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We are all familiar with the challenges for <keyword id="6375224" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="higher-education">higher education</keyword> in India. Not enough capacity – the danger that we will not be able to cope with sheer numbers and provide direly needed education to the majority of our young in the years to come, turning our so called <keyword id="576921" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="demographic-dividend">demographic dividend</keyword> into a disaster. Very poor quality – our existing institutions are in decline and the quality of new institutions are generally sub-par. Obsession with specialisation – in a society hankering for employment the emphasis on studying engineering, management, law, medicine, commerce, etc., is creating legions of trained manpower rather than problem-solvers and leaders. The government is making tremendous efforts to expand capacity by creating greenfield institutions, but there is only so much the government can do. It needs to be given a leg up by the private sector, but deplorably the regulatory <keyword id="6356826" type="COMPANY" weightage="80" keywordseo="environment">environment</keyword> remains constraining even for legitimate private players to set up institutions – most private institutions tend to be perceived as money-making rackets, with little or no concern for their students. In this context, much has been written and said about how to solve India’s higher education mess. Let me suggest three ideas that could radically change our country’s trajectory. While these ideas may seem far-fetched, I believe we, other than any country, have the opportunity to innovate in higher education and, in fact, have no choice but to do so. 
 
• Create education SEZs 
• Offer surplus land within existing public institutions to new public or private institutions 
• Rapidly expand Massive Open Online Courses) (MOOCs ) 
 
Creating SedZs Creating <keyword id="776571" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="Special-education">Special education</keyword> Zones (SedZs) akin to the industrial Special economic Zones (SeZs) can transform access to and the quality of higher education in this country. every year hundreds of thousands of our bright young students have no choice but to go abroad for higher studies. They spend billions of dollars and thousands of crores to get this education. What is worse, a simple demand-supply analysis of higher education suggests that these numbers will continue to grow, and grow exponentially. We are, in effect, outsourcing higher education to the US, UK, Australia and <keyword id="22501" type="COUNTRY" weightage="80" keywordseo="New-Zealand">New Zealand</keyword>. Recently, one of my employees sent her son to study dentistry in <keyword id="6358826" type="COUNTRY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Russia">Russia</keyword> even though she could ill-afford it. The new craze is “twinning programmes” where you study in an Indian university for 2 years and then complete your graduation and get a degree in the foreign university. <keyword id="6356662" type="COUNTRY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Singapore">Singapore</keyword> and <keyword id="6354539" type="COMPANY" weightage="80" keywordseo="Dubai">Dubai</keyword> are ostensibly building education hubs for Asia, but the reality is that it is Indian students hungry for a good education who are swarming new institutions in these locations. The tragedy is that home-grown public and private institutions are now setting up campuses in neighbouring and far-away foreign locations to escape overpowering local regulatory constraints. In effect, even though we can ill-afford to, as a country, we are outsourcing, and increasingly so, our higher education to the west. Given that both the supply of students and the demand for college graduates are right here in India, why not replicate the “overseas and higher-quality” experience in India by creating SedZs along the lines of the manufacturing SeZs. Interestingly, the concept of SeZs for education first seemed to have surfaced in 2004. In a then oped, the <keyword id="2776992" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="erstwhile-commerce-Secretary">erstwhile commerce Secretary</keyword> <keyword id="2776991" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="P-P-Prabhu">P.P. Prabhu</keyword> had made a case vigorously for SedZs saying, “The Special education Zone (SedZ) institution should be treated as though it is deemed to have been established in a foreign enclave, and, therefore, freed from all domestic controls and restrictions. An SedZ institution...should not be required to seek any approvals for its courses; it would need to be allowed to charge any fees, follow its own admission criteria and award its own degrees, and so on. However, if an SedZ institution wants recognition of its degrees and diplomas in our country, it would be required to meet the standards and conditions of affiliation and recognition.” 
 
Leveraging surplus land in existing institutions 
I have recently been part of an effort to build a new private university in India. With our poor infrastructure it is impossible to build a high-quality institution away from a large urban centre in India. Faculty are unwilling to teach and live in a place that does not offer employment opportunities for their spouses and an excellent school for their children. A case in point are the new IITs and IIMs, several of which, established in far-flung areas of the country on vast tracts of land in isolated settings, are struggling to attract faculty for the lack of adequate social infrastructure around their campuses. Clearly, for new institutions, urban or suburban locations make most sense. Urban and suburban locations make sense also because of the emerging trend of inner-city university campuses that are tightly integrated with their host cities. As <keyword id="2776994" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="Kerstin-Hoeger">Kerstin Hoeger</keyword>, full <keyword id="2776990" type="POSITION" weightage="80" keywordseo="professor-of-architecture">professor of architecture</keyword> and urban design at Norwegian university of Science and Technology points out, “worldwide, universities and their host cities are evolving into ‘knowledge cities’.” She and others in the field argue that the erstwhile ideal of a mono-functional and isolated greenfield campus removed from the city, providing academics and students the distance to reflect on humanity, is fast becoming obsolete in the context of modern knowledge societies, and is giving way instead to open campuses that share a close relationship with their host city. In fact, when seen today many of the top 50 universities of the world – for instance, <keyword id="54274" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="MIT">MIT</keyword>, LSE, <keyword id="53675" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="harvard">Harvard</keyword> and TU Berlin to name a few – are embedded in such ‘knowledge ecosystems’ enabling them to perform better. However, the model demands tracts of centrally located urban or semi-urban land that are increasingly hard to come by and come at exorbitant prices. For a new university to incur the high cost of land acquisition in its early stages is crippling – most new institutions end up investing large amounts in <keyword id="6354553" type="COMPANY" weightage="80" keywordseo="real-estate">real estate</keyword> even before they get started, unless they get subsidized and free land from the Government. Even so, most urban centres do not have unutilised land that the Government can allot for higher education. By contrast several central universities and institutes have vast tracts of land within urban areas that are underutilised. As an example, the <keyword id="58265" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="Jawaharlal-Nehru-University">Jawaharlal Nehru University</keyword> (JNU) in Delhi has a 1000-acre campus that is largely unused. <keyword id="105777" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="Osmania-University-in-Hyderabad">Osmania University in Hyderabad</keyword> has a 2000-acre campus. Why not allow new institutions to co-build and co-habit campuses for a fee and ensure more efficient utilisation of scarce and precious space. The “rentals” for the land will help supplement and improve the <keyword id="6357455" type="EVENT" weightage="80" keywordseo="Funding">funding</keyword> of existing institutions and not needing to spend their initial capital on land acquisition will help the new institution, in addition to giving them an attractive location to launch from. At the very least, the government should expand capacity and diversify areas of study in its central and public universities and institutes of national importance situated in central urban locations and built on vast tracts of land. 
 
Rapidly scaling up Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) India has no option but to <keyword id="819920" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="embrace">embrace</keyword> online education in a big way. This is because MOOCs are capable of solving two of India’s most pressing constraints at once – access and quality. It is near impossible for the country to provide a high-quality university education to the millions of deserving students with the existing numbers and quality of faculty. Current faculty-student ratios will just not get us there. The only way to fundamentally shift that ratio is to have “massive” classes made possible by the new MOOCs. In online education, unlike in traditional education, a few high-quality professors can reach manifold students. Of course, people will get into a debate whether this has the potential to replace teachers but we have also seen developments like Kindle and music players which have redefined usage patterns. There is also the classic intellectual debate about whether online education will work in isolation, in the absence of a classroom full of students, peers and teachers, but new theories show that self-learning is a new model whose time has come. But more importantly, we need to ask ourselves if we can afford to engage in such debates. India seemingly has no choice! Unlike in the West, where online education only adds to what already exists (more like education for the educated), in India it has the potential to be the first port of call for millions of students who are currently left out of the higher education system, or are having to settle for lower quality alternatives. Even if this model is the second or third choice for developed countries, it is a luxury for India to spurn it out of hand. In fact, many young Indians are already taking to MOOCs in a big way. At roughly 10%, Indian students form the second-largest group on Coursera, the biggest US-based MOOC, which has 4.3 million enrolments from over 190 countries. On Udacity and EdX, the other top-3 MOOCs, Indians represent equally large proportions. Clearly, innumerable Indian students see great value in MOOCs since the demand for education, particularly high-quality education, is way higher than supply and availability. At the very least, online education provides another chance to students who cannot understand or clear a course in the first attempt, and acts as a great democratiser. Agreed that distance or online learning is not the newest idea on the block – it has been around for a while. There are 176 institutes in India that offer distance learning programmes and 26% students are enrolled in them. However, there is a need to deregulate and scale up the distance/online learning model to be much larger than what it currently is. If we are ever to achieve quality with access, there is also a need to mainstream this sort of learning. The ideal solution has to be a blend where online education plays an important role in mainstream education. 
 
(The <keyword id="842" type="POSITION" weightage="60" keywordseo="author">author</keyword>, Pramath Raj Sinha, is <keyword id="1535570" type="POSITION" weightage="80" keywordseo="founder-and-managing-director">founder and managing director</keyword> 9.9 Media. He has also served as the founding <keyword id="6548521" type="POSITION" weightage="80" keywordseo="dean">dean</keyword> of the <keyword id="6357275" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="80" keywordseo="Indian-School-of-Business">Indian School of Business</keyword>. This article was contributed to Thinkers, a quarterly thought leadership magazine that features the brightest thinkers in the areas of economics and governance, philosophy and literature, science and technology, and management. To learn more about the magazine, please visit: <a href="http://www.thinkers.in/">www.thinkers.in</a> )

Thinkers/Thinkers 50: 3 big ideas that will reform India's ailing higher education system

New Delhi, Apr 19 () To ensure smooth cargo operations at India's ports amid the coronavirus pandemic, the shipping ministry has sought the commerce ministry's intervention for issuing advisory for recognition of electronic trading documents instead of "manual trade documentation" still required by many departments and financial institutions. Citing bottlenecks caused in handling EXIM cargo on account of the current manual process, it sought the commerce ministry's intervention for issuing advisory to departments, including customs, and the Indian Banks Association for accepting 'electronically generated trade documentation'. India has 12 major ports -- Deendayal (erstwhile Kandla), Mumbai, JNPT, Marmugao, New Mangalore, Cochin, Chennai, Kamarajar (earlier Ennore), V O Chidambarnar, Visakhapatnam, Paradip and Kolkata (including Haldia) that handled nearly 705 million tonnes (MT) cargo in 2019-20. Citing challenges faced in handling of EXIM cargo, Shipping Secretary Gopal Krishna in a letter to Commerce Secretary Anup Wadhawan said the inability of service providers such as courier agencies, general lockdown restrictions and the requirement of social distancing are causing severe impediment in issuance, delivery and despatch of physical format based trade documentation, which is directly impacting the release of import containers and cargo. Stating that the current manual process that requires surrender of original bill of lading (BL) at the shipping lines office, collection of paper invoice and payment by cash and collection of paper delivery order issued by then shipping line add up to 11.5 hours of person-to-person contact on an average, Krishna said it not only creates a high level of risk with the contagious nature of COVID-19 but results in considerable delays in release of cargo. Considering the present circumstances on account of COVID-19, the Indian Ports Association (IPA) under the aegis of the Ministry of Shipping has taken steps towards digitising some of trade related process through implementation of Port Community System (PCS), the letter said. PCS was launched in December 2018 and has managed to digitise the major part in port related activities including e-invoice, e-payment and and electronic delivery order (e-DO). Bill of lading (BL), a critical component, however is still missing and trade bodies under the umbrella of the Federation of Indian Logistics Association (FILA) have supported the IPA initiative of eBL and identified providers like CargoX, the letter mentions. "I would request you to consider issuing suitable guidelines and advisory consistent with international conventions on the subject to Departments as well as to Indian Bank Association for banks in India by accepting 'electronically generated trade documentation'. "Also, the 'stakeholders of the trade industry' such as carriers, exporters and importers can also be issued mandate to adopt and use such platforms for 'electronically generated trade documentation' including Bill of Lading (document of title) across stakeholders and across nations," the shipping secretary said. "Such a measure shall help ease the economic and humanitarian challenges and also encourage continuity of trade and also enable trade revival in future. This will also support the Ministry of Shipping and Ministry of Commerce in their efforts to ensure smooth flow of Export Import trade and release of import containers/cargo at various ports in India. Should the stakeholder or financial institutions or Departments require any support or assistance, they can reach out to Ministry of Shipping or the IPA," he added. The ministry also requested considering CargoX, a public block chain platform that provides the eBL solution and added that other solution providers of eBL like Tradelens, Wave, Bolero etc are explored for maritime EXIM cargo. The number of vessels handled by ports during 2019-20 was around 20,837, whereas during 2018-19, number of vessels handled was 20,853. The vessel traffic declined slightly by 0.08 per cent in comparison to last year. The major ports handle about 60 per cent of the country's total cargo traffic. NAM NAM ABMABM

COVID-19: Shipping Min seeks govt intervention for recognition of electronic trade documents

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Carlos Barria/Reuters</div></div></div><ul><li>With Gary Cohn out at the White House, Donald Trump can run the economy like the slapstick show he's always wanted.</li><li>The stars are Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and Trade adviser Peter Navarro.</li><li>These three stooges will surely provide the protectionist antics that make their boss laugh, but they're a danger to the US economy.</li></ul>Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is a sycophant.Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross is a sycophant.White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is a sycophant.And now, in an effort to please the President of the United States, they will put on a show in the White House. It will be billed as a show about the US economy, of which they are all now in charge. But it will really be a show about victimization, revenge, and some really good sound bytes - that's the kind of show Donald Trump likes.There will be no facts, there will be fewer figures. They'll tell the American people that trade wars "are easy to win" and have no consequences. They'll tell the American people debt and deficits don't matter. They'll tell the American people whatever Trump, who thinks that people still get milk from the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/04/local-milk-people-donald-trumps-odd-expression-inspires-memes">"local milk people,"</a> tells them to say.The healthy debate Trump claims to foster in his White House is part of the joke. The debates will all end in agreement with him, and that means we're in danger of starting a trade war that could spike prices at a time when the economy is already inflating.Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">CNBCCommerce Secretary Wilbur Ross</div></div></div><h1>The three stooges</h1>All of these men are ridiculous for their own reasons. I can't even rank them.Despite his lightly used Harvard PhD in economics, Peter Navarro is what economists would impolitely call "a crank." The Trump administration found him after Jared Kushner, likely thirsting for knowledge himself, searched for books about China on Amazon. There Kushner found Navarro's book "Death by China."To give you a sense of its contents, an expert interviewed in the documentary made from the book claimed that "China is the only country in the world that is preparing to kill Americans." So when Gary Cohn, the administration's soon-to-be-erstwhile economic adviser sidelined Navarro last year, Wall Street cheered. According to The Daily Beast he could be seen wandering the halls of the White House <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/no-one-knows-what-omarosa-is-doing-in-the-white-houseeven-omarosa">with a copy of his own book in hand.</a>"The thing about Peter Navarro is that he was never a part of the group of economists who ever studied the global free-trade system," Carnegie Mellon economist <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-trumpenomics-according-to-peter-navarro-2017-1">Lee Branstetter told me last year.</a><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Andy Kropa/Getty ImagesPeter Navarro</div></div></div>With Navarro elevated and Cohn out expect the administration to take aggressive action, especially against China, every chance it gets. Navarro, like Trump, sees the US (the richest country in the world) as a global victim. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, despite his years making money all over the world as a private equity globalist, has taken up that mantle as well. Ross spearheaded the White House's investigation into aluminum and steel, which resulted in the market-scaring tariffs the administration is set to announce.The investigation itself frustrated Cohn and other members of the administration, <a href="https://www.axios.com/trump-cohn-navarro-ross-tariffs-oval-office-6a33e083-63ab-4d4b-861e-c849ce83d98e.html">according to Axios.</a> That's because Ross left out all of the bad repercussions of steel and aluminum tariffs - he wrote the narrative Trump wanted to hear. And now we're here.It's unclear why Ross is doing what he's doing, but we do know that he has deep ties in the steel industry. Back in 2004 he made $2 billion selling his steel businesses to AcrcelorMittal. He sold his stake in the company and stepped down from the board last year. Arcelor Mittal executives, however, contributed heavily in the testimony leading up to Ross' report. Naturally they were in favor of steel tariffs.It is here that we should also note that Trump and Ross have been friends for years. One thing they share in common is their tendancy to grossly exaggerate their wealth. Trump sued a journalist who claimed it was around $250 million (not the $10 billion he claims) and lost. Ross was recently caught in his lie. His financial disclosures proved that he's been inflating his wealth to make the Forbes Billionaire list for years. This kind of deep seated insecurity should be examined by a psychologist, not a journalist.Finally there is Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Relying on him to counter President Trump is like relying on a wet blanket to keep your body warm on a camping trip through Siberia. He comes from a line of rich Wall Streeters, and his resume includes a <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/steve-mnuchins-controversial-history-foreclosure-crisis/story?id=44840027">solid contribution to the mortgage crisis</a> as well as production credits on movies like Lego Batman and Suicide Squad. Despite being groomed at the free trade, global facing firm Goldman Sachs, he has been parotting Trump's nonsense on trade just as he was parroting the administration's nonsense on deficits and tax cuts.He's also married to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/us/politics/mnuchin-louise-linton-treasury-instagram.html">this woman,</a> so I imagine he hasn't practiced saying "no" in a long time.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Jacquelyn Martin/APMnuchin and his wife, Louise Linton.</div></div></div><h1>This is for the cheap seats</h1>Republicans, in their desperation to win an election, all fell in line behind Trump. Their foolishness has a price. They thought they could have their base and eat it too - that is to say, keep the mass of Trump voters in their bloc but legislate to their detriment (see: tax cuts that benefit the wealthy more than anyone else).But that was not actually the deal they made. They voted for a showman who basks in the adoration of his base, and now they have a show where he will respond in kind. That means his populist rhetoric will now take action, center stage. It doesn't matter that the content lacks any kind of substance, or that it disagrees with the GOP's leadership.The result of this will be an extention of lost years. When the bottom fell out in 2008, the entire world was forced to put progress on hold and row in the same direction toward recovery just to stay afloat. Ten years later we've begun to to turn the corner. We can invest in growth and progress again. But that's not what we're doing.Instead we're fighting with our allies and denying climate change. We're supporting dying industries and starving growing ones. The most clear illustration of this waste and regression comes from comparison. Back in August the White House intitiated an investigation into <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/us-begins-section-301-investigation-2017-8">China's theft of US intellectual property.</a> It's a real problem, that requires a globally coordinated solution. No matter, with Navarro at the helm we will go it alone, likely putting tariffs on a swath of Chinese goods resulting in a trade war.China's Foreign Minister has vowed to retaliate in the event of a trade war, but that's just half the story. The other half is what China is already doing. On Monday the country kicked off its Communist Party meeting of the year, The National People's Congress. During the meeting China's leaders <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-04/how-to-make-money-out-of-china-s-national-people-s-congress">outlined their goals for the future.</a>Their goals make our goals look stupid.While our President is extoling the virtures of "beautiful clean coal" and "loving" trade action China is vowing to cut down on air polution and investing in teaching young people about artificial intelligence. We are not even competing with that, which is almost to say we've already lost.Mnuchin, Navarro and Ross are hardly the men to set this right. They are clowns performing slapstick economy policy for an audience of one.It's a joke that never had any intention of being funny. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/recent-pullback-corrected-market-imbalances-2018-2">The recent pullback corrected 2 glaring market imbalances - now the bull market may continue</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

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Thinkers/Thinkers 50: 3 big ideas that will reform India's ailing higher education system

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The three stooges are running the US economy now, so buckle up

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