?People are the soul of universities, not the buildings?

What have been the developments on the report since you presented it to the new government?

I presented the report in June. The knowledge commission also presented its report.

We haven?t been invited to make even one presentation either to the prime minister or to Kapil Sibal thereafter. I have met the prime minister once and the HRD minister once. There has been no discussion on how anything is going to be implemented.

What does that tell you?

People want the same mess as it is. It is good for everybody else. A lot of people can make money. A lot of corruption, no body wants to work together with anybody else. For instance, if we say that there should be no standalone institute of one subject which should be called a university, are these private colleges going to agree? A small technology institute sets itself up and calls itself a university. They say they are calling universities from outside, which great universities are going to come. They may come and align with some department but that is not a university.

What about the foreign education providers bill, does it not address some of these issues?

I haven?t seen the foreign education bill but I think we should have the right to examine who should come and who should not. 100 to 150 years ago America did not have any good universities. They did not have one great university so what did they do. They could not import any of the great universities of Europe, Oxford, Cambridge, universities in Paris or Bologna.

So they built their own?

They built their own, but they got some of the great people from these universities, individuals, who came from these great universities to the US and mixed with people of the universities there. That?s what we should do. We have thousands of qualified Indians. People are the soul of universities, not the buildings. And we are making so many institutes here, so many central universities, so many new IITs, IIMs so fill them up. I?ve had letters from people saying some IITs here have more space than MIT in the US but they have one-third the people being turned out. Why can?t they take three times the number of people?

But the faculty paucity issue keeps cropping up? IITs are saying they don?t want to increase the faculty student ratio from 1 : 8.

This is a ridiculous complaint. When universities started in Germany and else where, they started with 1:70. There after students work 1:1 with teachers all the time. What will they do with a 1:8 ratio. You train only undergraduate students in engineering. What do they do? No one does research, neither the teachers nor the students, not even in name. They are good undergraduate factories. We take wonderful, bright children and make them essentially like components for the outside.

We should make the IITs really great universities, which is what we said in the report. They have learnt how to do something now let them broaden. Let them have medical technologies. Let them have social science, let them have philosophy and languages then they will become great universities. Great universities aren?t built just by talking.

Why do medical institutes not want to come under the higher education commission?

They said they don?t want to be part of an overarching regulatory body. Bureaucrats get together for four meetings and they make this report. There are well meaning bureaucrats as well. But there is a lot of corruption. How will corruption stop if you have only government departments running things? Corruption will go if you let people free, don?t inspect them. This is the idea for higher education commission, there will be least inspection, least monitoring. Make the universities truly autonomous. That 10 people running a university are as capable of 10 people sitting out in Delhi.

The government does not want to relinquish control…

Not the government, it is the bureaucracy. They don?t want to give up their powers. Bureaucrats charge Rs 25 lakh or Rs 50 lakh for allowing you to set up a medical college.

Look at deemed universities, families want to set up colleges for their children to run, there are 25 year olds who have been made chancellors.

Where are these?

Deemed universities are filled with this type of governance. They are supposed to be having an examination of deemed universities. I think it should be done fast. Don?t get into trivia. But take decisions on the real things. Give freedom in every way. Develop the national curriculum framework, let it develop, let it grow, let it do. I think school education is alright because people don?t make so much money in school education. It is universities and colleges with the issues. Unless you really think of a university as a university at the highest level, you will not create teachers of teachers.

How practical is this whole idea of setting up world-class universities?

I hate that word ?world class universities?. That was not the idea. All universities should be of a certain standard. They think that there are some people, who are so good that you have to get them, pamper them, give them four times the salary. They will not have anybody checking their accounts; they will not be under anybody. That is not how it will work. You can only get good people from around the world when they have a stake in developing something new, better than what they have there and they don?t have UGC, AICTE lauding over them.