Smriti’s initiative sees Indian students learn from foreign faculty

736 courses have been approved by the GIAN committee.

perts would be evolved along with a comprehensive Faculty Development Programme not only for new IITs, IIMs, IISERs, but also other institutions in the country.

So far, the major beneficiaries of the GIAN initiative have been the IITs and the NITs, apart from the Central universities, but the ministry has assured that there would be a gradual increase in the outreach of GIAN to various other institutes. Apart from popular scientific research projects on robotics, energy, mechanical engineering and space technology, some contemporary subjects on which various faculty from across the world were invited by Indian institutes included urban development with special focus on smart cities, renewable energy use for industrial purposes, sustainable development, waste management and start-ups.

A ministry source said, “Most of these latter subjects are the ones where India lags behind the rest of the world. We need to adapt more technologies and efficient ones at that, to tackle waste management. This is one field where Indian researchers need to look at systems in developed nations and improvise them here. For courses on renewable energy, faculty from the US, Malaysia, Italy and United Kingdom were invited.

An interesting pattern in the 336 courses delivered by October this year was of indigenous subjects being taught by foreign educators to Indian students. A course on Hindi language was taught at Shivaji University by Dr Alessandra Consolaro, an Italian professor. Notably, Dr Consolaro has been researching on Hindi since 1980 and is an expert in South Asian language and literature and she can speak 10 languages. Another course on the influence of Srinivasa Ramanujan was taught by Prof Bruce C. Berndt, Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois, US, at Tezpur University, Assam. Prof Bruce C. Berndt is an award-winning researcher on the works of Ramanujan. Another star faculty to teach non-technical subjects under GIAN is Prof David Shulman, a renowned Indologist at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, who is credited for developing studies on Indian culture and language in Israel.

R. Subrahmanyam, Additional Secretary (Technical Education), Department of Higher Education, MHRD, explained, “To ensure that there is no wastage of resources and every professor who comes to teach under GIAN is worth it, a three-level screening process is followed. The rejection rate for over 1,000 proposals that were received by various institutes in the country was 40%.”