Many universities are teaching shops: Chidambaram

Mohali (Punjab), Dec 2 (IANS) Stressing the need to build world-class educational institutions in the country, Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram Sunday regretted that many universities in the country were just teaching shops.

Addressing students and faculty members after inaugurating the Mohali campus of the Indian School of Business (ISB) here Sunday, Chidambaram said: “My deepest regret is that many of our universities are teaching shops, with poor infrastructure, outdated textbooks, poor pedagogy and methodology, and untrained teachers. What we need is world-class institutions. ISB is one of a handful of such institutions in India.”

The ISB campus is on 70 acres of land given by the Punjab government. The Mohali ISB is the second campus of ISB-Hyderabad, a leading private business school ranked among the Top-20 B-schools in the world. The first session of ISB-Mohali commenced April this year.

Chidambaram told students not to be swayed by greener pastures abroad after completing their courses at ISB, as there was no dearth of challenges in the country.

He said: “What is it that you want to be after you leave this campus? There will be a temptation to take a job in another part of the world. Seize the opportunity. But please remember, there is no other place in the world that can challenge you like India. The greatest challenge is building India.”

The finance minister said he had been asking bankers to provide education loans to students liberally. He said that till now, only about 24 lakh students had taken education loans worth Rs.52,000 crore.

Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal said Punjab would soon become an educational hub with a number of leading institutions like ISB and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) being set up here. He said two more institutes, National Food Bio-Technology and National Institute of Nano-Technology, were coming up soon.

IANS 2012-12-02 20:16:10