AN ENGAGED EDUCATION
At Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), we have been focusing on three significant components of the New Education Policy (NEP)—multidisciplinary education, research and innovation and teaching in Indian languages. We have already formed an apex committee for the NEP’s implementation. Even before the NEP was released, JNU has been practising multi-disciplinary education. The objective in the university is to create conversations among people from different disciplines. That results in more creativity and innovation. It’s one of the reasons why the best students in the country come to this university. For instance, a student doing MA in International Studies can also do another course from the School of Social Sciences or in languages.
In the recent past, when we started the School of Engineering, we made it multidisciplinary. Our students get two degrees—one undergraduate degree in engineering and one postgraduate degree in any of the areas of social sciences and humanities. Many of the students, who could have easily got admission in any of the IITs, are coming here because of the multidisciplinary nature of our programmes. The idea is to make our engineers more socially aware.
We have also started a five-year integrated programme in Ayurveda biology. It’s a completely inter-disciplinary programme. Professors from molecular medicine, life sciences and biotechnology sit across the table with professors of Sanskrit and run this programme together. They study Ayurveda from the perspective of modern biology. Once the NEP is rolled out, we are going to start many more such programmes.
For a long time, the culture in this university was
“Our job now is to handhold universities with lower ranks and create a knowledge ecosystem” —M. JAGADESH KUMAR Vice Chancellor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi “The multi-disciplinary approach to education makes JNU unique in the country. A student from any background is free to choose another course of his or her choice. For instance, a student doing research in the Special Centre for Disaster Research can go and attend a class in anthropology” — ROHIT KUMAR, PhD student, Special Centre for Disaster Research, JNU
to focus on basic research. In the past five years, we have been able to change that. Basic research is good, but we need to convert that into translational research. We need to translate our research into some kind of application. When we talk about research and innovation, people often think that it is something related to science and technology. But teachers from social sciences and languages can collaborate with their colleagues in science and technology and jointly establish start-up companies.
For instance, if one wants to develop a model to predict how Covid spreads, it is simply not possible for a molecular biologist alone to develop such a model. How Covid spreads is influenced by people’s socioeconomic conditions. People from different local clusters react differently to the policy initiatives of government, such as lockdown and Covidappropriate behaviour. These inputs, which are crucial in building that model, can come from social scientists.
That’s the reason we have been advocating inter-dis