massive change, generational change, and not incremental change. We need technology as an entry point and not an end point to bring about generational change.
I can go on and on and on, but I know I have limited time. So finally, I once again want to thank the Department of State and organizers for this opportunity. I think this has been a great initiative. I want to compliment them for taking the lead. And I want to request them that we do this once a year. (Laughter, applause.)
I think there are great opportunities to network, learn from others. You will never get a forum like this. And I think this journey together is going to be difficult, is going to be long, but if we don't bring about generational change, nobody else is going to do it. Thank you.
(Applause.)
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