Friday, Feb 07, 2003
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Tamil Nadu
By Our Special Correspondent
The Humanities and Liberal Arts departments in universities will continue to get support from the UGC and other funding agencies. But, it would depend on the departments' ability to offer more employment-oriented courses, instead of the ``same conventional courses''. Departments should start ``interfacing with other similar departments'' to jointly offer more socially-relevant courses, said Dr. Kishore, who led an expert committee to the Madras University. The panel in the past four days heard presentations made by the university administrators and department heads seeking funding for their proposals during the Tenth Plan (2002-2007) period. He said the Tenth Plan funding was expected to nearly double from Rs.2,500 crores in the Ninth Plan to Rs.4,370 crores. The three main areas of funding will be for core development (including infrastructure), faculty development including research and curriculum development including innovative course delivery. The UGC had identified over 120 employment-oriented programmes with an allocation of about Rs.500 crores. The Vice-Chancellors could choose from these programmes to reorient the existing courses. Over emphasis on specialised departments led to multiplication of departments. But they were unable to attract students leaving the infrastructure and the faculty expertise under-utilised. They would do better to combine and offer composite courses to create graduates who would be ``immediately employable''. Today India had the world third largest higher education sector, with 8.9 million undergraduate students, 11 lakhs in PG courses, 4.5 lakh teachers spread across 278 universities and 13,000 colleges. Arts and Science students accounted for 43 per cent; sciences 20; business studies 21, and engineering and technology 17. However, the latest data showed that 76 per cent of graduates were unemployed/under-employed. So, the UGC was clear in its intention to support and offer incentives for ventures that generated employment, produced students with holistic vision and hands-on skills. The service sector and socially relevant areas like health, food, water management, nutrition, watershed development, rainwater harvesting, Geographical Information System were some priority areas. A student should be able complete one year to gain a certificate in a certain skill, two years to get a diploma, or go on to complete a 3-year degree programme. If required, the student should also be able to go on further to get honours or a PG degree in a core part of the same discipline. The Director (Administration), UGC, P. S. Rajput, said the commission hoped to cover about 5600 colleges by an electronic network ``UGC Infonet'' for better exchange of ideas and research papers and thesis. The Vice-Chancellor, S. Ignacimuthu, hoped that the commission would improve on its Ninth Plan allocation of Rs.3 crores.
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