Closure

We need to think more seriously about where we are, where we want to be, and just how to get there.

One could not have asked for a more satisfying closure to my time at the University of Hyderabad. The day I left the University, there was the following press release from Rashtrapati Bhavan:

UNIVERSITY OF HYDERABAD WINS

VISITOR’S AWARD FOR BEST UNIVERSITY

The President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherjee will present Visitor’s Awards for Central Universities in the categories of ‘Best University’, ‘Innovation’ and ‘Research’ for the year 2015 at a function to be held at Rashtrapati Bhavan on February 4, 2015. This function will coincide with the third Conference of Vice Chancellors of Central Universities scheduled to be held from February 4-5, 2015.

The Visitor’s Award for the Best University will be awarded to University of Hyderabad.

The President had announced institution of these awards at the Vice Chancellors’ Conference last year with the aim of promoting healthy competition amongst Central Universities and motivating them to adopt best practices from across the world.

Rashtrapati Bhavan : 29.01.2015, 15:20 hrs

It’s really nice that we (since I do continue as Honorary Professor in the School of Chemistry as well as in the Department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics at the UoH, I guess I am entitled to say we!) have been given the award in the very first year it was instituted.

There are two other Visitor’s Awards, for Innovation and for Research, and as the press release points out carefully, The Best University will receive a Citation and Trophy while winners of the Visitors’ Award for Innovation and Research will receive a Citation and cash award of Rs. 1 lakh. I think that’s just as well; while some money would have been nice, the honour is in fact greater. Let’s hope that this will translate into more recognition later.

Over the past three years the President has been emphasizing the need for quantitative markers of excellence, indicators that goes beyond just reputation. While that is in fact important, I am not sure that getting into world rankings such as the QS or THE lists really serves us well at this stage of development of our University system. Within India we have the NAAC, but that has its own constraints. In any case the ranking agencies outside India do it for a range of reasons, some of which are tied into the manner of funding of universities, both public and private. I suspect there is virtually no system of ranking that is foolproof, and most of the time, criteria can be tweaked very effectively as any examination of ranks between 10 and 100 will reveal.

While the Visitor’s Award is for performance within a small group of Central Universities, it is nevertheless one way to spur us on to do even better, and to think more seriously about where we are, where we want to be, and just how to get there. No poetry quotes this time, we’ll get there only by some fairly hard work…

The Last Post

In that great book of ours, the Mahabharata, one chapter I find worth reading and rereading is that of the Aranya Parva, which has to do with the Yaksha, and his many questions. (The idea of an examination where the consequences of failure are dire is an interesting one, and the resemblance to a vice-chancellorship is quite unmistakeable.) In the final parts, the Yaksha asks, “What is most wonderful?”, and Yudhishthira (who by then is the only survivor) answers,“… Day after day, countless creatures go to the abode of Yama, yet those that remain behind believe themselves to be immortal. What can be more wonderful than this? ”

A Vice Chancellor is appointed at the University for a five year term. I came here on the 1st of June 2011, and so should have stayed until the 31st May, 2016. However, that is not to be. I shall be leaving somewhat sooner than that.

The reasons for this early departure from the position are purely personal, and I appreciate all those who will respect and protect my privacy on this count. While some aspects of why I wish to leave are known to some, the interpolations and extrapolations are many, all of them incomplete and in the end, all probably incorrect as well.

As my term at the UoH draws to a close, it is impossible to not try to take stock, and also impossible to not make a wish list of what still needs to be done, the miles to go… Difficult though it is, I shall do neither. Three years and a half is not a short time, but it is also not long, and I am sorry to leave when so much that I had in mind remains unfinished. There’s really not much point making any evaluation on such timescales- as I have said earlier on these pages, the race is not always to the swift.

I have valued my time at the University and am grateful for the great opportunities that it has provided me. In particular, for the chance to take the road less traveled by. The UoH has completed forty years in 2014, so one is also reasonably secure that ours is a robust system, one that has weathered many storms and one that is strong in its foundations. I am therefore confident that work that is started today will be continued if it is truly in the best interests of the University, and that the best traditions of the University will be upheld.

Since this is “The Unofficial Blog of the VC, University of Hyderabad”, this particular post is going to be the last from my pen or (to be more factually accurate) the last that I will type out on my keyboard as VC. It has been a good way to get some things communicated more widely, and I have certainly enjoyed writing it as much as I have enjoyed being here. And that is probably a good note on which to end.

Republic Day, 2015

We should see how best to use our freedom for public good- not just in terms of educating larger numbers of our citizenry, but also to bring about important interventions in the public space and to mold public policy, thereby strengthening the fabric of the Republic.

Friends-

This is the fourth time I have had the privilege of addressing the UoH community on the occasion of Republic Day. Like all anniversaries, this provides for a stocktaking and gives an opportunity to reflect upon our goals as a university.

My inspiration for the few words I wish to share with you today come from our Chancellor, Prof. C H Hanumantha Rao (see the previous post) who’s term formally came to a close earlier this month. Hanumantha Rao-garu has been a wise counsel, an elder on whom we could always bank upon at all times, not just times of crisis. Recently, when he was speaking of his alma mater, the Delhi School of Economics, he recalled the early days of the School and the founder, Dr. V K R V Rao, and some of the ideals that guided the formation of that great institution.

The main impetus to form such an institution- indeed the main aim we should have for our own university- is to have a place where “scholars can enjoy freedom of thought and expression”. This is important in order for them to be able to contribute to policy-making in a fearless manner, he pointed out, but I would add, it is important also that scholars should have complete freedom of thought, speech and expression so that they can create new modes of thinking, new works, and lead others to think along new and creative lines. At a time when freedom of expression can be curbed in so many ways, it is necessary to underscore the importance of spaces such as our University.

A second ideal that will strike a chord with all of us is the goal of achieving academic excellence. There are so many ways of achieving this goal, and all of them are difficult. Bringing together a group of excellent and committed individuals is one way, but that has its own challenges. To a very large extent, our University did try that route and some of the initial faculty were truly stellar. Keeping up the tempo is more of a challenge, and we are only slowly recognizing the difficulty of this path to academic excellence, the need to keep building up and maintaining a team of competent faculty. It is also important to not flag, and to not give up in any dimension of endeavour…

A third ideal which VKRV Rao appears to have passionately held and communicated to teachers and students was a dedication to social commitment, which Prof. Hanumantha Rao says he thought was as important as technical competence. I think that it is necessary to recall this most strongly in these very trying days- the pursuit of individual goals has slowly but surely weakened this social commitment, and this has not been to our advantage as a society which continues to face nearly as many challenges today as it did forty years ago when our University was founded.

It is interesting that one means of achieving this, in the eyes of VKRV Rao, was in an “interdisciplinary approach in addressing socio-economic problems”. I need hardly emphasise that we too share this ideal in our University, and in the way in which we have developed in the past few decades, in particular under the rubric of the University with Potential for Excellence. Much as we bridle under the implications of the word “Potential” in the phrase, it should be acknowledged that it is fair: our goals of excellence are some distance away and need our concentrated and concerted efforts.

Our University has recently been awarded an additional grant under the UPE scheme, a grant that will help us better realize the goal of providing space to explore scholarship with complete freedom. We should use this to reach the excellence we are capable of. One of the things we need, paradoxically, is more spaces to study and more spaces where we can train ourselves to meet the challenges of the outside world. The University is committed to providing these and in the near future, we plan to construct a Reading Room in the South Campus (it would be fitting to name it after Savitribai Phule when it is done). A second structure that is planned is the Samatha Bhavan, a unified space where students can come together to train themselves and be trained in dimensions – other than just academics – that are needed in order to be better prepared when they leave the University.

As before, I would also like to draw our attention to the very special privileges that being at a comprehensive University such as ours give us all automatically. The University is very young and has just started along its path of growth- we need to pay special attention to how we expand and how we share our good fortune with others who have less by way of facilities, infrastructure and expertise. The UoH has a leadership role to play in the community of Universities, and we should find the way to do so responsibly, as well as to do this with generosity.

We have many goals as a University, the main one being to provide a space where there can be complete freedom of thought, and the freedom to explore all scholarly modes of expression. This needs both dedication as well as imagination, catalyzed by collaboration across disciplines. No discipline has all the answers- indeed no discipline has all the questions! We should see how best to use our freedom for public good- not just in terms of educating larger numbers of our citizenry, but also to bring about important interventions in the public space and to mold public policy, thereby strengthening the fabric of the Republic.

Jai Hind!

A Chancellor Speaks

The Chief Guest at the Inaugural Session of the Annual Day Celebrations of the Delhi School of Economics on 16 January, 2015 was our Chancellor, Prof. C. H. Hanumantha Rao. When I read the text of his address, I was struck by several of the observations he made and felt that many among us would be keen to learn some of the history of major institutions such as the Delhi School of Economics (DSE) and the Institute for Economics Growth (IEG), and also of the personal history of stalwarts who were associated with these institutions. Prof. Hanumantha Rao has been kind enough to let me reproduce the address in this blog.

The Delhi School of Economics was founded by Professor V. K. R. V. Rao with a high ideal of training economists and other social scientists for their effective participation in nation-building. The existence of the Delhi School of Economics on the pattern of the London School of Economics inspired many among the younger generation in different parts of the country to benefit from this opportunity opened up for advanced learning. The same inspiration brought me with a zeal to the Delhi School of Economics in August 1957 from the Osmania University. I was lucky to be registered for Ph.D. at the DSE with encouragement from Prof. A. M. Khusro.

My first opportunity to listen to Prof. V. K. R. V. Rao at the DSE was in this Vivekananda Hall on the occasion of its Founder’s Day on 14th November, 1957. He spoke with great passion about the ideals of the DSE. First and foremost among these ideals he said was freedom of thought and expression. I came to know years later that his founding the DSE owed primarily to his own struggle for freedom of thought and expression. He narrated how, while speaking as a member of an official delegation in those days, he was interrupted by its head, a civil servant of the ICS cadre, by saying that economists are expected to ‘produce’ arguments in support of the official line and not air their ‘own’ views! This infuriated Prof. Rao who decided to resign from his post in the government the very next day to start an autonomous institution where scholars can enjoy freedom of thought and expression to be able to contribute to policy-making in a fearless manner.

Achieving academic excellence was another great ideal for him. For this purpose he recruited professors of great distinction from different universities in India and abroad. Apart from Professors B. N. Ganguli and P. N. Dhar who together with him formed a trio in the then small department of economics working tirelessly towards shaping the DSE, he brought, in the first round, eminent scholars like professors K. N. Raj, B. V. Krishnamurthy, M. N. Srinivas, M. S. A. Rao, Tapan Roy Chaudhury, A. M. Khusro, Siva Subramanyan, George Kuriyan, V. L. S. Prakash Rao and others.

The third ideal which he passionately exhorted the teachers and students to follow was social commitment which he thought was as important as technical competence. Drawing inspiration from the freedom movement, he felt that ensuring a just social order in the country was not possible without social commitment. Towards this end, he strongly believed in the need for an inter-disciplinary approach in addressing socioeconomic problems. Therefore, in all the institutions he established, namely, Delhi School of Economics, Institute of Economic Growth, and the Institute for Social and Economic Change at Bangalore, he took great pains to accommodate different disciplines in social sciences to facilitate fruitful interaction.

Thanks to the functioning of our democratic set-up for over 60 years and the existence of institutions such as the University Grants Commission and the Indian Council of Social Science Research, we enjoy today far greater measure of autonomy and freedom of thought and expression when compared to the immediate post-independence period.

In respect of academic excellence too, we are today in a much better position than in the early years of the DSE. I was a witness to the virtually demoralizing intellectual atmosphere in the room where the Ph. D. scholars used to be seated. I found that quite a few of them had already spent 5 to 7 years or more groping for the subject. To a considerable extent, this reflected the research culture in a typical Indian university in those days. The emphasis then was on producing a bulky thesis after a great deal of reading and summarizing the literature, with an objective of making a ‘lasting’ contribution to the subject! Happily, the focus gradually shifted to the quality of research questions addressed in the thesis, methods of analysis followed and the significance of the findings arrived at.

At the time of founding of the IEG in 1958, certain sections of the DSE, including the Economic Development Section, headed by Prof. A. M. Khusro, and supported by the Ford Foundation, where I was a Ph. D. scholar, were shifted to the IEG. Having been associated with the Institute of Economic Growth in the neighbourhood for 50 years until its Golden Jubilee Celebrations in 2008, I can testify to the beneficial impact that the DSE had all along on the research work done at the IEG.

Many in the IEG faculty had completed their Ph.D. from the DSE and continued their academic links with the parent institution. IEG faculty has had an active collaboration with the DSE in providing guidance to the M. Phil. as well as Ph. D. students. The use of econometric techniques was virtually non-existent in the early years of DSE, but very soon became popular with the stalwarts in the subject like Prof. A. L. Nagar and Prof. K. L. Krishna coming on the scene. The IEG and DSE have had major collaborative projects in Macro-Econometric Modelling for India with Professor K. Krishnamurthy of IEG and Professor V. N. Pandit of DSE as leaders of the project. When academic institutions happen to be next door neighbours with common interest, scholars across these institutions easily walking into each other’s rooms, not uncommon in both the institutions, for exchanging views and engaging in discussions could perhaps prove to be as fruitful as projects jointly undertaken.

The scholars of both the institutions are well-known for their broader approach to development. For example, the issues of sustainability and social justice have figured prominently in their research agenda. Besides, they have actively participated in shaping socio-economic policies in the country as members of various expert committees and commissions. Prominent among economists well known for their broader approach to development are Professors V. K. R. V. Rao, P. N. Dhar and Raj Krishna who starting from the DSE made substantial contributions at the IEG. Similarly, the contributions made by scholars like K. N. Raj, Sukhamoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen from the DSE on broader issues of development have greatly inspired scholars in both these institutions and in the country at large towards engaging themselves on socially relevant issues. We from the DSE and IEG are proud of the fact that Prof. Manmohan Singh, the architect of economic reforms in the country as Finance Minister in the early 1990s had been a professor at the DSE before he joined the government, and is president of IEG. Again, as Prime Minister he brought in the perspective of ‘inclusive growth’ which has been widely supported in the country.

All these scholars have been open to inter-disciplinary approach to development. Carrying this tradition forward requires harnessing satisfactorily the potential for collaboration between scholars working in different disciplines. Some interaction between such scholars is inevitable when they are working under the same roof, as, for example, when they meet every day at tea in the common room! A more serious exposure to each other’s work takes place through participation in seminars. Attending each others’ seminars apart, it needs a deliberate effort to formulate projects where scholars from different disciplines collaborate on issues of applied nature. Most of our failures on the policy front are traceable to the lack of such a broader inter-disciplinary approach.

Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the organizers of this event for remembering me as an old boy of DSE and providing me the opportunity of meeting so many friends at these celebrations.

The emphasis added above is mine. I believe that we can all benefit from more interaction, by enjoying each other’s work in whatever way possible. Institutions like the DSE and the ISE or indeed the CSEC or CESS in Hyderabad have all benefited from a strong emphasis on interaction and collaboration, and there is much to learn from examples, especially when they have touched our lives so strongly. Prof. Hanumantha Rao’s tenure as our Chancellor ends this month. We are truly fortunate to have been associated with him.