ACCORDING to the author, lecturer and thinker, the Indian education system does not encourage thinking out of the box. Urmila Rao of Careers360 caught up with Lord Desai at Asia Pacific Management Institute, Jasola.

Q: Do you think education has become commercialised?
A: It has become professionalised, I would say. These days nobody wants to do Economics, they want to do Business Studies, Management Studies, Accounting and Finance, or HR. Who is doing Sanskrit or History? Okay, partly this may be the way of the world but a few people who do are good at it and very motivated.

Q: Does India need more higher education institutions?
A: India needs 10 times as many higher education institutions as it has got. It really ought to sort out many complicated laws too.

There are so many different bodies for non-degree education and degree education. Then there are all sorts for union or regional rules. Yes, you should have a regulatory certifying body and a unified sort of exam. What do the Americans do?

They don’t restrict people from opening colleges. Let students start in a junior college and move to two-year college and go further on, as long as they can sign up and pay for it.

Let the consumer decide and then judge the colleges by performance.  In America, there is great variation in the quality of educational institutions and the aim of ranking universities is precisely to evaluate their quality. And institutions should be judged by output, not by input or process.

Q: How do you rate the quality of institutions in India?
A: The quality of Indian universities is not internationally good. Again I blame government policies for that. India needs many colleges of higher education and it needs at least ten which could at least be in  the top 200.

Q: What is your view of British colleges in terms of reputation?
A:  The British until very recently, had a very elite view of education. Education was a bench to filter out the non-middle class. Lately, there has been a bit of democratisation of education because of polytechnics which eventually can become universities.

Q: But precocious students like you still choose to go abroad for studies?
A: We probably relieved the pressure on the market! Your see, higher education teaching doesn’t require teaching qualification, at least not in England. In higher education it is the knowledge of your subject that matters, not the knowledge of teaching. People should not say, “Oh we don’t have teachers; therefore we will not open colleges.” Let people take the initiative, let the private sector do these things.

Q: In India quality faculty and high fees are seen as setbacks...
A: If there is a demand for faculty, there will be supply of quality faculty. The high fee in India is nothing like high fee in Harvard. People borrow to buy houses. Why can’t you borrow to get educated? House would be a depreciating asset. Education is an income-generating asset.