Building a Stanford, MIT, or Harvard in India is not a task that can be easily achieved. Nalanda 2.0 was an initiative started by Shailendra “Shail” Kumar, former president of the IIT Foundation and the author of Building Golden India. The aim was to build a university of the future, called Ekagrid, in Bangalore.
Unfortunately, Kumar announced that the board of directors have decided to close the university initiative.
“We launched the initiative in 2018 to build a world-class multidisciplinary research university in India that would be at a similar level of excellence, scale, and scope as Stanford, MIT and Nalanda of ancient India,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post, announcing the end of the chapter.
To build Ekagrid, Kumar had assembled an outstanding team of academic leaders, entrepreneurs, VCs, and senior industry executives. This team, based in India, Australia, Singapore, UAE, and the US, included faculty and alumni from 11 of the top 25 research universities globally.
The single-minded focus of Nalanda 2.0 was to make India’s higher education system world-class and launch institutes such as Global Institute of Artificial Intelligence, College of Computing, and College of Health and Life Sciences. “Ekagrid will expand its scope and scale to become a comprehensive and multidisciplinary research university,” reads the website.
What Went Wrong?
The Nalanda 2.0 team also engaged with the Prime Minister Officer, the education ministry, and officials from different states such as Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, and Telangana, to zero-in on the best location for the university.
Speaking with AIM, Amit Sheth, the chair and founding director of the AIISC, said that he had also proposed the idea of Ekagrid to PM Narendra Modi. Sheth, a part of the advisory team for Nalanda 2.0, said the project was still in initial stages of raising funds.
“The Prime Minister was very prompt to understand the need for this project and provide actionable guidance,” he added.
“At least thrice in the past 18 months, I felt that we were close to securing an anchor donor-level funding and receiving required government support at the central and state levels to launch the university,” said Kumar.
However, despite these concerted and sustained efforts over six years, they could not get the required funding. He added that the case for establishing a university in India has only become more compelling with time, making the outcome even more disappointing.
Sheth said that the bold and ambitious effort was worth taking on, much like what China did 15-20 years back. “However, the donor enthusiasm may have yet to match the vision’s scope,” he said, while adding that relying on high undergraduate tuition money was not a good option.
“Agreeing to give complete autonomy necessary to make such an effort successful and possible in the West, is something the Indian higher education policymakers and bureaucrats don’t appear ready for,” added Sheth. “Ekagrid’s vision was different and more ambitious than Ashoka, Plaksha, and Jio, and remains a target for future initiatives.”
Sheth highlighted that in the US, universities such as Stanford and UC Berkeley promote research that helps companies, such as Google, build better products. The same needs to be done within India.
What Next?
There is still hope though. Professor Ravikumar Bhaskaran, life fellow of IIT Kharagpur, said that he was eagerly waiting for the establishment of Ekagrid. However, he also placed a higher bet on the IITs of the country to compete with the institutions of global excellence.
“I feel it’s a safer bet to expect some of the IITs to reach the top 25 among the world’s best. I wish Indians around the world (including NRIs) come forward to support the IITs and help them reach there soon,” said Bhaskaran.
Disagreeing with him, Kumar said that India needs many top-class multidisciplinary research universities. “IITs cannot be the standard of excellence for India forever. India can do so much better,” he said, adding that India is also failing because millions of youths don’t have access to higher education, and IIT, NITs, and BITS have very low annual intake of students.
Meanwhile, the funding for institutions, such as the Jio Institute, has been on hold for more than two years because of several controversies. There are still issues with universities not being allowed to be built with private money.
Regardless, Sheth told AIM that there is still hope as there are other plans for building an AI institute within India, focusing on strategic autonomy in AI to move away from Western companies.
