Curiously, there’s been a deep disconnect between Indian industry and academia for over four decades, with neither the leaders of India Inc nor wiseacres of the academy being aware that the national interest demands their active engagement and cooperation. I recall that over three decades ago when I was editor of the country’s first two business magazines, it was rare for the opinions of academics to feature on our pages, and rarer still for business magnates to make any reference to industry-academia cooperation or interaction. My routine perusal of increasingly boring contemporary business magazines and publications indicates this stand-off hasn’t changed.
The mutual indifference of industry and the academy has extracted a stiff price from the Indian economy. India Inc is notoriously averse to research and innovation as a result of which its productivity is rock-bottom by international standards. Similarly starved of sponsored research stimulus and funding, the research and citations record of time-serving academics is also abysmal. Over the past half century neither Indian industry nor the academy has produced any big bang product or process innovation. It’s shameful that automobile, computer, internet, cell phone and even labour-saving household and kitchen devices and other killer products and innovations — of which Indian consumers are enthusiastic consumers — were invented elsewhere.
It’s especially demoralising to learn that indigenous fighter jet Tejas has been 30 years in the making, and that even an indigenous parachute designed by the DRDO (Defence Research and Development Organisation) for over 12 years, flopped recently. And about the inability of industry or the academy to design a low-cost plough and other farm implements for the country’s utterly neglected rural majority, the less said the better.
If the record of corporate India for research and innovation is bad, the academy’s is worse. None of the country’s 37,000 colleges and 800 universities is ranked among the Top 100 in the annual World University Rankings league tables of the reputed London-based rating/ranking agencies QS and Times Higher Education. And as detailed in our cover story herewith, most of them recklessly certify hapless graduates who are unemployable in industry, which is paradoxically suffering an acute shortage of well-educated and skilled personnel. Hence in our cover feature of this issue, we stress that greater industry-academy cooperation is imperative for resolving the huge and snowballing challenge of youth unemployment confronting the nation.
In the special report, Delhi-based columnist Arati Bhargava traces the history of Aligarh Muslim University promoted as the Muhammadan Anglo Oriental College in 1877 by social activist Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, to modernise and mainstream youth of the minority Muslim community, and its long struggle for minority status. Why is the minority tag so important for AMU, the Muslim community and the country? This is explained in unprecedented detail in this special feature.
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