Though the setting up of a Central University is the prerogative of
the Union Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) it shall be in
the right spirit of adherence to the Constitution and to our federal
structure if it is done in consultation with the state in which the
university is proposed to be set up by trying to appreciate the special
needs and perceptions of the state administration, the elected
representatives, leading academics and intellectuals. A unilateral
imposition without taking into consideration the actual ground reality
or expectation is bound to generate an atmosphere of distrust and
bickering and invariably dilute the larger vision and goal of the
effort.While it is a more fundamental debate as to why a large number of
central universities have to be created without adequate resources,
space and manpower and more importantly without a distinct goal for
excellence, it would perhaps be in the best interest of the entire
project if the selection of a location for the Central University of
Bihar (CUB) is best left to the people of the state to deliberate and
decide upon. The Bihar Legislature has already adopted unanimous
resolutions asking the Centre to establish the CUB at Motihari in East
Champaran district and there is a debate going on within Bihar itself on
the proposed location of the new university with a group pitching in
for Gaya, which was the initial proposal of the MHRD and another voting
for Motihari which has been the favourite spot for the Chief Minister,
Nitish Kumar. By appearing to be intransigent on its choice of Gaya, the
MHRD is only further widening the divide and generating adverse
reaction at a time when it can well do without such a furor. In fact our
national tendency of parachuting a central institution of higher
learning by disregarding the ethos of the people and the ground
realities has nearly always prevented such institutions from evolving
into centres of academic excellence. It is true that regional
aspirations are growing and it is legitimate that the young in the
states and in the districts aspire for national institutions that can
bring them en par with the youth in the metros but it does not
seem to serve the purpose if such initiatives are divorced from the
actual needs and possibilities of the region. Therefore passing an act
that declares the setting up of 14 central universities all over the
country is one thing, but to formulate a unique vision and aim for each
one of them needs a different approach altogether.
Historically; the setting up of institutions of higher learning had
been a vibrant part of the Indian civilisational experience. The ancient
Indian universities of Takshaśilā, Nālandā, Valabhī and Vikramaśilā were
some of the leading knowledge-lighthouses of the ancient world and were
unique in their growth and in their approach to knowledge and in their
method of imparting it. The ancient Indians were adept at creating these
institutions which grew in an organic manner over a period of time. The
process of this growth seems to have been so steady and so rooted to
the ethos and demands of the age that the institutions thrived for
centuries providing intellectual direction to the evolution of
civilisations and more importantly also served to facilitate – in those
days of intimidating distances – interactions between world
civilisations. They lived dynamically and grew and only saw decadence
and destruction at the hands of invading hordes. It has been rightly
pointed out that the centres of higher learning in ancient India ‘were
unique in their organisation and scholarship during those distant times
when elsewhere in the world very few had thought of organised education
at the university level.’ Most of these universities were international
as well as inter-provincial in nature and maintained a high standard
with well laid down and meticulously conceived stipulations and criteria
for admission. In Nālandā, it is well known that, ‘streams of
pilgrim-students wended their way in search of knowledge’ from Tibet,
Korea and China and in India from the central regions, from distant
provinces such as the North-West, ‘Kāñchipura in the South, Purusapura
(modern Peshawar) in the North and Samatata in the East.’ The university
of Takshaśilā is said to have had such a vibrant and erudite
faculty that they ‘could attract hundreds of students from distant parts
of the sub-continent, in-spite of the long and dangerous journey which
they had to undergo.’ It was then believed that the ‘knowledge of these
teachers put together represented everything that was worth knowing in
those days’ and the institution developed a great reputation in the
field of medicine. History says that ‘the royal physician Jivaka
who had cured the king Bimbisara of Magadha and also the great Buddha
himself of some painful diseases, had studied medicine’ at Takshaśilā.
This hoary tradition of developing seats of higher learning was
eventually broken; a long interregnum followed and came to an end when
British administrators decided to form universities on the British model
in the Indian presidencies. The civilisational memory of past
indigenous institutions of higher learning was lost or at best became
opaque and the British pattern of the university was upheld as the one
to be emulated and replicated countrywide. Such a perception was briefly
challenged in the first decade of the last century by a dynamic
nationalist group of Indian scholars and opinion-leaders who advocated
the need of creating national education institutions modelled on the
spirit of past Indian educational institutions. The movement, though
short-lived, did generate much debate and saw efforts made at building
some such representative institutions. Satish Chandra Mukherjee
(1865-1948), Aurobindo Ghose (Sri Aurobindo) (1872-1950), Benoy Kumar
Sarkar (1887-1949), Lokmanya Tilak (1856-1920) were some of the pioneers
of this movement. The much deeper issue, however, is that
post-independence, a wide debate on the need to develop a system of
national education, or to evolve models of higher education institutions
in tune with the Indian civilisational spirit never took off. Even
those models of education developed by some of our leading national
figures – the Basic Education, or the Nai Talim model, or the
Visva-Bharati model – were not sufficiently explored or experimented
with in the early years after independence when it was possible to chart
out a wholly new and refreshing direction for Indian education. The
various dimensions of education and perceptions of knowledge-imparting
within the classical Indian paradigm were not considered and a serious
and wide-ranging effort of re-discovering some unique facets of the
Indian educational past was never undertaken in right earnest allowing –
with some modifications – the continuation, replication and
perpetuation of the British presidency model of universities. And in our
present zeal for creating such institutions we seem to have ignored
again our civilisational memory of this past experience and appear to
have omitted deriving inspiration from the collective spirit that
inspired such landmark creations of the ancient world.
Without entering into the politics of the current debate on setting
up the CUB one can very well point out that the reasons for setting it
up in Gaya, as proffered by the Union HRD minister does not appear to be
very original, innovative or justified. One of the reasons cited is
that Gaya has better infrastructure, is well connected and is a
‘historical and cultural centre of international importance’ while
Motihari is 200 km from the state capital Patna, and does not have
proper support infrastructure and has hardly more than half a dozen good
hotels.’ Connectivity, support infrastructure, quality of life in the
surrounding and faculty quality does not seem to have been taken into
serious consideration when deciding to reconstruct the Nalanda
‘International’ University in the same state. The area then was
designated and the university was allowed to take shape and it was
thought that infrastructure and the surrounding area would grow with the
growth of the university. Why is this precedence being overlooked by
the MHRD in the current debate is difficult to explain. The backwardness
of an area cannot in real earnest be the major deciding factor for
setting up an institution of higher learning. By depriving the area of
such an institution one shall simply relegate it to the realm of
perpetual underdevelopment and isolation. Universities in ancient India
never functioned in isolation; they were an organic part of the
surrounding and did initiate great efforts to develop these areas
through a number of public service initiatives. The surrounding
localities, villages and towns were never allowed to stagnate while the
university achieved academic excellence and fame. Similarly, today
central universities that come up in remote locations in the states
could try and develop such a vision of community growth and development,
such an approach is in tune with the past Indian educational
experience. A number of leading Indian educationists had given thought
to this aspect of the functioning of a university. In fact, there were
some formidable educationists who had undertaken such an approach in the
early years and had called for its serious consideration. In his paper
on ‘The Quest of Academic Values in the University’ veteran
philosopher of history, scholar of culture and civilisation and former
Vice Chancellor of the Lucknow University Professor Radhakamal Mukherjee
(1889-1968) who had himself actively participated in the national
education movement brought notice to this vital aspect. It would be
worthwhile, for the sake of broadening the discussion, to cite
Mukherjee’s views in some detail. Recalling the initiatives he had taken
on trying to integrate the university with the surrounding community,
Mukherjee wrote:
During my term of Vice-Chancellorship I set up the
University Council of Social Work for a wide minded programme of adult
education, Community Centre, Children’s play movement, sramdan
for the common people. Constructive social work undertaken by the
student community in the slums and villages can not only harness its
best energies and aspirations in constructive channels but also abridge
the present cleavage between the classes and the masses that thwarts
social progress in so many directions. A full-fledged Department of
Extramural and Welfare under the Dean of Students’ Welfare is a
necessary adjunct of a modern University that must recognise its
obligation to the region, the neighbourhood and the common people around
it…
There has been no concerted effort at developing such a broader goal
of social responsibility. Just because Motihari does not have more than
half a dozen good hotels does not mean that no new development
initiative can come up there! A central university could very well be
the starting point of greater development in the area. A central
university in Motihari can work wonders for the development and growth
of the whole of northern Bihar and may even go a long way in arresting
the rising tide of naxalism in the entire belt. If remoteness is indeed
a criteria what explains the setting up of an IIT in then remote
Kharagpur in 1950. The historic Hijli detention camp which detained some
of our most valiant young freedom fighters was converted into housing
the IIT which rose to become one of the premier institutions of
technical education in the country. In fact, like Hijli Motihari and
East Champaran too are intrinsically linked to our freedom struggle and
to the memory of Gandhi launching his Satyagraha. In this context one
can also recall that when the Pondicherry Central University was set up
in 1985 in the outskirts of Pondicherry no major infrastructure support,
except for the town itself, existed in the area with the nearest
airport, Chennai, a good 150 km away. Today after two odd decades of the
University’s functioning the area has grown significantly and has seen
major infrastructure development. A number of central universities
founded in the states – in Tamil Nadu, Odisha for example – are located
in remote areas. Their failure, for the moment, to attract the requisite
number of faculties for effective functioning – the Central University
of Odisha at Koraput has been able to fill ten out the sanctioned
strength of 48 faculty members, and the Central University of Tamil Nadu
located at Thiruvarur has been able to recruit six of a sanctioned
strength of 24 – reflects on the MHRD’s attitude towards these newly
spawned institutions and not on their location or other local factors.
Adequate publicity, attractive incentives and guarantees for research
and education growth or even special recruitment drives with special
provisions bypassing some of the more tedious bureaucratic procedures
could have attracted a greater number of academics – especially the
young – to these institutions. The MHRD seems to have failed to
effectively undertake such a drive. The Central University of Karnataka,
for example, located at Kadaganchi, 30 km from Gulbarga and 250 km from
Hyderabad the nearest airport, has succeeded in attracting a good
number of faculty members demonstrating that academic scope and teaching
opportunities evolved by those laying the foundation of the new
institution can and actually does determine the responses to these
far-flung institutions. In a country like ours, with massive
disparities at all levels especially at the educational, it is only with
such initiatives of setting up universities at remote locations that
one can really hope to bring about greater educational parity. Therefore
remoteness of location cannot, in all fairness, be the principal
criteria for rejecting the proposal.
The MHRD appointed Site Selection Committee comprising experts have
also stated that Motihari falls in the seismic zone and a 1000 acres
fertile land would go non-productive if the CUB comes up in the area.
Shedding the blinkers, one could think of turning these factors into
some of the most unique features of the proposed university – make it a
new age model earth-quake resistance edifice with a special focus on
agricultural and high-yield paddy research. In any case the people of
the area are for the initiative and do not appear to be resisting any
move at developing the university. It is a skewed view of things which
says that seismically active zones be relegated to the national
periphery when it comes to implementing development schemes. Under that
logic, large tracts of northern India, including some of the leading
corporate hubs, which fall within a high seismic zone, should perhaps be
abandoned. What is urgently required is the revamping of our national
understanding and vision of a university with the entire nomenclature
and our understanding of it requiring massive revision and rethinking.
Moreover, from an international outreach point of view, a university in
Motihari, which is close to the border with Nepal, - with Birgunj, the
gateway to Nepal being roughly 55 km away – can very well be developed
with an international outlook and invite students from the neighbouring
country, grow into a pre-eminent knowledge hub in the area and work
towards developing that segment of the border region important for both
the countries. Famed author of the Animal Farm, George Orwell
(1903-1950), linked by birth to Motihari, has in any case already given
the place an international profile! Gaya should have had long back a
global education institution in keeping with its international spirit
and its spiritual message, that such an institution has not been thought
of in the past six decades reflects our attitude towards the
preservation of our spiritual-cultural heritage and the dissemination of
their perennial message.
Instead of making it an opportunity for jointly working out a grand
educational vision between the centre and the state the effort at
developing the CUB is fast degenerating into an avoidable blame game and
a false show of strength. An effort at evolving a consensus by setting
up a joint committee comprising of experts from the state and the centre
and with the centre being sensitive to the needs and demands of the
state can at least start making things move. In fact a high-level
national committee can be formed with leading educationists,
intellectuals and education administrators to examine in great detail
the entire exercise and vision of setting up central universities in the
country. Such periodic scrutiny shall avoid ad-hocism in this
very vital sector of our national life and perhaps aid in developing a
broad educational vision for higher learning in India in consonance with
our civilisational legacy of education and learning.
Meanwhile the CUB must come up and come up with a grand vision and
programme fulfilling the aspirations of the people of that region!
Sources
- Apte D.G., Universities in Ancient India, Baroda: Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, [date not stated]
- Mazumder Nogendra Nath, A History of Education in Ancient India, Calcutta: Macmillan & Co., 1916.
- Mukherjee Radhakamal, India: the Dawn of a New Era, New Delhi: Radha Publications, 1997.
- Sankalia H.D., The University of Nalanda, Madras: B.G.Paul & Co., 1934.
- Abdul Qadir, ‘CUB issue: CM’s stand puts Sibal in a bind’, The Times of India, April 2, 2012.
- Abdul Qadir, ‘CM remains firm on Central University of Bihar location’, The Times of India, 31 March, 2012.
- Santosh Singh, ‘This Round to Sibal, but Nitish not done yet’, The Indian Express, 30 March, 2012.
- ‘Agitation for CUB gathers momentum as PM supports Gaya, not Motihari’,
The Bihar Times, 19 March, 2012.
- ‘Nitish Kumar Urges Kapil Sibal to shed bias against
Motihari’, The Times of India, March 12, 2012.
- Basanta Kumar Mohanty, ‘Varsity in Limbo over Strife’, The Telegraph, Calcutta, 3 March, 2012.
- ‘Himanshi Dhawan, ‘Centre-state site tussle to deprive Bihar of central University’, The Times of India, 3 March, 2012.
- ‘Bihar Houses adopt resolution on Central University’, The Economic Times, March 1, 2012.
News Reports/Analysis
Author is Research Associate in Vivekananda International Foundation
