-The Times of India   Higher education in India should not perpetuate inequality of opportunity It's admission time again. Charming images of 'freshers' entering the campus and glossy advertisements of the universities we had never heard before hide the harsh reality of educational mortality from school to higher education. Elaborate coverage of rising cutoffs and entrance tests draw our attention to individual merit and luck. We tend to forget the overwhelming role of...

The Bill to regulate medical education and govern human resource in health is a highly diluted version of the original draft. Distortions in the area of Human Resource for Health (HRH) are the root cause of many of the ills facing the health sector in India. Among them is the shortage of qualified medical professionals. The estimated density of 19 health workers (qualified and unqualified) per 10,000 population is nearly 25...

-The Economic Times Kulvinder Gill, professor of breeding and genetics at the Washington State University in the US, describes himself as a dreamer and an optimist. One of his dreams is to make sure food production does not decline over the next few decades, when increasing temperatures act on the yields of major crops. Specifically, he is beginning a project with six other organisations in India to make wheat less sensitive to...

Doing a course from global top universities such as Harvard, Peking or Oxford, while being in India, will soon be a reality. Country’s higher education regulator, the University Grants Commission, on Saturday opened doors for world top 500 universities to start dual degree or twining courses with Indian higher education institutions. The commission approved regulations also gave six months to higher education institutions in India running courses of foreign universities to...

With the Central government unsure of getting the Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations) Bill, 2010, through the Rajya Sabha, the Human Resource Development Ministry is now trying to allow “backdoor” entry to foreign institutions. The Ministry has asked the University Grants Commission (UGC) to identify possibilities within the existing laws of regulating and allowing the foreign educational institutions. The two possible ways of going about it are allowing these...