A significant number of technocrats turned management honchos, specially those who have made it big in their professional stints have attempted to give voice to their patriotic fervor in the form of prescriptive as well as descriptive writings. Dwelling deep into their very own life journeys and experiences, drawing vividly from their techno-managerial styles, their writings have created a new category altogether.
One such attempt has been from Shail Kumar who wears the badges from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur and Indiana University, Bloomington. Having being instrumental in building up the Pan-IIT movement in the USA as well as administering UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, Kumar in his 250 pager “Building Golden India,” builds up a case for transforming India’s Higher Education System for unleashing the country’s vast potential.
Structured into 4 sections, setting the context of his conversation moving to enumerate the challenge, which he compares with the peeling of an onion whereby the broken and disconnected system is described elaborately. The author, then attempts at Benchmarking for Learning from the Best in section 3 by citing the case study of United States, Silicon Valley’s two globally acclaimed universities – UC Berkeley & Stanford University. In the final section he prescribes his Solutions for Building a Golden India which entails his characteristic Gray Revolution.
The book has been configured with inputs from over 107 eminent personalities which have been duly acknowledged as a numerated list.
The rigour & repartee of the conversations contained in a book praised by 17 tech luminaries including Rajiv Bajaj of Bajaj Motors is a must read for all eduleaders across the deck who intend to make Higher Education as the centroid of national discourse, which in a starkly stellar manner Kumar has tried to position as the panacea for India’s redemption.
How much of it gets actually adopted in practice, would certainly depend on the pro-active activism of the author.
