Due to an increasingly large student population attending college, the Universities in India are tightly packed and competition is at an all time high. National Knowledge Commission chairman Sam Pitroda made a “wild” suggestion – why not run the University in shifts – that would automatically double all capacity. Start the day at 6:00 am and end it by 3:00. Start another shift at 3:30 and end it at midnight. This is a low cost of way of increasing capacity since we would be reusing a lot of the infrastructure.
Mumbai University has taken this suggestion seriously and is working out how this can be practically implemented – for starters they found that this would increase the capacity by 60% rather than 100% since not all courses would demand 2 shifts.
I didn’t know Sam was the chairman of the National Knowledge Commission. I am glad he is. The right person, at the right place, at the right time. We can not forget how he was instrumental in facilitating the Communication Revolution in India. I hope we see something good become of our education system as well. I do like how the system has finally realized that being adaptive and responsive to the industry is very important for a University.
Many colleges already do this Mumbai.
When I was a student (over a decade ago)
Evening used to be for Junior College and Mornings for the graduate students.
We used the same labs, same class rooms and infrastructure. Our timings were managed in a such a way that resource utilization was optimized.
I think real challenge is creating a more dispersed model that moves away from metros and concentrates on Tier III sities and less. They will provide the feeder.
Let the metros get the brands (IIMs and IITs and the other IIs) however, other educational institutions need to be dispersed and feed into larger universities in the Metros.
Mr. Pitroda’s solution addresses an increasing population. It does not necessarily address access to education
Cheers-
A post that made me think. Rare!
Anand
Without an in-depth knowledge of how it works and just from what i think is the college system in india, this looks more of a strategy to accommodate increasing applications rather than ensuring increased access to education. (what anand says as well)
Moreover, a shift system cannot be applied as a general system for all kind of courses. Planning a subject refreshment would take a lot in consideration along with demography.
Alas,the suggestion of SAM are taken seriously. there will be no denial of admission to all the students seeking admission in course of his/her choice.In country like India where shortage of Infrastructure is there available resources can be utilised to maximum.