Dr Madhu Chitkara,
Vice Chancellor,
Chitkara University

With the Indian economy opening up at a fast pace, the Chitkara University is aiming to create problem solvers and knowledge creators for the country. Universities and other higher educational institutions would have to bring about a paradigm shift in their approach to teaching. We have to lay emphasis on learning-centric approach rather than the examination and teacher-centric approach.
The University has two sprawling campuses located in Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. The Chitkara Institute of Engineering and Technology was listed amongst the Top 50 engineering colleges in the country within the first six years of its inception.
We select our faculty members with utmost care and we support them to enhance their skills. We invite senior faculty members from US universities at our campus as guest faculty for varying durations and that helps us hone the teaching skills of our faculty. I believe that if we look after the intellectual aspirations of the faculty then they will look after the students.
The University has built very strong collaborative arrangements with industry. Reputed industries like nVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors, Texas Instruments and Cadence have set up laboratories at our campus.
We runs Campus Connect Programme of Infosys from its campus. The University has its own FM Radio Station that beams programmes daily to give hands-on experience to its media students. In addition, we have tie-ups with reputed organisations like Fortis Hospital and FTKMC to train students. Collaboration with foreign universities is another priority area for Chitkara University.
Our socialist environment has not been psychologically able to cope up with this massive expansion and higher fee structure of private universities. This has created an impression that they are out to make money. The reality is totally different. The lack of trust is the main reason for this state of affairs. We must accept the fact that not all private universities are indulging in wrong doings and not all public universities have standards.

Gurmeet Dhaliwal,
Chairman,
Baba Farid Group of Institutions (BFGI),

Highlights the key issues plaguing the higher education sector and shares steps taken by BFGI to overcome them. In conversation with Seema Gupta.

On Employability
The biggest hurdle in employability is that majority of students opt their career by chance not by their choice and also the absence of skills evaluation system and for the same we have developed a student employability scorecard at BFGI

What is the vision behind setting up Baba Farid Group of Institutions (BFGI)?
We dream to make students financially independent during study and provide with 100 percent placement to our students after completion of their education.

What are the challenges faced by upcoming private higher education institutions?
The challenges faced by upcoming private higher education institutions include:

• Inadequate financial assistance from government for research
• Outdated curriculum
• Creating employable professionals from completely unskilled freshers
• Lack of availability of skilled and research-oriented faculty
• Less focused students as they have chosen career by chance but not by choice
• Lack of industry-academic interface

What are the steps taken by BFGI, to increase employability of students, which is currently a major concern in India?
At BFGI, firstly we ensure that students opt for a course after making proper career choice. To facilitate that we have established a department of career guidance and counselling that conducts online and offline aptitude tests. Another hurdle is the absence of skills evaluation system and for the same we have developed a student employability scorecard.
There is also lack of skills among the students. BFGI is taking several steps to counter this deficiency. We conduct internal training for students, which is a crucial part of our curriculum and timetable. The unique feature is that we have a dedicated team of more than 25 trainers who strive hard to provide right platform to the students not just by enhancing their skills but also by evaluating these students through student employability scorecard.
Internal trainings are not only sufficient to accomplish the goal of overall development thus, we have collaborated with reputed corporate giants like HP, HCL, Wipro and Manpower for providing students with professional training both on technical and non-technical fronts.
We have also collaborated with AIESEC to provide summer internship programme from six to eight weeks in order to give global exposure to our stu-dents and making them open towards inter-cultural diversity.
Our students participate in stipendbased live projects with big industry giants in order to accomplish the objective of Earn while Learn.

Please share with us some research or innovative projects undertaken by students or faculty at BFGI.
We have a dedicated innovation centre in collaboration with Microsoft Corporation. We have established DATA64 Centre of excellence where live case studies are carried on cyber crime.
IT giant Apple has selected and uploaded a 3D iPhone game “Salvador” developed by one of our student. Also one of our students has developed a working project on Live Bidding of scrap and faulty materials for Jindal Steel Group, Delhi.
Besides all these projects, our students and faculty members are consistently working on research-oriented activities.

Most of the private universities these days are being set up as world-class universities. International exchange programmes and foreign collaborations are important features in most of these universities. OP Jindal Global University also figured among the Top 10 because of its exchange programmes and foreign partnerships. Universities like Azim Premji University and Shiv Nadar University are also good universities with a potential to top the list. However, these universities are more popular for their exchange programmes and more weighatge was given to foreign collaborations as compared to the exchange programmes.

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India’s Top 60 Private and Deemed Universities
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India’s Top 60 Private and Overall Deemed Universities-Ranking

Faculty is the most important pillar of an educational system. Good faculty is essential for imparting quality education among students. Availability of good faculty is a major problem in all institutions across the country. No matter how many institutions we set up, recruitment of good and quality faculty is crucial for excellence in teaching-learning.

View More:

Top 10 Universities with High-Quality Infrastructure
India’s Top 60 Private and Deemed Universities
Top 10 Academically Recognised Universities
Top 10 Universities of Academic Excellence
Top 10 Universities with a Global Connect
Top Universities Across Zones
India’s Top 60 Private and Overall Deemed Universities-Ranking

Dr Murugesan Ponnavaikko, Vice Chancellor, SRM University
Catering to nearly 45,000 students in five campuses across the country, SRM University is one of the largest privately-funded universities in the country offering programmes in all disciplines. Dr Murugesan Ponnavaikko, Vice Chancellor, SRM University, talks about the University’s vision and future plans in conversation with Chhavi Bakaria.

Education to promote rural economy
The people at the helm of affairs are trying to bring foreign universities in this country. They do not understand that bringing foreign universities is going to be futile. One-third of India’s population is living below poverty line, and we need to provide education at affordable costs. By bringing foreign universities can they offer programmes at low cost? How can the authorities or the HRD ministry feel that the foreign universities are really going to help this country?
India is a rural and agro-based country, and none of the Indian universities -whether government or private -are offering programmes that are relevant to this country. Thus, we are developing graduates only for foreign countries and not for our country. As a private university we have more freedom to revise our curriculum and we can define and develop programmes suitable for the local areas where we are serving. So the education programme should be formulated in such a way that the graduates are produced with skill sets and knowledge so that they can use their expertise for developing rural-based industries, using the local resources so that the rural population and economy will grow.

On DU’s Four-Year Undergraduate Programme
With a four-year Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in computer science, a candidate can compete with Bachelor of Technology (BTech), but with a lesser course fee. This will be one of the greatest benefit for students”

“With Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), we have established a lab called ‘Learning through discovery’. It is called actual learning laboratory similar to which is available at MIT, Boston

Improve faculty selection procedure
Providing good faculty is a real challenge in this country today. University professors are selected through the National Eligibility Test (NET), which is only a written examination. I doubt if only a written examination can qualify a person to teach. A person who cannot talk or communicate properly even if he has knowledge is useless. I suggest that the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Ministry of Human Resource Development should come up with a specific teachers training programme for engineering and higher education similar to BEd or MEd programmes that are required for school education.

Industry and overseas collaborations
If the Indian education has to really flourish, we will have to make the education more in collaboration with the  industrial partners so that the students get to know about their requirements. A person with knowledge, skill set and human values is only called human resource, so such an education will only really help growth in this country.
SRM University has collaboration with Bosch automobiles, Germany who have established their own testing facilities in our campus. We are also having close collaborations with the medical, bio-engineering and pharmaceutical industries. We have brought industrial training as one the important aspects into the curriculum with some credits.
Collaboration is different from bringing foreign universities in this country and it is an essential component. We have signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with more than 85 universities around the world like the USA, UK, Australia, Japan, Korea, etc. Around 100 students and faculty members spend one semester in any foreign university especially the US Universities. SRM University’s links with Partners International, an organisation of top US hospitals, affiliated to Harvard Medical School, USA, and Queen’s University, Canada, contribute greatly to knowledge exchange, joint research and career opportunities.

ICT in Education
When I joined Tamil Virtual University to SRM University, I started a Directorate for Virtual Education and we are using ICT for education in developing virtual laboratories, virtual repositories and teaching to students. In fact, in engineering branches like computer science or power, many things cannot be seen or visualised, spoken, communicated through words. Using ICT we can develop animation, video-based materials so that the students can see and understand. So ICT is going to be the core pedagogy for teaching, but at the same time it cannot be a replacement. It will be an excellent tool for the teacher for communication purposes

Laxmi Narayan Rao (Lux Rao) is Chief Technologist, Technology Services, HP India Sales.Rao’s division helps customers adopt technologies and solutions such as cloud computing, big data, mobility. He talks about how ICT adoption in education in India is taking big leap and need for good teaching tools in education. In conversation with Sruti Ghosal, ENN

How do you look at the role of technology on growth of education sector in India?
Education sector is one domain which has seen mass proliferation of technology. Previously it was the classroom education, which was prevalent, but now students can gain knowledge from multiple channels. These channels can be through Internet or other means.Since there are a lot of means to gather information there is not the right kind of tool to sift through the information and gather the correct ones and omit the ones which are not needed. So keeping this in mind we need a set of tools which will actually help the students sift through the correct information.

Indian education sector is an 85 billion US $ opportunity for business. How do you see education as a vertical for HP?
At HP we have come with a solution called HP video book. It essentially scans a book, and identifies the key words in the text. These keywords are those which are relevant to the child. It automatically sifts through the content, identifies the key words, cross references it with known knowledge repository, brings in the best videos and offers a side by side knowledge experience to the child. So this is something which actually can be game changing as far as a child’s learning is concerned. If we take an example of a 8th grade student,he must be interested in knowing more about the relevant topic so he might look into the internet. In the process he might get much information but the possibility of being side tracked by unwanted information cannot be subdued. This is one part of the video book. The second part is that, if we take a 1st semester electronic student he might have understood the theoretical functioning of an optic fibre. But by the time they apply it to the industries they might have passed three four semesters and there remains a possibility of the lesson fading away from their mind. There is a gap between the theoretical understanding of the topic and practical understanding to it. So a video book bridges this gap by bringing in videos referring to the content. This video book offers a 360 degree perspective to the child.
Talking about a service like HP video book the need for actually sifting the content for quality information is very important. A person who wants a holistic understanding of the subject, it is very important that he comes across the right content and does not get distracted. In HP technologies it has always been an effort to simplify education and cloud today is playing a vital role in it.

For a person who wants a holistic understanding of the subject, it is very important that he comes across the right content and does not get distracted

What are the challenges and opportunities in this market?
India has a very lucrative market and as a market is also has a need for large amount of good standard teaching tool. With technology the barrier between the rich and the poor can be bridged and everyone can get access to quality education. So tools are very important so that great quality education can be imparted to the students.