Mahendra Bapna, former CEO of Tata enterprises HV Axles and HV Transmissions, has recently launched University-21, along with Harvard Graduate School of Education, New York University and Arizona State University. In this interview, Mahendra Bapna tells FE?s Abhishek Chakraborty that a large percentage of engineers and MBA graduates lack critical thinking ability, attention span, comprehension and reasoning skills. Excerpts:
It has often been talked about that the quality of graduates being produced by the Indian education system is largely not employable?
During the last 12-15 years, I have interviewed thousands of engineering and MBA graduates and have found that a large percentage of them lack critical thinking ability, attention span, comprehension and reasoning skills. Except from a few elite (top 10%) institutes, it is hard to find graduates who can articulate and even write proper English. Therefore, I feel the employability of graduates varies from role to role, based on varying degrees of proficiency required in language and cognitive skills. As a result, there is rush for low-skill, back-office kind of jobs rather than aspiring careers in manufacturing, engineering, science and technology.
How can we fill these gaps?
Our higher education system will need to embrace a 21st-century mindset, which is all about creativity, leadership, innovation, problem-solving, social engagement and entrepreneurship. Our institutes and industry have to work seamlessly in order to ensure that we are imparting our students the requisite skills in sync with the changing business needs.
While working as the CEO of two Tata Motors enterprises, did you face any inertia challenge?
As the CEO of HV Axles and HV Transmissions, I set up a 70-member strong faculty to retrain about 4,000 employees. There was a series of technical and adaptive challenges that I faced during the turnaround phase. New product development, initiating a captive engineering research centre, factory-facility planning and investments were few initiatives to fix technical problems. This was relatively an easy part. Improving leadership bandwidth at all levels, changing mindsets of a large workforce and translating vision to actions were the real transformational challenges. It was relentless communication, opening two training academies to gear up the workforce to approach improvements through the innovation concept, customer orientation and adopting TBEM for performance improvement that helped us manage our teams better.
How can University-21 help improve the quality of higher education in developing countries?
I became a Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow in 2012 to take on new challenges and potentially make an even greater societal impact than I was able to in my career. I wanted to put together in qualified team of educators and business leaders who can actually help institutes improve their quality of higher education. Besides my deep functional expertise in leading large enterprises, I am glad that, among the founders of University-21, I have the support of eminent academicians who have played pivotal roles in making NYU the largest private university in the US; in transforming the largest state-owned university (ASU); and in working closely in reforming education in countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Venezuela, Paraguay and the Middle East.
How can we make education more engaging for students?
The success of any curriculum hinges primarily on the quality of teaching and an appropriate strategy of active learning. This includes the traditional chalk-and-board method, the modern audio-visual tools, and the realistic prototype demonstration models. Together, these three can make the classrooms not only exciting but also meaningful.
In particular, to facilitate those students who need repetition, additional strategies are required, which include recording of lectures and discussion held in classrooms, and developing tools to facilitate students to internalise concepts learnt in classrooms by recasting them by simulating the same in a virtual electronic environment.