Mr. Deputy-Speaker, Sir, it is always very encouraging for us when new institutions of higher education are established in our country to cater to the growing aspirations, the tremendous potential and the vast needs of our youthful population. The future is theirs and it is for us to help shape it through creating quality institutions such as the IITs and the NITs. To this extent, the amendment to the National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research Bill, 2016 to add the NIT in Andhra Pradesh to the schedule of the parent Act of 2007 is something we welcome as a Party, and if I may say so in my personal capacity as a former MoS in Shri Javadekar’s Ministry of Human Resource Development.

          However, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, Sir, it is also my duty as a parliamentarian to bring to the attention of this House the complete disregard of this Government for the principle of quality in its quest for mere quantity. What, for instance, is the current state of this very NIT in Andhra Pradesh that we are discussing here today? The NIT with 900 students already, as the Minister told us, functions out of a temporary campus. There are no laboratories; there are no libraries; there are no high quality IT or engineering tools for training. Can you imagine an engineering college without a functioning laboratory or library books? The fact is there is an acute shortage of infrastructure in terms of accommodation as well. We have a situation where we have created an institution which was not ready to be launched, but in a haste to put the foundation-stone as announced, they have gone ahead. The result is, even to stay, there is a girls’ hostel functioning, but the boys are accommodated in a village somewhere else.

          The NIT has been permitted to commence activities, but do we want shells of institutions, Mr. Minister, or path-breaking resource centres that would truly make a difference? I want to contrast this to what we have just seen in my constituency two weeks ago, when a fully functioning Central Polytechnic, the best known in Kerala, established in 1949, was derecognized by the AICTE in your Ministry for not fulfilling a list of conditions that they deemed had to be fulfilled. If that same list were applied to the new NIT in Andhra Pradesh, it would have been derecognized by the same AICTE.

          So, the problem in our system is that our higher education – I said this when I was a Minister as well – is overregulated and under-governed. We really need to focus on what the purpose of education is, how we bring about learning outcomes for our children and not focus irrelevantly on excessive regulation.

          There is a larger problem that is hidden behind this Bill, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, Sir. Even our premier IITs are facing today a shortage of trained faculty. According to the Government’s own figures, it is about 42 per cent in the IITs, but in the NITs, the shortage is now in the glaring vicinity of 50 per cent of the authorised faculty. There are no teachers, Mr. Deputy-Speaker, and students are being herded into half-built campuses with half the faculty strength to receive an education that can only be called half-baked. Frankly, this is inadequate. We cannot run education like this.

          On top of that, employers across the board are complaining about the unemployability of Indian graduates. A recent FICCI survey shows a figure of 62 per cent of employers are dissatisfied with the quality of our engineering graduates. This is a fact. In fact, I have spoken to many CEOs, as I am sure you have done. Infosys and Tatas and so on have set up their own campuses to train the people they have already hired after an engineering degree,  not for on-the-job training, but to make up for the deficiencies of the education we are giving them in our engineering colleges. They are getting nine months to one year of new education because our education is not good enough. Of course, they are paying teachers better. So, many teachers are leaving and going to Tatas and Infosys and companies like that, rather than staying in the NITs and coming to the IITs.

          Yes, we are proud of our IITs, which is the next Bill that you are bringing up. There is no problem there but these  are largely islands of excellence floating in a sea of mediocrity. The truth is we have to be conscious that NITs live up to the standard that their name ‘National Institute of Technology’ implies. The fact is that in our haste to add more on paper, we must not lose sight of the fact that these institutions are meant to set new and higher standards. If your walls are not solid , and you have no teachers to set the right intellectual standards, it will collapse. It is not just the building that will collapse, but also it will take with it the future and the prospects of the bright young people who are going to build the India of tomorrow.

          I looked at your own Ministry’s documentation, Javadekar Sahab. A UGC survey of 1471 colleges and 11 universities have found that 73 per cent of the colleges and 68 per cent of the universities have a quality that the HRD/UGC considers to be medium or low quality. Yet, what are we spending in the latest Budget of this Government – 1.2 per cent of our GDP on higher education. Frankly, that compares with 3.1 per cent in the US. Okay, we are not the US. But take South Korea which is not far away. It is 2.4 per cent  -- double of what we are spending.

Since we are talking about the NITs, let me stress that a Working Paper on the Quality of Engineering Education in BRICS countries has been released. As you know, India is now going to host the BRICS Summit and all the BRICS Conferences this year. According to that, average spending per year in engineering education is the lowest in India among the BRICS countries. We are spending 1300 dollars a year; China spends 4300 dollars a year per capita; and Brazil spends 5000 dollars a year. Even our fellow BRICS members, companions in the developing world, are leaving us behind. They have policies that focus rightly on quality and not just quantity. While we are on BRICS, let me mention that in terms of higher education and training, Russia is 47^th amongst the 148 countries surveyed in the world. We are ranked only at 91. We do not even have complete campuses,  like the NIT that we are just approving today. It is no wonder that statistics are stacked against us. Though I am not going to speak on the next Bill on the IITs, let me again remind you about the Kakodkar Committee reforms.  Really we ought to take those into account and implement them. They have been sitting with your Government for two years on the IITs.

          In global ranking, we know our IITs will feature in the top  two hundred. When we come to the NITs, they do not feature anywhere in the top 500. Why is this the case? Why is it that we are so insistent on increasing the numbers of our institutions without a corresponding interest in ensuring that we improve the quality of our institutions? Governments can exploit sheer numbers for public relations purposes. But what about the hundreds of students who enter these institutions each year in the hope of getting a decent education but are told, upon graduation, that they are unemployable and they need to be trained all over again. The quantum of support that our Government is granting to higher education institutions is simply insignificant in comparison to funding that other countries and other Governments are giving.

          I  think, Harvard University’s research and development funds alone exceed that of the entire HRD Budget that Shri Jaitley has given. All the UGC, all the agencies including the UGC put together will come under one university in America. There are, of course, structural and financial differences between us and the Harvard. I am not comparing them. But the point is this. Can we make fuller, better and wiser use of our resources instead of fragmenting them by spreading them right across this horizon of  mediocrity that I described? We should be building big ships that can withstand the ocean and not boats that will capsize at the first wave.

          You mentioned, Mr. Minister, in your remarks, the importance of innovation. I agree with you one hundred per cent. When I was there, I would make the same point. But look at what we are doing. India today has 17 per cent of the world’s brains, because we have 17 per cent of the world’s people. But we are only producing 3.5 per cent of the world’s global research output. There is something wrong there. What are we doing to tap the possibilities of industry-academia collaboration? My Government had accepted the report given by Shri Narayana Murthy to promote more academia-industry interface. I would suggest – I had respectfully suggested when I was there earlier – that we could, for example, allow companies to come directly to our IITs and NITs and say: “here is a research project; if you have students who are prepared to research on this, whatever comes up, we will have an agreement. We will innovate something together and NIT can share the profits with the private companies.” It happens very commonly in the West. But we need a policy decision from you that will allow the NITs and other institutions to have this kind of relationship with companies.

          Similarly, why can we not get more private sector money into this? You admit that you do not have enough money in your Budget. Look at the OECD countries. About 75 per cent of research and development funding in the OECD countries comes from the private sector. In our case, it is only 15 per cent from the private sector. Why is everything dependent upon the Government? Having heard our Prime Minister’s speeches, we should expect that this Government should be reaching out much more to infuse more funding into our NITs and IITs.  Pending, when we lost our position in the Government, was our Research and Innovation Bill which would have allowed the setting up of some 14 universities purely for research and innovation, including  in the private sector or funding on a PPP mode, or even on a sole ownership mode. 

Please look at that Bill again and see if we would like to revive it. The honest truth is, your diagnosis is right that we need more innovation, we need more research, but we are yet to see a convincing prescription for that diagnosis. You also need to prescribe a solution that takes into account these ideas.

          Considering that the NIT in Andhra Pradesh has already been functioning for one year, I have to say to you, Mr. Minister, that even its website does not inspire confidence. Please have a look at it. For example, the section on faculty has just two lines which I now quote. “Faculty for the new Institute will be taken initially under ad hoc basis. Some senior faculty members superannuated from IITs and NITs also will be taken. In addition to this, faculty members from the mentoring institute NIT Warangal will be taking classes, both theory and lab, on a regular basis”. This is the entire website listing on faculty at NIT that you have just asked us to approve. This, Mr. Deputy Speaker, is where our children’s future is being crafted! This is where tomorrow’s leaders are being told to dream their dreams!

          I ask you Mr. Minister, are we doing them justice? Is it any wonder that 82 per cent of our country’s engineering graduates are ending up in professions that do not require an engineering degree? What is the Government doing to align the establishment of educational institutions like this NIT that we are approving today with market research so that we know what employers are looking for before we push our children through an engineering degree? Let us see what they want? Where is the need? What kind of engineers do we want in India, or what do employers want, what does the government want, what does the future want? Is the Government creating NITs within a framework that aligns education with employment and both with the country’s needs? Where is our value addition? What can we do that others are not doing better than us, and with more money than us?

          What is happening to our engineering graduates, Sir? Mr. Deputy Speaker, I must tell you, last month the Madhya Pradesh Police Department advertised 14,000 Constable posts. Nine lakh candidates applied for these Madhya Pradesh Police Department posts of which there were 10,000 engineering graduates, a dozen Ph.D. holders, plus another 90,000 graduates and 15,000 postgraduates. They want to be Constables in Madhya Pradesh. Because  the fact is we are releasing graduates into an ecosystem that does not know how to use them. We have talent in our country but we do not know how to mould it, how to put it forward.

We need to change the ecosystem and that includes, Mr. Minister, providing innovation, including incentives. I was very interested to learn from Prof. Mashelkar that he is now giving out of his own money, Government is not doing it, an annual prize for innovation. I know you know him well. Find out about this. The prize in the first year was won by a young man who actually targeted a real need in our country. As you know, we have something like 15 million people who go blind because of preventable blindness. Most of this could be prevented by a simple eye test for glaucoma early on so that they can catch in time. For that you need drops which will dilate your eyes and you cannot see clearly for the rest of the day or for several hours.

Most of these poor Indians are daily wage workers, they cannot afford to lose a day’s wage. So, they avoid the test because they cannot afford not to have their eyesight for a day. So, this man invented a test for glaucoma that does not require dilation of the eyes and now poor people can go for the test. Mashelkar sahib said this is where we should give prizes for innovation, innovation that is targeting the needs of our country’s people. And I would urge you, Mr. Minister, that the Ministry itself should come up with a national level incentive like this to encourage more innovation in the NITs, IITs and elsewhere.

Finally, Mr. Deputy Speaker, I am not opposing this Bill. My party and I want more higher education institutions to open their door to India’s young people who are hungry for education. But we all want these additional institutions to be solid, to be well equipped with teachers and resources, and to produce quality learning outcomes so that their graduates can go confidently into the world where their skills can command good prospects in the employment market. Can we truly say that that is the case today, Mr. Minister? I think in all honesty, even though we are not here to oppose this Bill, we want you to think very seriously about these larger issues that I have raised.

With these words, Mr. Deputy Speaker, let us by all means declare this NIT to be an institution of national importance, but let us also make it an institution of truly national importance. Thank you, Mr. Deputy Speaker.                                                                        

titutions. I think, if we can take steps for this, the quality of engineering education can improve. There is no doubt that engineering graduates coming out of many of the private poor quality engineering colleges are not having the necessary skills to be employed. I think, we should take care of those people who are coming out of engineering colleges, to impart more skills so that they could be employed by the industries and various organisations.

          Thank you very much.