Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Industries Limited is planning to invest 1,500 crore rupees in its proposed university, Jio Institute, in the next two years. It has informed the government’s Empowered Expert Committee (ECC) about its project.
The Reliance Industries Limited is in discussion with Stanford University and Northwestern University in the US and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore to establish the facility. Earlier the government appointed Empowered Expert Committee which monitors the Institutes of Eminence had expressed displeasure to Jio team over delays.
The HRD ministry had granted the Institute of Eminence (IoE) status to three public and three private universities. The IoE status accredits the institutions to get full autonomy and special incentives to establish themselves as world-class institutions. The government bestowed the IoE status to IIT-Bombay, IIT-Delhi and IISC-Bangalore among the public universities.
Jio Institute by Reliance Foundation, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) and BITS Pilani were the three private institutes which were granted the IoE status. Last year, Prakash Javedkar, the then HRD Minister, had also informed that the three public universities which got IoE status will receive government funding of Rs. 1,000 crore over the next five years to support them to accomplish world class ranking.
The academic and institutional experts advising Jio include Nanyang Technological University president Subra Suresh; Michael Keller, chief librarian and vice provost, Stanford University; Frank Mulhern, associate dean, Medill School of Media and Journalism at Northwestern University and Vinayak Dravid.
The Jio Institute might collaborate with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) among other schools for mentorship association. The institute is being set up in 800 acres in Karjat, a municipality in Raigad district near Mumbai. The inaugural session which is expected to start in 2021-22 will include courses on engineering, natural sciences, arts, humanities and social sciences, management and entrepreneurship, and digital media and journalism.
Higher education in India has been dominated by public institutes. The best colleges and universities are largely funded by the government. The valuable IIT and IIM degrees created brand-engineering and management which paved the way for many private colleges in these fields. These private university model set up mostly by politicians on not for profit model became a gateway for the investment of black money. The politicians found it easy to set up private colleges due to regulatory hurdles by socialist bureaucracy. The politicians used their proximity and power to set up colleges and invested the black money there. The engineering and management colleges used to charge huge capitation fee and tuition fee to students. The capitation fee became a source of black money for politicians, thereby making the establishment of a college a lucrative and foolproof business for politicians.
However there is a ray of hope in the overall gloomy picture, and this hope comes from the newly started private universities. The private university model started by first generation entrepreneurs and some old industrialist have performed exceptionally well in recent years. The private university model is being set as a trend by institutions like Ashoka University, Jindal Global University, and Shiv Nadar University, etc. that are a ray of hope in the gloomy higher education sector. The newly proposed KREA University, Jio institute are some other institutes which are expected to function on this model. In the upcoming years, it would be interesting to see whether this private university model could change the landscape of higher education in India.