Promising partnership
Following the rapid growth and development of India’s IT, particularly computer software industry, Indian IT firms are establishing their footprints worldwide, especially in the high-growth economies of China, South Africa, New Zealand and Malaysia. One of the latest such initiatives in the high-growth IT hardware and networking training space is a collaboration agreement between Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Hardware Technology Ltd (IIHT), and the Bahrain Institute of Technology (BIT), the training division of Bahrain Development Bank. Under the partnership BIT will invest US$ 6 million (Rs.2.4 crore) on technology infras-tructure in Bahrain to which IIHT will provide the study material, curriculum and faculty."Our corporate mission is to acquire a global reputation as a premier training institute for hardware maintenance and networking engineers. Through our new Global Learning Solutions division we have partnered with numerous technical training institutes to offer IT infrastructure management services (IMS) training solutions in ten countries including China, South Africa, Russia and Indonesia. Through this strategic partnership with BIT we hope to establish our reputation in the Middle East," says S. Keshava Raju an engineering graduate of Bangalore University and founder-CEO of IIHT.
Since its promotion in 1993, IIHT (annual revenue: Rs.70 crore) has morphed into India’s largest training institute for hardware maintenance technicians. Currently its 350 franchisees operate training centres in 125 locations in India and six abroad, offering 50 short-term and long-term study programmes to over 60,000 students. Apart from regular hardware and networking courses, IIHT is also the licensed training partner of global IT hardware giants such as Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and Sun Microsystems.
"We are impressed with the industry oriented IT hardware and IMS study programmes offered by IIHT. Therefore we are delighted to sign up as its exclusive franchisee in the Kingdom of Bahrain. Under our partnership agreement we will offer short-term diploma programmes in hardware maintenance and full-fledged degree programmes in IMS. This collaboration is the first step towards realising BIT’s long term vision of establishing Bahrain as a regional IT education and services hub," says Adel A. Al Safar, CEO, BIT who was in Bangalore recently to sign the partnership deal.
Having established itself as a market leader in the hardware maintenance and networking training spaces in India and with a foothold in South-east Asia and the Middle East, IIHT is all set to expand its operations to the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe. "Currently the global demand for qualified hardware and IMS professionals is 500,000 against the existing pool of only 200,000. IIHT intends to play a major role in bridging this gap which could slow down economic growth worldwide," says Keshava Raju.
Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)
Gubernatorial academic
Although Vinayak V. Dalvie has been the Mumbai-based deputy secretary (education) to the governor of Maharashtra since November 2003, serving first with erstwhile governor Mohammed Fazal and currently with the incumbent S.M. Krishna, he prefers to regard himself as a teacher. "When I accepted this assignment in the governor’s mansion, I requested I should be permitted to continue with my teaching," he says. Having duly received gubernatorial assent, Dalvie continues to teach fisheries and endocrinology at the Masters level in Mumbai University. Moreover he is visiting lecturer at the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art. Inside the palatial seaside Raj Bhavan office-cum-residential complex in Mumbai’s elite Malabar Hill, Dalvie assists the governor to discharge his duties as chancellor of 19 universities across Maharashtra (pop. 98 million).
Dalvie is eminently qualified for the several duties he discharges. With a Masters in fisheries and endocrinology from the University of Mumbai, a Masters in fine art from the Sir J.J. School of Fine Arts and MMS from Mumbai’s Welingkar Institute of Management, he has been an active researcher of subjects as diverse as zoology and business management. Not an individual who believes that education can ever be completed, Dalvie is currently researching the potential of international marketing of Indian education in Mumbai’s renowned Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies.
Prior to signing up for gubernatorial duties four years ago, most of Dalvie’s 25-year teaching career was in Mumbai’s well-known Mithibai College from where he rose to positions of importance in Mumbai University, including director of students’ welfare, foreign students’ advisor and director of the information bureau.
His continuous interaction with tertiary students has convinced Dalvie there is a bright future in marketing Indian higher education internationally. "The future of higher education is bright in India though unfortunately today the situation is that foreign students aspiring to study in here are given an awful run-around. Moreover most hostels built for foreign students have more Indians than foreign students staying in them. But I expect a turnaround in the situation in three-five years. Meanwhile I will do what I can to rectify the situation, while supporting foreign students seeking assistance in getting admission into colleges in Maharashtra," says Dalvie, who believes there is a huge opportunity for attracting college students from the Gulf countries, Thailand and South America to India.
Simultaneously Dalvie is working on creating research awareness in Maharashtra’s 19 universities. "Governor Krishna recently launched Avishkar, an initiative focused on encouraging research culture in undergraduate, postgrad and doctoral students. Under Avishkar students will be given opportunities to exhibit their research projects at various events and interact with experts in their fields who will act as judges and reward them significantly. Higher education in India has huge capacity to expand. I want to participate in the process of expansion and quality improvement simultaneously," says Dalvie.
Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)
Film academy architect
When the Chennai-based Prasad Group, Asia’s largest provider of post production services in the film and video industry, promoted the L.V. Prasad Film & TV Academy in 2005 to commemorate 50 years of the Prasad Group (established in 1956 by veteran film maker L.V. Prasad), highly regarded film director, educator and columnist K. Hariharan was the unanimous choice as director of the academy. Two years later, this academy sited on the sprawling six-acre campus of the bustling Prasad Studios in Chennai, has acquired an excellent reputation for providing its students world-class film and video education, with the added benefit of interacting and working with renowned film technicians and creative artistes who visit Prasad Studios regularly. Moreover the academy’s state-of-the-art infrastructure including digital sound recording and dubbing theatres, film laboratory, a dedicated shooting floor, contemporary equipment, video cameras and a huge library of books and DVDs gives its students a flying start in India’s booming feature films and television industries.
The academy offers two-year postgraduate diploma courses in film direction and cinematography (fee: Rs.2 lakh per year), and a one-year diploma in editing and sound design (Rs.1.65 lakh) to 30 students (ten in each course) who are instructed by 12 full-time faculty and 15 visiting film and television industry professionals. The syllabus drawn up by Hariharan with inputs from eminent film professionals, is designed to integrate allied arts with the aesthetics of cinema and television.
"Our objective is to nurture film makers with a holistic vision of cinema as an extension of the liberal arts. Conventional cinema pedagogies are based on the European and American models which are not quite suitable for Indian conditions. We advocate the study of Indian cinema and Indian best practices in filmmaking. The dominant focus of our syllabus is narrative style, content and creativity as the essence of Indian cinema," says Hariharan, an alumnus of Bombay University and the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII), Pune who has directed seven feature films including the highly acclaimed Marathi film Ghashiram Kotwal (1978) and the Tamil Ezhavathu Manithan which bagged the national award for the best Tamil film in 1982. Moreover he directed a Hindi film Current which won the best critics award in 1992.
Film making apart, Hariharan brings a wealth of teaching experience to his job as director of the L.V. Prasad Academy. His curriculum vitae includes four years as lecturer at the Adyar Film Institute, Chennai; visiting faculty at the University of Pennsylvania; guest faculty at Miami University, FTII, Pune and the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
Two years on, the academy is attracting widespread notice, even as ambitious plans are on the drawing board. "We are negotiating a collaboration with Arcadia University, Philadelphia for a student exchange programme and have signed a partnership with the South Korean College of Fine Arts to develop a new Indian animation idiom. Introducing a range of short-term courses in animation is also on the cards," says Hariharan.
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)
Master toys designer
"Science principles are best understood if they are incorporated into play toys," says Arvind Gupta, coordinator of the Children’s Science Centre of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, Pune, a hi-tech research facility open to scientists of all Indian universities. An electronics engineering graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, and winner of several awards for popularising science, Gupta is the author of 12 books on science education and has conceptualised, scripted, and directed 75 science documentary films for national telecasts."For the past 25 years, I have been teaching students to make toys from simple materials — old newspapers, slippers, matchboxes, broomsticks, ball pen refills, film-cans, discarded cycle tubes. This not only stimulates creativity in children, but also helps them to better remember scientific principles and formulae," says this master toys designer and Unesco science teaching consultant, who has advised science educators in the US, UK, Sweden, Japan, France, Finland and Pakistan.
Inaugurated in 2004, the Children’s Science Centre supported by a a recurring annual maintenance grant of Rs.5 lakh awarded by the Mumbai-based Sir Ratan Tata Trust, and a one-time capital grant (utilised for construction of the admin block, from the estate of the late Marathi writer Pu La Deshpande), attracts class IV-X students from over 400 schools in Pune and neighbouring districts every week.
"They bring old newspapers, used photocopy papers, scissors, scale, glue, old slippers and assorted paraphernalia which is used to make newspaper caps, colour mixers, rotating hexa-flexagons, flapping birds, matchbox riders, rolling toys, soda straw flutes, whirling wool, film bottle pump to inflate a balloon, numbers fund with a calendar etc," says Gupta.
Constrained to survive on a shoestring budget of Rs.5 lakh per year (though the Union government’s department of science and technology chipped in with Rs.2 lakh for books and equipment in the first year, it hasn’t been renewed), recently the centre experienced an unexpected windfall. Impressed with its ingenuity, last year an anonymous donor anted up Rs.10 lakh with a promise to pay Rs.10 lakh more shortly. "We are planning to raise a corpus of Rs.1 crore so that we have a contingencies reserve. But money doesn’t run this centre; the driving force is the passion of the staff. The Rs.5 lakh grant is sufficient for our needs," says Gupta philosophically.
Michael Gonsalves
(Pune)
Dell ambassador in academia
In an economy experiencing the pains of double digit industrial growth in terms of an acute shortage of skilled manpower, industry professionals ready, willing and able to lend a helping hand to academia by volunteering to assume the additional responsibilities of visiting faculty are more than welcome. Alekhya Talapatra, director sales (government and public sector) of the India subsidiary of the US-based computer hardware giant Dell Corporation Inc (annual sales: Rs.232,000 crore) is one such volunteer. "Unlike developed countries where universities proactively engage in industrial, economic and societal research, ours is more a theoretical academic culture. Therefore there isn’t much scope for industry professionals to engage with academia. Moreover monetary incentives aren’t attractive," says Talapatra who has signed on as visiting faculty at Delhi’s Fore School of Management, where he lectures on sales distribution and B2B marketing.A practising professional in the IT industry for more than a decade, Talapatra — an alumnus of St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta and XLRI, Jamshedpur — invests a wealth of knowledge and experience into his three lectures per month at the Fore School (estb.1981). "Initial government and industry resistance to IT is history and now there is widespread acceptance of its benefits. Therefore my lectures at FSM focus on IT-driven marketing innovation and creativity," he says.
As an IT industry professional well aware of the power of technology to raise teaching-learning standards, Talapatra is disappointed with Indian academia’s reluctance to use new ICT (information communication techno-logies) to bridge the academic gap between India and the West. "There is complete lack of understanding as to what use computers can be put to in academics. Rather than computer education as a showpiece subject, ICT needs to be integrated into pedagogies at the elementary, high school and university levels," advises Talapatra.
According to him there is growing awareness of the potential of IT and ICT in areas such as distance education and research. "The incremental use of ICT in distance education offers the hope of quality school and tertiary education reaching under-served students in the remotest parts of the country. This is the best argument for accelerating India’s IT and management education revolutions. And with it, issues of PC affordability, broadband connectivity and penetration will be resolved expeditiously," says Talapatra.
Autar Nehru
(Delhi)