Quality education is vital: Krishna

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, MARCH 19. The Chief Minister, Mr. S.M. Krishna, on Monday called for

quality in higher education to meet the challenges posed by the knowledge-based economy. Quality meant much more than equipping the students with basic skills, he quipped.

He was inaugurating the 6th Biennial International Conference on ``Quality assurance in higher education'' organised here by the International Network for Quality Assurance Agencies in Higher Education (INQAAHE) and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).

Mr. Krishna felt that in government-funded institutions, the expenditure on quality improvement had been very low. While State funding for education might not increase substantially, there was a need to subsidise financially weak but academically competent students, he said.

He said there was a definite shift from the manufacturing-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, which was increasingly becoming universal. ``Geographical distances are no longer a limiting factor in this economy,'' he added.

The fears of technological changes triggering unemployment were unfounded, he said. This proved false in the context of the knowledge-based products in the global context as unemployment declined. The U.S., for instance, had the lowest unemployment rate for the last 40 years, he pointed out.

Thanks to an increase in trained manpower, unemployment was showing signs of decline in Europe, Mr. Krishna said. ``It is in this context that higher education has become a driving force of economic development,'' he noted.

Mr. Krishna said that in much of the developing world, higher education was in a bad shape for the past few years. The confidence in higher education eroded due to unemployment. Quality-oriented development was the need of the hour. ``We just cannot work with the tools of yesterday to solve the problems of today,'' he observed.

Higher education, he said, should respond to the changing expectations of manpower in tune with the changing socio-economic setup of the country.

He said that although India had made strides in the information technology sector, the IT infrastructure was small in comparison with the population. ``India is ranked 39th in the IT world as per the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union,'' he added.

Mr. Krishna said the Government was anxious to transform the traditional classroom to meet global educational standards using IT as a tool. The intention was to avoid creating a digital divide. ``Quality of education cannot be compromised at any level,'' he added.

Drawing attention to a shift in emphasis from ``any education'' to ``quality education'', Mr. Krishna said evaluation by agencies such as the NAAC would be a valuable measure of the health of the education system.

Education Standard Board: The Minister of State for Higher Education, Dr. G. Parameshwar, said the Government had constituted an Education Standard Board to monitor the standard of educational institutions from the collegiate level.

Mr. M.K. Kaw, Secretary, Ministry of Human Resource Development, said quality assurance had been declared a mandatory requirement for all institutions. For the first time, the University Grants Commission (UGC) had started a system of rewarding good institutions with additional funds on the basis of their performance. There was also a medium-term plan to link financial grants with assessment grades, he added.

However, he said, the evaluation of quality did not always depend on the institution. Factors such as location, favourable grant-in-aid position and recruitment of teachers would attract the potential students, he pointed out.

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