we of course always been talking about technology and the impact of this technology to our society in so many ways and particularly there are attempts to identify what kinds of impact technology would make to society in various aspects so and of course one expects that development in society both in quality as well as in scale is also we have a lot of expectation that technology would do something for us so some of those expectations could be wrong-headed some of them could be right so these are some of the issues that have already been part of intellectual engagement all over the world and particularly after the new media the impact is of course quite visible to many of us in so many sectors and so the the today's context of this particular talk comes from you know thinking about the future about what is going to be the situation or what should be the situation or what should be the way how we have to think about particularly education and technology in 2035 so this was one of the parts of the 2035 vision documents which the Typhac started to put together and one of the roadmap of that is on the sector of education and so we have with us Professor Varun Sahani who has been part of not only the 2035 vision document but also particularly chaired and written the education roadmap of this 2035 vision document the document of course is available on Typhac's website which all of you are encouraged to go through and comment on it so of course Professor Sahani is doesn't need much of an introduction a well-known academician but so currently of course he is an reputation as a vice chancellor of Goa University and he's a is working on international politics at Jala Nehru University and of course previous to that he has been also at the vice chancellor of Jami University for some time and so one of the important issues that we're going to do is that of course having looked at his thing he's also a diver in the in the open sea and so but one thing I actually could appreciate is that though his expertise comes from you know political science but we have an intellectual who actually is a very active what I can say responsive to the various things that are happening around the world I mean in that sense he has a very broad understanding of not only what happens in the world but also very particularly about what is India and what should be the character and in the in the vision that India would have you would actually be able to see all those things from his presentation and the there are a lot of you know controversial as well as debatable standpoints which the vision documents very courageously puts forth and that is I think one of the important reasons why we have been looking forward to listen to you for quite some time and so we managed to finally get you here thank you so much for coming and thank you all for coming to listen to us process I well good afternoon everybody and many thanks to the Hobi Baba Center for Science Education for having invited me particularly Professor Tuna Wala who was very very kind we've been in touch with for quite some time also want to thank Dr. Pradhan who's here in our audience because I think he's the he's the point of navigation at all started with him suggesting that I may have something to say that could be of interest to all of you so what I'm going to do is essentially present two documents to you that I have been involved with now pretty much for eight years they're both out this is the second of the two documents this is the kind of the educational technology roadmap and we had an earlier document which was what we call the main vision document for what is technology vision 2035 this was an initiative of typhag typhag is the technology information forecasting and assessment council it's an autonomous body of the department of science and technology of the government of India I think when it was originally planned typhag was planned as being kind of the technology of technology part of the planning commission but it never quite happened so it's kind of remained autonomous within DST but it has for the last few years been trying to position itself as as the technology think tank of the government of India it's been headed by very eminent Indians the first exercise technology vision 2020 was actually initiated in the in the late 1990s when Dr. Abdul Kalam was there was there was a chairman of typhag that's exactly he moved from there to actually becoming the president of the republic and currently the chairman is is Dr. Anil Karkotkar who's obviously no stranger in the city and particularly in Anusha Kinagar so the idea was to sort of move on from technology vision 2020 but not just in move on in a chronological sense but in some ways take some lessons learn from the 2020 exercise and plan the 2035 technology vision exercise a bit differently and what I'm going to be doing partly is showing you that as well so what I'd like to start off with is maybe talking a bit about the the vision document it's not downloading thank you so this is what the first document was the main vision document this is where I along with a couple of other colleagues we were basically tasked with in a long consultative exercise finally writing up technology vision for the country was released in January of 2016 and I want to say up front that this is not a prediction exercise so we are not saying this is what is likely to happen it's not a foresight exercise that this is what we can envisage it's not a projection exercise you know that given where we are this is where you know we will be it's none of these things it's a vision exercise in other words this is where we would like to be I do want to emphasize this right from the beginning we were very clear this had to be a vision document now that's challenging it's challenging because you've got to keep simultaneously your head in the clouds and your feet firmly planted on the ground because otherwise you can sort of you know completely be up there in the clouds so you've got to sort of maintain that connective tissue between the India of here and now and the India that one would like to see and be a part of in 2035 and that's what we try to do so how do you do that if you actually sort of are planning a vision exercise of this nature how do you go about it and we asked ourselves is there anything at all about the India of 2035 that we can be certain about and this was it this my friends is the population estimates of our country comes from the United Nations population division so we took the intermediate figure of 1.58 billion as India's population in 2035 that's kind of the median there's a high and there's a low as well so we said let's assume this is the population what does it mean it means this quite clearly that India is and will remain a country of immense size this is the one thing we could be certain about India is large today it's going to be large in 2035 what is the other thing we could be certain about this was the other thing India is and will remain a country of immense diversity and we there was only two things we felt that we could be certain about everything else about 2035 was in the realm of speculation these two facts were not you could be absolutely certain about it so that's what it was about then my friends the certitude of massive diversity that this would be a huge country and it would be an immensely diverse country in other words there would be no country like us on the planet there isn't today and this certainly wouldn't be in 2035 there would be another country almost as large as us but certainly not with the same diversity right another thing we did in this exercise by the way both in the main document and in the education technologies roadmap we didn't mention any other country that's one of the biggest problems when we think about education we start thinking about the Finnish model and the and the Dutch model and the Japanese model we said we are not going to do any of that stuff you know we we we are going to be looking at India and figuring this out for ourselves because the fact is there is no other country like us but the moment you say that the only thing you can be certain about is India's massive diversity you're saying something else and that made us markedly different from the technology vision 2020 document and that is this it's not about India in 2035 but Indians in 2035 the 2020 document was about various sectors as it pertain to India we said stop talking about India let's talk about Indians this vast mass of people incredibly diverse let's talk about them so in other words in a very real sense this is not a landscape but a peoplescape and who are these people how do we begin to start the process of characterizing then these people this exercise of taxonomy led us to this we came up with these six segments of Indians non-exclusive which means that you know you could simultaneously be in more than one segment and we call these segments first of all rooted and remote which we said would be about 20% of the population globalized and diaspora we estimated would be about 30% of the population left out and left behind would be said would be about 30% of the population alternate lifestyles and world views would be about 15% of the population creative innovative and imaginative about 15% and finally 55% of our population would be what we call be hives and production lines obviously you could be both I mean you could be you know you could be for example you know left out and left behind and also be rooted and remote for example which is why if you actually sum up these and these are all obviously rough person percentages but based on a fair amount of work so a little bit about each of these categories then what do we mean by rooted and remote these are the these are the Indians who will be rooted by choice although some would not have a choice they would adhere to old values but the values themselves will evolve as circumstances change they will be seen by others not as backward but as emblematic of the good old days we have seen this by the way in other countries as well over time those who are rooted and remote actually begin to be valorized in a very different kind of way and we think that by 2035 as India urbanizes this is going to happen in India too there is a danger that they could become cultural exhibits the notion of remoteness itself would have changed by 2035 why because there would be road connectivity to every village by then every single household would have internet connectivity so what does it even mean to be remote when there's a road to every village when there's internet is itself something which we need to conceive about what exactly does that mean the second segment of the population the globalized in diaspora we could say the following things with some degree of certainty that Indians would be the largest diaspora community in the world by 2035 the government of India would have to devote considerable resources to this segment of the population and deploy these resources worldwide comparisons across countries would be routine for this segment the notion of best practices would be commonplace the concept of citizen itself would have been citizenship itself would have been transformed by them and what makes this segment extremely important also is that this would be a segment that would be extremely assertive about its rights and would have a strong sense of entitlement would not hesitate to hold the government accountable for all ills real or imagined so this is going to be a segment we feel that by 2035 is going to be a very critical element because they are the ones who are going to be able to capture public policy in a way that no other segment is going to be able to capture it left out or left behind what we said was that despite much greater openness many improvements India would continue to be an unequal society and in this unequal society many would simply not get a chance in the first place or would not be able to keep pace so they were either been left out right from the beginning or they will not be able to keep pace they would be left behind and therefore we would need to think about when we think about the technology vision for the country of a system that is acutely sensitive about inclusion issues because there would be a significant sector of the population which otherwise would be permanently left out alternate lifestyles and world views obviously those who choose to opt out of the system who would advocate and pursue alternate lifestyles who would have radically different ideas about society they would have radically different ideas about what constitutes the good life so what do you do with this segment of your population well any sensible system would not interfere with their choices but would nonetheless seek to remain engaged with them and by the way this is a segment which has always existed in Indian society you just have to think about the sadhus who have been a part of our society from the moment the society was created and the sadhus of India are those a classic example of a segment that espouse an alternate lifestyle and world views so how do you deal with this segment if you try to give them that liberty of choice but you have to somehow try to continue to be engaged with them and one of the reason why that's important is of course because social benefits accrue from individual mavericks so you know if you are willing to if you're willing to accommodate those who do not conform if you don't put too much of a premium and you know unconformity if you're willing to accept alternatives there will be concrete social benefits that will also accrue over time from that the fifth segment which is what we call creative innovative and imaginative these would be the individuals who refuse to be constrained by the straight jacket imposed by the system much needed innovation would come from this segment of the population and although small in size this segment would be critical to the health of the country because it would be the fountain of economic and social dynamism and finally we the last segment was what we called be hives and production lines which again we felt was an extremely important segment because the productive process ultimately is the source of all resources and underlies all social existence and this would be the segment of the population the vast majority of the population your be hives and production lines so catering to their needs keeping them skilled satisfied and involved would be one of the biggest challenges for the system so this is the way we envisage India now there were many many ways in which we could have thought of India's diversity that we thought that this was the way we needed to proceed so we were not thinking about diversity in terms of the various ethno-cultural communities of which our country is composed we were not thinking about it strictly even in socioeconomic class terms so we're not talking about in terms of community or caste or class we said it's much better to think about it as segments of population understanding that individuals could in fact be parts of more than one segment one of what I believe is being one of the most important parts of this document has been to assert that there are 12 prerogatives and that these prerogatives are as the term itself clarifies the right of every Indian their rights of every Indian today although largely unattained and they will certainly be the rights the prerogatives of every Indian in 2035 six of these prerogatives are individual six of them are collective and I'll just quickly run through all of them that the six individual prerogatives are clean air and portable water food and nutritional security universal healthcare and public hygiene 24 by 7 energy decent habitat and quality education livelihood and creative opportunities the six collective prerogatives are safe and speedy mobility public safety and national security cultural diversity and vibrancy transparent and effective governance disaster and climate resilience and finally eco-friendly conservation of natural resources so we said these 12 prerogatives six individuals six collective are going to be the right of every Indian and any technology vision has to ultimately be about how these prerogatives can be attained so that is the way that that's the fundamental way in which technology vision 2035 is different from technology vision 2020 because out here it's about catering to the needs the requirements the prerogatives the rights of Indians these are claims that Indians can make upon their government these are claims that Indians can make upon other Indians these are claims that Indians can make upon other actors and upon themselves ultimately as well so I don't want to say very much more about the the main document but one final thing before we move on to the education technologies roadmap itself and that is this thinking about how we can sort of crystallize all of this we said we need to come up with certain grand challenges grand challenges that ultimately require the energies the talents the efforts of a wide variety of different agencies a wide variety of different technologies a wide variety of different knowledge sectors and so on and so forth and so we came up with these 10 grand challenges I'll just run through them very briefly with you the first of them we felt and we really felt this was the most important is guaranteeing nutritional security and eliminating female and child anemia which is a huge problem in India and it fundamentally means that 50 percent of the population of this country is perpetually malnourished 50 percent of the population and that's irrespective by the way of social class it's got nothing to do with social class it's a completely gender category it's a gendered category it's a gendered reality and so we said that eliminating female and child anemia was the number one technology challenge for the country the number two was ensuring quantity and quality of water in all rivers and aquatic bodies the third challenge was securing critical resources commensurate with the size of our country the point is we are such a massive country with such a massive population and such massive needs that there are many many many critical resources that we simply do not have that we thought was the third technology challenge the fourth was providing learner centric language neutral and holistic education to all each of these terms is important it has to be learner centric it has to be language neutral and it has to be holistic i'll be obviously talking about this for the bulk of my talk so i don't need to specify more about that the fifth technology challenge we saw as understanding national climate patterns and adapting to them which remains still in many many ways a huge challenge for us but with the development of the sciences of complexity hopefully now the knowledge and the technologies are coming into place for for there to be an authentic climate science which actually can get down to the up to the scale of weather itself the sixth technology challenge was making india non fossil fuel based the seventh was and you some of you may be surprised by this but we felt very strongly this should be there taking the railway to lay and to the one you know it's more an engineering challenge than a technology challenge but we felt it was absurd that you know there were parts of our country that did not have real connectivity and now after all all it all it involves is building bridges and tunnels build those bridges and tunnels and take the railway you know i mean it's ridiculous that it's not that we that we have not done it in all these years by the way i should also mention of these 10 challenges about six there are now some type of national mission or project tackling them the railways for example that project has already begun so we are actually gratified we don't we don't take any credit for it but we do hope that sort of at somewhere you know each of these will be taken seriously the eighth one was important for us again which is ensuring location and ability independent electoral and financial empowerment as you know conducting elections in our country takes weeks and weeks and weeks now why does it take weeks and weeks and weeks it takes weeks and weeks and weeks because voting is done physically and because voting is done physically and we're talking about vast numbers of people you you've got to you basically spend huge amounts of time airlifting massive forces from one part of the country to another part of the country to be able to maintain law and order at the time of the electoral process to give every citizen the right that every citizen you know obviously has which is to be able to exercise their franchise now if we could through technology be able to come up with a electoral system that is location and ability independent that you don't have to be located physically if there was some way in which we could do that that would fundamentally transform and similarly financial empowerment that's the other thing so on both of them we felt that that was a technology challenge the ninth was developing commercially viable decentralized and distributed energy for all and the tenth was ensuring universal eco-friendly waste management these we've placed as a 10 grand challenge is six of them as I mentioned already there is work being done on them but along with this main vision document the technology vision 2035 exercise also had 12 sectoral road maps so having stated the technology vision the question then is in different sectors what do we need to do to get from here to there get from where we are today to where we wish to go right and so we finally identified these as the 12 sectors on which we would have separate road maps technology road map medical sciences and healthcare energy water environment food and agriculture infrastructure materials manufacturing habitat education transportation and information and communication technologies those that have a red star next to them are ones that are already out so six of the 12 are out medical sciences and healthcare materials manufacturing education transportation and ICT the ones that we are still awaiting our energy water habitat environment food and agriculture infrastructure so so that's the state state of play right now all of these documents are available on the typhag website downloadable in pdf if you write to typhag they'll happily send you a hard copy they'll mail a hard copy to you for free so those who want hard copies can get a hard copy it's not a problem I think I think I would urge you to sort of at some stage if you can spare a bit of time you know glance at these documents there may be something in there of interest to you so I'm going to now at this stage move to focus specifically on the educational technologies road map and there we started out with five axiomatic propositions the first of them was this in human and social terms our country is the sum total of all of its generations those past those living and those yet to come hence empowering Indians empowers India that there is no notion of India independent of Indians so you know to talk about you cannot talk about making India powerful without first empowering Indians and once you've empowered Indians there is no other sense really in which India is going to be powerful so it's it's it's about empowering Indians that is what it's all about that was axiomatic proposition one the second was this by enhancing individual possibilities education leads to social transformation and national advancement these are axioms so if you don't accept any of them we we didn't spend any time trying to justify or prove these we treated them as axiomatic and moved on and the entire document is based on these five core understandings you disagree with one of these propositions then our document to that extent you know is a flawed document third technology socially constructed and in turn shapes and transforms society fourth public policy choices will determine whether educational technologies function as barriers or levelers these are going to be public policy choices you can you can erect huge barriers based on technology or you can use technology as a battering ram to bring down the fundamental inequalities in our society and to basically create level playing fields for everyone and the fifth proposition was this in an era of rapid technological change we must either work hard to keep pace or risk rapidly falling behind so being static is not a choice or it is a choice but it's a choice that is going to be fundamentally self-defeating we say this in axiomatic terms again that you essentially have to keep moving now once you know once that's clear you've got to keep moving then all those other questions come in in which direction at what pace in what sequence all of those are critical issues but we've got to start off by saying you've got to keep moving or otherwise be willing to fall behind and you know what happens when you fall behind this country has experienced colonial domination you know what happens when you fall back technologically what we'd also do in this document is try to bridge certain gaps that we perceive the first gap is between tradition and innovation between indigenous knowledge systems and cutting edge futuristic research the second gap is between the world of learning and the world of work how do you build that conveyor belt that connective tissue between between the world of learning and the world of work that I think is one of the core challenges for any education system in our country today the third is between knowledge and skills obviously knowledge and skills go go hand in hand I mean you know but the problem when you say they go hand in hand is that you sometimes assume that they are the same thing which of course they are not knowledge is know what skills are know how and until we are willing to recognize this difference we're going to continue to have an education system that privileges knowledge and fundamentally ignore skills there's absolutely we have to be clear first of all that these actually exist and that they are different between mainstream and vocational education that we felt was another critical gap that needed to be bridged between education as instrument and education as value so obviously there's an instrumental use of education a purpose to education but education needs to be seen in value terms as well as a value in and of itself a value in its own right between knowledge production and transmission that's of course research and teaching between teaching and learning between the disciplines and between different levels of education so all of these we identified as critical gaps and we said these critical gaps somewhere out there our document has to address these gaps that's one of course because you're thinking about the country as a whole as it sort of tries to construct fabricate education system for itself that it would be valid for 2035 needs also to think about all of these gaps after that we talk about the historical significance of 2035 now you know 2035 was a year that was selected the past the last project was 2020 so 2035 started started in 2011 so you know there was a whole decade basically of overlap with 2020 you know so we don't wait till 2020 but in the education sector my friends there is another historical significance of 2035 and that is this it's linked to this particular gentleman I don't know how many of you recognize him this is Thomas Dabbington Macaulay who on the 2nd of February 1835 wrote this in his famous minute we must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern and then probably some of the most painful and hateful words in the history in all of colonial history a class of persons Indian in blood and color but English in tastes in opinions in morals and in intellect and like it don't like it accept it don't accept it the harsh reality is that the education system in our country today is still a product of that fundamental vision in other words an educational system set up by the imperial power for the purposes of colonial control and imperial extraction has not fundamentally changed and so we said we must understand the historical significance of 2035 when it comes to education we are talking about two centuries after Macaulay and what will be our vision then and we came up with an alternate vision vision 2035 and that is this achieving the full potential of every Indian that is it you need to have an education system that achieves the full potential of every Indian as he or she defines it that's what we've not said but that's there within parenthesis you do not decide what the potential of an of a fellow Indian is for them to figure out what they wish to do with their lives we then talk about the landscape of education in contemporary India I will not say very much about this the document two doesn't say a lot about this because we decided early on we are not going to get swallowed in the swamp of today where you know any you can you can write you can write a thousand pages on what ails the Indian education system today it's not difficult so we said you know we are not this is not going to be a document which is you know bemoaning the system that exists today the situation that exists today rather we're going to just take a look a very light look at situation today just to get an idea about what our starting point is where the journey is beginning from I could talk about many things here but I'll just give you one one one little bit of data just indicate to you how terrible our situation is today the private tuition industry in our country today has an annual turnover which is larger than all the monies being put by the union and the states in all levels of education it's just another datum but I think this is something we can meditate on and ask ourselves how have we come to this pass how have we come to this pass that we've actually created the scope for another whole industry to come up that actually has greater value in turnover terms than all of the public money going into education what kind of a system is this what does it mean in terms of access what does it mean in terms of quality what does it mean in terms of values what does it mean when you can when you have to purchase a medical seat and that costs you several crores the person who has to pay that amount of money for that education what kind of medical practitioner is he or she going to be and it's not therefore that's the point if the system is the system that we have to focus on I won't say more about this Indians in 2035 then what are their educational aspirations so what we did was something a bit clever at this point we said we'd already identified six categories of Indians right so we said we're not going to play around with those categories but when we thought about it we said that there are a couple of other categories that seem to emerge in terms of types of Indians so we need to get a couple of more taxonomic boxes added on because which are which are kind of education specific so what are these categories going through them again quickly some of them would already be familiar to you rooted and remote globalized and diaspora then this was a category that we felt we needed to add dropouts and late bloomers because this is in fact a very significant section of our population those who are forced to drop out from the system or those who discover their talents late in life we used to signify this the French artist Cezanne who unlike his contemporaries struggled and struggled and struggled before he became recognized as a great master and in fact there's a lot that can be said about genius itself so for every Picasso who is identified as a genius when he's still in his teens you have a Cezanne who's actually recognized as being a genius only after his death so that's a reality how do you when you have an education system how do you cater to your late bloomers particularly in a country where everybody who's any good in the sciences is being basically shoved by their by society by their family into one or two branches of education that's a question then of course the left out or left behinds in our population this was another category that we felt we needed to add and we called them second chances or double dips we spent a lot of time trying to find an Indian photograph a lot of time I personally must have spent about a week we looked everywhere ncrt we asked everybody do you have a photograph of an elderly Indian in a regular classroom not stage we could have staged a photograph and after all government of India it's not difficult to do we could always create a classroom got somebody we know is elderly to sit in the chair and there's a class going on we said an authentic photograph now why is this category so important it's important because one of the demographic realities of our country is going to be that of second careers more and more people in our country are going to live for 25 to 30 years beyond their formal age of retirement or superannuation two and a half three decades that's a long long time it's another it's an entire lifetime what is our education system doing for this segment of our population we have an education system that at the university level since I am at the in the university level of education we see our our our user community as falling between a demographic that falls between the ages of 18 and 28 and as I go around the colleges of goa and elsewhere I'm constantly asking the question what about those above the age of 58 above the age of 60 what are we doing for them do we have anything at all any education package for them so in goa university one of the things we've done is we've said that any senior citizen who wishes to register for a phd doesn't have to pay tuition fees they're not there they're not they're not doing a phd to earn a you know to get a get a job they're doing a phd because they love something it's probably some engineer who always loved history and was forced into engineering by his parents you know here's a chance for them to now learn history let them learn history let them love it we probably have some fantastic phd's emerging from this group of students but that's the way we have to collectively this is just one one individual initiative by one university but in systemic terms recognizing this as a sector you have to think about the educational needs of this sector then of course we talked about this already the alternate lifestyles and world views this also we've talked about creative innovative and imaginative and the obv hives and production lines one of the things that we spent a lot of time on and as a group or most proud about was the work we did in this section which was on literacy creativity and skills i genuinely believe i believe that our entire report is well i'm biased with them and i'm one of those who wrote it but i do believe that our report is uh is is is is a fairly uh is a fairly unique document but quite apart from what i think i think this is where we made a very significant contribution because we argue that literacy itself is going to fundamentally mean something else by 2035 and we in fact spent some time on it and broke it down and we said that literacy by 2035 will have five components to it reading writing and communication numeracy e digital proficiency visual and symbolic proficiency what do we mean by this well just think about the world of emojis etc etc that are coming in there's going to be a new sense of literacy which is going to be involved actually in symbols uh in sort of that symbolic language that now is going to be a part and parcel of literacy and by e digital proficiency we mean the use of devices for example uh we know that when it comes to the use of devices very often uh you know it's the grandmother who's illiterate and the grandchild who's you know nine years old who's literate but that's a form of literacy and to the extent that you cannot use a device to that extent you are functionally illiterate in a in a society in which that device is now fundamental for all sorts of other purposes and will become even more so as time goes on so we think that this is a core element of literacy too and finally we felt civic awareness and on that basis we came up with what we call a literacy wheel i won't get into the details of it but essentially you know we saw these spokes radiating out going into all parts of the economy and society uh you know the spokes of the wheel were about sort of how we could have further and continuing development uh how the various types of skills that are needed traditional skills e marketing uh higher studies the whole lot and this this literacy wheel i think really gives some kind of an understanding of it and you ask where's technology in all of this we see technology as the lubricant for the wheel technology is what will actually enable the structure to be smoothly mobile then in the document we talk about access anyone anywhere anytime i'll not say anything about it right now we're happy to talk about it later in the q and a mainstreaming of vocational education and reimagining lifelong learning we spent a fair amount of time in the document about quality issues achieving quality employability entrepreneurship and livelihood security this is a section we are all collectively very proud of culture recreation and the good life which actually does not very often feature in in documents pertaining to to education but we felt that this was fundamental that an educational system that does not privilege questions of culture does not ask fundamental questions about the good life is not frankly an education system worth having research innovation and product development this again i think is important because the way we envisage it to some extent product development can begin when the learner is still learning we don't have to see product development as something that emerges after one is a fully formed you know professional but in the process of forming itself we can begin to think about product development dr. Anil Karkotkar himself contributed some very very interesting ideas to this particular section of our document then of course the heart of the document which is the technological future of education you know so what are the technologies that we envisage are going to be critical in this whole process of transformation of education and we club them into a set of different categories so first of all we had information and communication technologies cloud computing 5g telephony mesh networking nfc by the way we also categorize these technologies both in the main document in this document into those that are readily deployable namely these technologies already exist and can be can be sort of used tomorrow if we have the purpose and we have the will to use them the second category was from lab to field these are the technologies that certainly exist in laboratory conditions but they've got to still make that transition across the valley of death to the real world where they can actually find application so those technologies were a second category of technologies the third category of technologies are those that we said required directed research so you know we focus directed research so these are technologies that exist there has been a certain proof of concept but a lot needs to be still done to actually make these technologies move forward and finally the fourth category was what we call in the imagination of blue skies stuff which is which is stuff that you know at the moment frankly not much at if anything is being done on it but we can certainly envisage them so I haven't gone and put all of those details in here because obviously I have only x amount of time with all of you but in effect that is what we do so some with each of these technologies we we categorize about you know what what is the what is the period in which they could be deployable or not but they still need to be developed so on and so forth then a bunch of artificial information technologies natural language interpretation machine translation context of air computing machine vision then a whole bunch of display and user interface technologies in fact this is a very large category of technologies hand-held hand-held devices wearable technologies piece recognition gesture recognition haptic interfaces multi-touch interfaces pico projectors fabric embedded screens skin embedded screens volumetric screens immersive virtual reality brain computer interface something like brain computer interface the classic example of something which is as of today blue skies but you know the already at least at the blue skies level you know people are beginning to think about what that kind of interface would be internet technologies then mobile apps mooks internet of things all of which obviously are already very much current technologies but on which the case of internet of things for example one of the big areas of sort of current research that are going to probably yield to some very major outcomes in the future computational technologies again digital identity big data analytics modular computers computational photography neuroinformatics photonics quantum computing quantum computing again being something which is you know somewhere between directed research or you know in the imagination it's somewhere you know in that kind of time frame and finally simulation and modeling technologies gamification and 3d printing we felt were two of these technologies that you know really could play a role you know in the in the whole education process gamification in particular we think is a technology that has huge educational potential you know if you can think about the right ways of utilizing it and deploying it we then also talk a bit about institutions because obviously one of our big problems is institutions in fact in the main vision document itself I was mentioning this so when I overlaunched to some to some colleagues in our document we actually have a statement which says as currently constituted schools colleges and universities would be redundant by 2035 and after a great deal of thought and cogitation we decided that the word redundant was the best word that they actually would not be if they are not radically transformed they would actually not be serving any useful social purpose by 2035 if they continue to be as they are currently constituted so we said that is true what are some of these emerging knowledge scapes and institutional architectures and one of the contributions out here I believe was that we said look there are we actually appropriated something that UNESCO has written and talked about so this is not a hundred percent sort of our work but we sort of we thought that this is a good launching pad and we said that you know in the past institutions were largely what we are called mode one institutions and by mode one institutions what do we mean that these were institutions in which problems were set and solved in contexts that were governed by the academic interests of disciplinary communities so disciplinary communities decided what was worthy of of research what was worthy of transmission and not so there was homogeneity mode one institutions were characterized by homogeneity whereas we now have a bunch of institutions in mode two which are you know problem solution governed in the context of application transdisciplinary knowledge characterized by heterogeneity then mode one we have institutions that are organizationally hierarchical and form-preserving in other words the university once created continues forever you have its its syndicate its academic council I mean they may some of these bodies may not even be serving any purpose but form-preserving you know it doesn't change but we are moving from that to another type of institution which is organizationally hierarchical and transient and I would say the institution we are in right now is is is on the whole much more of a mode two institution than it is a mode one institution although it's still not a transient institution in the future we are going to have institutions that actually are transient institutions that actually come up for a particular purpose for a particular project to crack a particular problem when that sorted out the institution itself will disappear you know think about the human genome project for example and and how how groups got together to crack the human genome you know that's an institution you know but it's a classic example of a of a mode two institution you know where does CERN come for example CERN I would argue is somewhere closer to mode one than it is to mode two right although there are elements of mode two definitely in CERN and so you know I mean this is this is a I think a rather useful way for us to think about institutions and about institutional transformation and then of course we have a final section where we talk about sort of this you know shaping and enabling environment for knowledge and skills and we essentially say that there are there are three pillars out here that we we have to fundamentally focus on the first pillar is policy policy choices policy decisions shape everything you say that we have a 10 plus two plus three system right you say that in year x in year x plus y a vice chancellor wants to come up with a four year undergraduate degree and you essentially I'm not getting into the details I'm not mentioning any your if you don't know what I'm talking about I'm not going to tell you what I'm talking about but you know vice chancellor comes around do something that is different and is hammered on the head that this is a this is a violation of the 10 plus two plus three system what is sacrosanct about that three I mean what is it what is it that that is sacrosanct about that three when in any case your kids then do one years of masters before they go to the United States to do another masters because they got together I mean so you know those sorts of issues that's policy another pillar for us was infrastructure a whole bunch of infrastructure issues some are bottlenecks others are not some are redundancies you know and we need to go and focus on these infrastructural issues and particularly to think about what a classroom is going to look like in 2035 whether it's going to even exist in a physical form or not you know there's there's a there's a lot that can be said about that you know about about whether even in terms of infrastructure we need to be thinking about different ways of actually building the buildings where you know the whole knowledge enterprise takes place and the third pillar very obviously is finance you know I mean so so we say that you know if you want to shape an enabling environment for knowledge and skills we need to focus on those issues of infrastructure of policy and of finance at acting as fundamental impediments okay so what we do is then towards the end of the document is we try to tie all of this together so we have our types of Indians again all all the eight categories that we have in the education sector we describe out here you know uh basically what each of their challenges are so for instance access is there's the primary need of the rerouted and remote language is the primary need of the global and diaspora and so on and so forth and then we look at a whole bunch of other things here which are for example culture recreation in the good life literacy skills access and then we put a whole bunch of those technologies we've been talking about in these various boxes so saying that so in effect we are saying say for any one category for this particular need these are the sorts of technologies that we will need to use so we've done that exercise okay um what therefore are some of the key points that emerge from all of this exercise say if none of you were to actually pick up this this work we've done this is the only you know only time you ever going to interact with this what are some of the things in bullet points that I as one of the people who was participating that would would like to perhaps leave with you so this is essentially some of those key points across the document first and I think one of our very important early insights was to identify predetermined content as the biggest bane of the Indian education system the fact that what the learner will learn is determined not by the learner but by others you can never if you do not allow the learner to pursue his or her passion you are simply never going to have that learner achieving his or her full potential so it's a challenge about how do you decide the content what is the way in which you can do it but predetermined content we said was the biggest problem another thing our document does it brings in foreseeable future technologies and considers their impact on education various aspects access quality skilling assessment and management the document proposes to reposition education to prepare learners for life and not work and also for easier absorption of life skills the document suggests modular certification and in higher education this is facilitating easy exit and re-entry this for us is again really important at the moment you know you have you have the most absurd rules in our education systems a learner who has to break a program at a particular point has to pretty much start from the beginning you know there's this absolutely no way in which we treated this as in a modular form that's one of the fundamental challenges for us and if we want to authentically build a system in which people can transit from the world of learning to the world of work and come back again and keep doing that through their lives we've got to basically crack this problem about how do you how do you how do you structure something that is modular the document suggests that education should not be solely for the head which is what it is right now but also for the heart by which we mean value education and also for the hands by which we mean vocational education we propose I mentioned this when I talked about the good life briefly that sports culture and value education are seamlessly intertwined and should be encouraged in order to attain the good life the biggest crises some of the biggest crises in our society today are crises of values not so much of resources the crises of values about about people fundamentally know who know knowing better making the wrong choices choosing pathways that are fundamentally wrong so how do you change that one of the things we do in this document is we ask what will the teacher do teachers are not going away teachers are going to obviously remain but what will be the role of the teacher and what we say is there will be a new role of the teacher the role of the teacher will not be that of the instructor any longer transmitting content is not going to be what the teacher will do because that content will be readily available to the learner rather is the teacher as facilitator pathfinder navigator counselor confident these are the sort of roles of the teacher of the future the document emphasizes adaptability and change resilience of teachers to face the onslaught of technology and constantly evolving new roles that's another huge problem with with technology the pressures on a to on a teacher are going to be constant you know that old stereotype of a university lecturer who came in with that same set of yellowing notes year after year and they essentially worked his or her way usually men through those notes that's that's really you know but only yesterday's day before yesterday's story now you know the the pressures on a teacher today are enormous you confront classrooms with students who probably have at least an imperfect understanding already or knowledge already of what it is that you wish to talk about change resilience we thought was something that was critical for the ability of teachers to be able to adapt to change as technology moves on very quickly take on new ways of being one of the things that we recognized was controversial but we still felt we needed to put it in was this ring fencing teacher training from the private sector let me specify what I mean by this what I mean by this is that we felt this one the few concrete policy rocket recommendations we made in the document normally we didn't really get into concrete policy recommendations but this one we did and it was to say that teacher training should not be something in which the private sector is allowed to enter teacher training is one of those areas where we felt it should entirely be a public activity the document envisages the technological possibilities of completely unleashing education for the first time making it genuinely AAA anywhere anyone anytime it conceives of product development translational research as a means to enhance innovation of learners it foresees that learners would be seeking second and third careers and also short span careers so essentially technology triggered obsolescence will play a big role you know so ease of access to education is going to become really important also this is something which we felt we needed to emphasize learner-paced personalized education adaptive learning adaptive assessment how we get there what are the technologies we bring to bear to make this happen that's something we can talk about but that the fact that we need this I don't think that there's much doubt about it the document foresees the transformation of the university into a multiversity a tripartite pluralistic institution dealing with research disciplinary specialization and diversification of curriculum it flags exponential changes due to technology that will force educational institutions to reinvent and recalibrate themselves so these were essentially the various points that we wish to emphasize and that I wish to bring forth before you I'm almost at the end of my talk I literally have three transparencies to go but what we did was like the main document we felt that we needed to identify certain grand challenges in the education sector too and we came up with five we happy to talk about them in greater depth when we get into the question and answer session but here they are the first of them is enabling universal personalized access to knowledge and skills in a dialogic teaching learning environment so I think each of these words out here need a certain amount of clarification universal everybody potentially should have it it needs to yet be personalized so every learner would be in effect needing something different we are talking not just for access of knowledge access to knowledge but also to skills but the most critical part of it is in a dialogic teaching learning environment because teaching learning takes place dialogically that's the only real way in which you can do teaching and learning is when there is that give and take that to and throw that's one of the reasons why that physical classroom still remains so important and those physical classrooms where that dialogical process still takes place in terms of teaching and learning those are the classrooms that people actually learn so in technological terms how would you how would you do that what are the technologies you would bring to bear say a young learner wanting to learn practicing her mathematics you know sitting down and doing mathematics picking up something theorems you know a hologram for example you know you know programmed to sort of actually get into a dialogue with that learner and say you know no no no that's not correct it's a right angle triangle remember it's a right angle triangle so you go back and you know you draw it again on your screen so right angle triangle okay now you know you can begin to sort of begin to think about the ways in which technology can sort of potentially create that dialogue because if you don't do it to that extent technology would have failed you in terms of teaching learning so that that's one very critical thing the second we felt was enabling language neutral content through real-time translation and interpretation language neutral content it doesn't matter the language in which that content is being transmitted real-time translational interpretation if that existed today all of you would have headphones and you'd be able to listen in any language of your choice what i'm saying instantly maybe with the five second delay those technologies are coming they're about 10 or 15 years away to to scare my colleagues in goa university i tell them that the day is not very far i said this over lunch as well so some of some of you would have heard this the day is not very far when a learner in vasco would be able to with headphones on follow a lecture being delivered in german in heidelberg in organic chemistry and would be hearing that lecture in company that day is not very far away at that day what is going to happen to the chemistry teacher in vasco that's the question so for teachers this is a very very real challenge and you know it's it's it's going to happen i mean this is only a matter of time it's going policy will decide whether these technologies will be affordable or not policy will decide whether these technologies will be widely deployed or not but certainly the technologies are going to exist the third kind of big challenge is building universal interactive and adaptive simulators for skill training and evaluation so if we say that our challenge is skills and if we know that skills come only through practice practice practice repetition repetition repetition how do we begin to do this it can be done it's just that it's very expensive pilots both military aviators both military and civilian train on simulators they they they build up the ours on simulators along with the ours that they're actually flying it's required for them it's a professional requirement so in certain high-end professions we'll find simulators coming in now in a very big way you can imagine it in surgery for example simulators in surgery and requirement of all surgeons that you know you will periodically actually go and practice on simulators and you will actually log in ours on simulators you know that's like it is there in aviation you'll probably find those practices but to actually make them universal universal interactive and adaptive simulators that can only happen if we really treat it as a technology challenge and work at it what do you want to probably need I suspect is some kind of a universal rig and on that universal rig you'd be you'll have to in a modicul modular form you know add as attachments both hardware and software you know to it in order to be able to do certain functions why do you need to do that because therefore the investment is in that rig and everything else can be bought in modular fashion and therefore it'll have to be affordable it'll have to be universal it's a massive challenge when I talked about this at a meeting in Delhi at DST about a lot of interesting ideas that came up about what form this could take but I suspect that anybody who actually takes this on seriously and tries to envisage what this would actually be in technological terms would be probably entering and probably capturing an entire marketplace a fourth challenge is integrating diverse knowledge systems academic specializations and levels of learning so how do we begin to actually integrate these you know move out of our disciplinary and other silos and begin to sort of start having a wild wide ranging notion of knowledge while recognizing the specializations are important and that there is there is knowledge and there are skills attained through specialization which we cannot by any manner of means set aside but this is I think we felt was the fourth technology challenge we on each of them we we have we have gone and spent a couple of paragraphs carefully written honed rewritten to sort of try to get our point across which may be a bit difficult for me to do right now and finally which we felt was a huge technology challenge a huge need but also technology challenge is replacing individual certification and institutional ranking is reputation metrics for quality assurance what we do today is you have the one shot examination winner take all it's a it's a fundamentally unfair system somebody who is unwell on the day of the examination who comes up with a suboptimal performance women are inevitably you know disproportionately disadvantaged by this young women in particular it's a fundamentally unfair system and based on that one single exam everything everything gets decided how can we change that how can we come up with reputation metrics of quality assurance for the individual that are not based on single shot examinations similarly institutional ranking you know when the ranking agencies come institutions look lovely everything works as soon as they go things go back to normal go university is looking terrible these days now the other day I was asking I said you know I think I think you know we need to start thinking about a major repainting of our building then they said sir the monsoon I said okay so after the monsoon so you know put up the files to me then they said sir but knack is coming next year you know our next knack visit is 2019 so you know presumably they are saving money out there to make the university look like a I don't know pardon the gender insensitivity a blushing bride or something you know when the knack team comes on campus or whatever I don't know what is what's going on but but but that's the way that that's the way we've built our systems I mean you can't blame the people who are doing that so they're trying to remind their stupid vice chancellor that you know just 2018 knack is coming next year so you know we don't need to paint the buildings this year now now how do we get over this how do we get over this culture you know we got to come up with a new way of doing things and one way is if you can come up with reputation metrics which are 360 degree evaluations of individuals of institutions of processes even of you know content how do you do it today you can with big data analytics it actually becomes possible for us now to be able to begin to evolve those systems where in fact there is this continuous 360 degree evaluation taking place and over time you know you are aware yourself of how you are being evaluated by your peers by our superiors by those who work under you etc etc and you can also therefore modify your behavior into ways that make you a better co-worker a better boss a better whatever you know employee whatever it may be so those are kind of the sort of challenges it's a major technology challenge so these five challenges we argue and those of you who read the document will see clearly these are technology challenges they all speak to very real needs for education and society but the challenges are fundamentally technological we end the document by identifying two other challenges that we say are non-technological but nonetheless fundamental and one of them is this bridging the divide between curricular co-curricular and non-curricular learning getting out of this cobweb that we have built which says that mathematics is necessarily more important to society than dancing for example mathematics is incredibly important but so is dancing and at what and at what stage is the learner told that you know dancing is frivolous you'll you know mathematics is important that's the question so we got to create a system where each of them is seen as a form of learning and everybody is allowed the child is allowed the young learner is allowed to pursue those branches of learning that actually in passion make make them passionate obviously they learn other things too but they can pursue their passions and not in that extracurricular sense oh you know you're very good at painting so you can do that but that's not ultimately what you're going to be judged on that's not you're going to be evaluated on why not why not somebody who's a really good you know individual arts why are they not being seen to be an outstanding student somebody who's an outstanding sports person why are they not being seen to be an outstanding student that's the question so because somehow figure out how we bridge this divide some systems are doing it again I said we don't talk about other countries here but some systems now in the world have begun to recognize this and have begun to tackle it and the last for us because this is the the alpha and the omega of of education it's never going to go away it cannot go away it should not go away is the teacher so we feel you know making teacher training the keystone of educational reform that's the challenge no education reform will ever succeed if the teachers are not on board it's as simple as that if the teachers are not on board it'll not happen because the teacher can subvert it I was involved I was mentioning this to a few friends a little earlier I was involved in the process of rewriting the ncrt textbooks some years ago in political science and you know God how we worked on it and ultimately when it was interacting with the teachers it became clear to me that day that no matter how hard we'd worked on the textbook it simply would not get to the learner in the way that we had intended it to go and there's nothing we could do about it today we can today technology makes it possible for us to write textbooks in formats that the learner can access without the intermediation of the teacher but this poses a fundamental challenge for teachers there because it's very easy to therefore be knocked out of the equation and that would be a terrible thing so making teacher training the keystone of educational reform we literally end our document on this note I'm sorry I've gone on about 10 minutes more than I'd intended to but I'm done I think that was really spectacular we also identified a lot of challenges for us and so thank you sir for a very brilliant exposure but I there was no mention about primary education is that is not is that not part of vision 2035 it's absolutely part of vision 2035 but what we say about primary education is but several things but I think let me just mention one thing that we we do say in the documents which is that devices should be kept away from children below the age of eight but this business now of introducing young learners to devices literally from the first day is a terrible thing and it is leading them to fundamentally from a very young age cognitively confuse the physical world and the virtual world just the neural pathways the brain chemistry is getting messed around in all sorts of very fundamental ways and that that particular stage of child development it's extremely important that the child first be allowed to immerse himself or herself in the physical world and then at a particular stage we think eight is about the right age we discussed a lot with people who work in the cognitive sciences with a couple of you know neurosurgeons etc we talked I mean we tried to get what what sort of age if we are going to recommend a specific age eight seem to be sort of the consensus thing that seem to be emerging so that's one example of what we talk about I think I think the the the key the key problem with with primary education is that learning through play we all talk about it but in reality very few institutions actually seriously pursue it today mostly it is from a very young age imposing memory tasks on the learner now how do we get out of that we think gamification potentially for older ages maybe may work you know where where you can sort of you know you learn in the process of playing games and that could then be on devices but for that that age if we are ourselves saying that they should not be exposed to devices what do you do we we didn't I think in our document uh sort of say anything very specific about how we tackle the challenge see in some parts of our document we well let me put it this way we started out by realizing that we couldn't say anything about educational technologies without saying something about education first because you know you know it make no sense to sort of you know talk about sort of some education some educational technology solutions if we weren't first clear what type of educational system we wanted so we were handicapped when it came to primary education to very honest it's not that there aren't some very fine thinkers in the education studies field who are focusing on these issues of course there are but from the technology point of view we really didn't partly because we ourselves were recommending that for the extremely young learner don't use devices you know immerse them in the physical world so there are lots of arguments today in favor of devices oh it helps you know it helps hand-eye coordination and stuff like that but there are other ways to develop hand-eye coordination you know by playing with balls playing with blocks there are also the other ways in which that can be done which does not require in the physical world that does not require devices so so if anybody going through the document finds that they're not saying a lot about the first phase of education it's not because we don't think it's important but because early on we felt that you know technology out there would have only a limited role I found the initial categorization of indians that you did based on the professionals and also left out very interesting so my question is so when you say it is done from the when you do that kind of categorization in a technology vision document what aspects of technology or components of technology do you think are addressing those five categories six categories that you had so mainly what you spoke about was maybe in educational technology form maybe because the audience here but there were also some categories in the profession which doesn't have much connection with education like left outs or how what components what characteristic of technology you see that that will address those categories yeah so so we felt for example if it comes to you know those who we call the left outs and left behinds what is their what was their key characteristic what was their key need we felt that it would be the fact that they are isolated but they're isolated due to either resources or opportunities so they may not be physically isolated they may in fact be living and in fact they are living most of them right amongst us but never nonetheless they are isolated so they would be different from say the rooted and remote in which case you know we could say much more that the isolation is a physical one or in the case of say dropouts and late bloomers where again we would say they were isolated but isolated in an academic sense they're academically isolated that they've you know they're basically not been able to get get to the fruits of education you know so for you know so if you're thinking about dropouts and late bloomers if the challenge is that they're isolated academically then a whole range of assistive technologies are what we need to bring to bear to sort of deal with their problems so you know and then we sort of go about that exercise of saying well okay so what are the sorts of technologies and you know then a tabular form we sort of specify it so that kind of mapping process and look there's another thing also you know we are we are clear that in the current form the which very format this is a static document in fact one of the problems with the technology vision 2035 exercise so far if I may be permitted to be autocritical since I'm a part of it is that ultimately we have brought this all out in a format which is very 20th century you know we're still bringing out in the form of a Sakari document one of the reasons why so few people have heard of it is precisely because we brought it out in a format where very few people will hear of it you know it's in the format of a Sakari document so that's our problem that's our challenge so we've got to we've got to we've got to think about how we can bring some of these ideas into the public domain so that they are they are debated they are problematized they are critiqued they are you know at you know taken on board and operationalized whatever it may be but to do that we've got to bring it out in different formats I was over lunch chatting with a few colleagues talking about this precisely that you know that this is where you know we we we face some fundamental bottlenecks so for example not just in the educational technologies thing but you know transportation there are some really interesting things that came out in the transportation sector report which again a lot of these are just dropping like stones in a pond you know and that's it it's gone so we are working very hard I'm at least you know pushing the system to see how we can you know come up with a dissemination exercise that authentically gets to different user communities in different formats you know so for instance in educational technologies the formats in which we'll have to get it to a group like yourselves would be very different from the way we'd get it to a bunch of teachers who are tackling the needs of primary schools you know students early learners for example we'd have we'd have to give it in different formats but but even today there are things that we are not doing that we can do that are really low lying fruit I mean for instance there are very few you know what's up groups even today of teachers in particular subjects and so on and so forth so we don't have a what's up group of geography teachers you know and in Bombay Mumbai you know geography teachers in the schools of Mumbai who are teaching geography to students of fifth sixth seventh and eighth class there's no reason why not it's just literally you know a problem of aggregation you know it should be so somebody is going to make a killing on that one by the way I think you know if you if you one of you is technologically savvy create an app that can actually bring various communities of teachers together you know if you can if you can come up with an aggregating platform that can do that somebody out here is going to make a killing I mean you know because everybody will go to it because that's the sort of stuff we need you know if you are if you're talking about making our teachers change resilient you know the way they're going to be change resilient is when they actually create communities amongst themselves and they and they you know so what we would like ideally is you know somebody coming and putting in the what's up you know one of my students asked a really interesting question today and you know I phobbed I phobbed him off but I'm not satisfied with my answer and this was the question any suggestion and then let the suggestions come pouring in that's how you could create a community of learners and that's how you then as teachers reach out to the learners today it's possible to do that you know we can build all of these imagined communities so I'm sorry I've taken the your question into part pathway is a bit divergent from what you had asked but but I hope the basic basic questions been answered okay thanks for this great yellow person I have two small question one about your preposition that education system is going to be redundant by 2025 there is a lot of yellow person at as of now even I think we can say that even as of now it is redundant we should not wait for 2025 but despite the several sector are doing well within the education system but my question is that apart from this metaphysical approach to understanding any body of knowledge is available that is indicating that this system is going to be redundant that is one question second regarding your idea of teacher training probably my understanding is that at least now we should accept that as a system as a country we are not capable to handle this idea of teacher training we should work on a different idea to working with teacher and because we have not sufficient expertise in this country to handle the idea of teacher training on the on the second thing I I mean yeah I think a lot of people are saying that now I mean there's a there is a real problem with with the whole process by which somebody gets certified to be able to teach there's a huge problem with that and that's a problem that is at every level it's starting with the regulator themselves I mean you know there are huge problems with the regulator but but it's become a very lucrative part of our education system it provides a job very easily because it's a system which is constantly expanding it's a skill set it's a qualification that is easily mobile and therefore is of great benefit to people who are in family situations that involve significant mobility so that's something you can take and you can start off in somewhere else the net result is that there's a huge huge emphasis on this and I don't I don't basically disagree with what you're saying but only thing is we are not throwing our hands up and saying oh well nothing's to be done about it we say that no get serious about it uh start start come up come up with the system whereby teacher training is and could be entirely the responsibility of the state we do not privatize military training in our country do we I mean military training is something which is entirely a responsibility of the state is the government that has to do it it's a public activity it's done by the public why is providing education any less critical than guaranteeing your your military security as a state my view it isn't so I mean that's that's the that's the argument we take we've got to really start off by saying that this is probably something that needs to now be now we just ring fence and you cannot enter this area on your first question I'm not sure why you think it's metaphysical I mean it's not matter you yourself said that you know some people will say why wait till 2035 you know system is redundant today the question is not where the institutions will continue to exist of course they'll continue to exist universities last forever you know once a university is created mostly they last forever but that doesn't mean that they are now fulfilling the purposes for which they were established look at some of the great universities of the endogengetic planes which were some of the great institutions of our of our land and look at the condition they are in today so I mean the doesn't I mean there are they are still institutions are people employed there people go to work or don't get a salary everybody does you know but the question ultimately is is this institution serving its designated social purpose so it's in that sense when we talk about redundancy you know I said this over lunch and I'll repeat it I mean you know there are some great European universities that indeed great universities in the Arab world that existed for a thousand years you know as living continuous institutions but the point is they've constantly evolved and transformed themselves I mean you know the same lineage is there but there's this constant process of reconstitution that's why the statement is again schools colleges and universities as currently constituted will be redundant by 2035 the the the drama of somebody coming to the classroom and doing it and going out may still be there we may still deploy technology in these sorts of ways and think that we're very advanced there's no fundamental difference between this and the blackboard in chalk I hope everybody recognizes that right it's just much easier to get more information up there than if you were writing it out that's all there is to it that whole stuff will continue to happen but will it serve any social purpose you've all heard I mean in this audience of the flipped classroom I mean every single person's audience knows what it is but let's just recall once more what it is what does it mean it means that the work that the learner did at the institution of learning is now being done at the home place and the work that used to be done at the home place now is beginning to be done at the institution of learning are our teachers equipped for that it's very easy for you to go and do a broadcast form of content transmission you come in there you you've said the terms of the engagement you're there for a fixed amount of time you determine the content you transmit in whatever form brilliantly competently or terribly but you do it right that's one thing but what happens if what used to be called homework is now being done in here the learner is picking up the content at home so there's no longer content the content is being transmitted from other locations other actors your role as a teacher is to help them work through those problems that they earlier did at home those problem sets where it is completely individualized it's completely individualized how do we how do we begin to tackle that and again small scale experiments I can give you 20 examples of how it's happening but I mean our problem is large numbers of everything in this country if you can't come up with a mass solution I'm not interested I'm serious about this I mean I love going to institutions of learning and seeing what they're doing out there but frankly I've been to too many experimental schools by now to have any interest in them that's interesting but ultimately epiphenomenal I mean you know you've got you if you can't massify it that's not a solution that is applicable to India if you can't scale it up don't talk to me about it because our problems are all problems ultimately of scaling things out right so I mean I'm not I'm not standing out here saying that in one single document we've we've solved the problems of either education or technology or indeed society but we've tried to make an attempt to to not make this some kind of a Sakari exercise and we really tried to authentically look at what the con what the issues were from the from the bottom up and I'd love it if some of you actually you know could find the time to go through it and and react to it and actually critique it I mean one of the things in terms of dissemination exercise that I'm telling them is our dissemination exercise should be aimed in a way where we actually actively ask people to problematize and critique what we are saying I mean we want that you know we don't want to be there in our defensive positions and so on and so forth I hope I've sort of kind of answered what you had asked sure if I forget I'll take it on should I just yeah hello good evening and I'm from an affiliated college in Mumbai and we also have a UTC recognized community college attached to us now since there's so much talk about you know mainstream and vocational kind of learning that must should be happening could community colleges be a solution for the future where you know students who just look at vocational training and are just looking at getting jobs after a certain amount of time you know they enroll themselves into community colleges which is already well established in the US system and we have separate colleges for the actual learning or the actual academics which we hope to see happening again since we have this community college in my own institution which is only one of the three recognized community colleges in the University of Mumbai the challenge that we face again is related to demographics and of course the fact that higher education itself is so subsidized so when so you don't find any takers for community colleges for the skilling colleges so to say so that is a very big challenge and of course this is related to the educational roadmap that you have laid before us I do not know if it falls into the technology vision this is something I thought I must share with you that probably could community colleges separating these two institutions be be a kind of a solution things that you said actually include policy decisions which will be slightly unpopular because they involve some sort of mass inertia to be turned over so do you have also any recommendations to create a political will to make these changes into sort of policy changes or to actually drive them through to its target thank you for a stimulating lecture I think and it's remarkable the breadth of vision which is behind this policy vision document and it's somewhat unusual and so really commendable I think so I of course I was trying to look at it a little bit critically and thought I'll put a couple of things in front of you for consideration you know maybe you you must have thought through them and perhaps you dealt with them one is you know it's quite striking that when you talked about those who are older in terms of age which is the direction in which the population will shift the picture you showed was of an aged person who was a student and normally when we you know recruit people after superannuation we recruit them in the role of a teacher or in that you know to take advantage of the agent experience but here you've turned it around you want them to be learners that's of course interesting but is it also some kind of a privileging of change because I don't know if 2035 is too early for that but change itself could be problematized it could create its own problems the rapidity and pace of change and one might have to deal with that in certain ways in which case of course age becomes a metaphor for stability and so on so that was one thing that I was wondering because you know issues of fragility issues of risk stability these might become important in the future if not the very near future and so we have to learn and evolve ways of dealing with those issues as well that was one point that I wanted to make the second thing I thought is that remarkable though the vision is it may be considering education largely as something centered around an individual of course I mean I wouldn't say that this is completely true you have other things as well but if you think of education as something that's not of the individual but education of communities and of collectives and the fact that education and learning themselves create communities and collectives and you know this determines the formation of communities collectives the flow of culture evolve so all these interact with learning in some way and perhaps we need better of course this is we don't have a good understanding of all this how is it that learning creates communities and how do communities in terms in terms share learning distribute learning within them etc so perhaps this aspect could also be thought through and included in some way sure let me look at the you know the whole question about vocational education first you see I think it's a it's a bidirectional challenge really it's not just about mainstreaming you know vocational education but it's also about vocationalizing so-called mainstream education so over time if things work out and if you see vocational education as in some ways you know a bit of a dummy for the skill side and you look at sort of you know mainstream education is a bit of a dummy for the knowledge side you would in an ideal universe like to in fact see a convergence so if that is kind of you know broadly speaking the way one can envisage it certainly that's the way I have come to envisage it and to some extent in our document too then I'm not sure that standalone vocational colleges are a solution just as I'm increasingly convinced that standalone any same mono disciplinary anything's are a solution you know and particularly given the nature of the sorts of issues that you know we now have to tackle you know socially globally and so on I mean we really need to be having collaborations across these divides so you know for me in some ways in some ways an ideal kind of form of learning actually already exists and that is medical education whereas the branches of medical education the skill and the knowledge component is so seamless and it's done in such seamless a manner that you know you don't know where the knowledge ends and the skills begin and vice versa and it's the same practitioners so and that's a form of education that blends the place of learning with the place of work so the place of learning and the place of work are also co-located you know it's actually a wonderful form of education the more I think about it the more I'm sort of convinced about that there's a problem with that the problem is it's so terribly expensive you know some of those expenses are because we built policy requirements because we've got to have a 200 bed tertiary hospital in order to open a medical college you know I mean obviously the skies are through the cost of you know through the roof but the idea there I mean I think for a moment if we can just envisage that and ask are there other branches of learning where we could do something similar you know what would then engineering education modeled on a medical education look like for example you know we could just sort of play out some of these thought experiments to start up I think we may begin to come up with certain types of you know institutional forms which may be actually quite interesting and which may actually work you know I mean so to some extent that's that's the way I basically approach this issue and then of course there's the more kind of trivial but nonetheless important thing which is that you know in our society if you aren't a graduate you're nobody tragic but that's the reason we had to evolve the bee walk as a degree because you know that that young kid who at age 16 can strip down a motorcycle and then build it back up again that's a wonderful skill but that's a skill that will remain unrecognized the parents will shove that kid into engineering and that poor child will take seven and a half years to get that bee or be tech degree and in the process would actually be de-skilled you know actively de-skill now that's our reality and by the way this example that I'm giving is of somebody who's in my family very close to me you know I've actually seen that happen in with my own eyes in fact a cousin of mine who I'm very fond of actually this process and that in other words nobody not the family not society not the state nobody recognized that this was in fact a very gifted individual the entire system just did not recognize that this was in fact an intelligent person because we defined intelligence in ways which necessarily excluded him how do we begin to change that so I mean I'm not at all convinced that standalone institutions help us get anywhere we've got to think now about some of these great convergences and I'm not saying it's easy I'm not saying it's easy but I think the challenge for our generation and for the youngsters in this room is that it's building institutions building systems which bring various different specializations together into comfortable cohabitation and mutual influence and mutual learning and mutual support I think that's that's the challenge for our generation and in the process I've completely forgotten your question could you just oh yeah sure sorry no I got it I got it because I got three very different questions and I was okay I'll say two things about that I've thought about this deeply I'm a political scientist so so it's actually my discipline that you're touching with that question two responses and I think they're both coming from different sides but they're converging again interestingly the first is I truly believe that a political party a political leader a political platform in our country today that cracks the fundamental problem of education will become the natural party of government for at least a generation I'm absolutely convinced about that if you think about how much today individuals and families in this country are willing to invest on education I think it's in anybody who actually comes up with a workable solution to our education crisis so I don't think that this is you know simply a question of as it were pushing a political establishment or a bureaucracy in a particular direction I think some of them are beginning to get the idea that that you know education could be the thing that differentiates them you know just like roads were for another political party that I will not mention but which understood that there was a huge deficit in this country on road connectivity and took that road connectivity challenge seriously and that and that political party again I will not name it has had concrete real benefits political benefits from that recognition I think that some ways education is ripe for something like that and if a political formation existing or one yet to emerge you know can I pick this up and do it it's actually a massive vote winner in and of itself as an issue area but equally you're right this cannot be something which is limited to a top-down kind of you know approach of a state re-engineering the entire education system it's not going to happen like that there are too many moving parts there's too much of complexity it's just a massive system the diversities are enormous so I think we're going to need that bottom-up kind of community involvement model also very significant in that in some ways ties up with this question you know when talking about building communities the what's up group example that I was giving is precisely about that it's about building a community of knowledge you know and mutual support and so on so I believe that that is also happening now and you know there are there are parts of India the Indian northeast for example where very very actively from the bottoms up there are these pressures now with regards to education the northeast and states didn't have any problem by handing over their universities to the union government and saying yeah let them be central university and that's a really interesting indicator normally state governments like to cling on to their universities the northeastern states didn't do that they said no you know I mean the whatever resources we have a fraction of the resources that you know can come if deli if this becomes deli's game and they said yeah make it your game we don't care asked to it's going to be our our learners our young generation that are going to benefit from it we don't mind so that's I think the other you have these indications therefore of a very significant bottoms up approaches also the question is going to be our traditional institutions the institution that already exists are we even going to be a part of this process or not you know that's the real question that's the real question because as of today it could go either way you could see a massive re-engineering and transformation of our institutions or we could just see this kind of prolonged you know existence on life support you know what's happening in a lot of our states today is that state universities are getting barely any money I must rapidly say my state is not one of them and my university is not one of them we are very generously supported by our state government but we are I would say a bit of an exception you know normally I mean I mean when I mean when you have these vice chancellor confuses we talk to vice chancellor a lot of them they they're struggling one vice chancellor told me that her wage bill I won't I don't identify the state because it's shocking data that her wage bill just the salary bill comes to about 42 crores a year and the amount of money that she gets from the state government is 2 crores a year I don't even I just looked at her and said why are you such a such a masochist why are you doing this job I mean you know so so I mean you know so we have some real problems there I think on I think I think your your your concerns are perfectly valid but we did actually in one meeting discuss this whether when we are talking about learner centric and we are focusing on Indians whether we should whether we should treat individual Indians as your unit of analysis or whether we can think about larger groups and larger solidarities and so on after a lot of discussion we felt that that would just complicate our task too much because then you would you could ask all sorts of questions about what is the basis of those groups you know what are the basis of the solidarities and you know so we're that was also getting us into a ticket of potentially ideological issues I would no problem with ideology but in a document of this nature you know we didn't want to necessarily get into those areas but I think what you're asking is a really fairly valid questions and particularly because some of the things we talk about cannot be solved at the individual level you know you're going to ultimately require kind of group solutions how you define those groups how those groups are constituted I think that's that's a different question and it's and it's not you know this you see we all we all develop particularly those who come from if I want to anything else a left liberal predisposition orientation we all come with this kind of very fuzzy I'd not fuzzy but kind of fuzzy in the in a cuddly kind of sense of groups you know that groups are these great things and and and you know but the reality is that groups can also be incredibly oppressive you know and particularly in a society like ours and the fact that you know access to education has been you know unevenly distributed in our society is not just because the state has created you know structures whereby you know these are provided more in some areas than others in some groups than others but also because of the way the groups themselves function and I think those of us who would probably recognize that so I think given all of that we didn't I think in any serious way so anybody reading a document hoping to find a very strong kind of community based approach to education may probably leave the document disappointed I'd be curious actually now to if you could find the time to read it and then tell me what you think about that I would be curious because yes you're raising a very significant issue but having we discussed it early and I think we just said you know we're not getting into that that area partly because amongst ourselves we didn't fully agree which is what happens when you anytime ideology gets into the picture sorry I but it's a very it's a very unsatisfactory answer I know but that's all I have so thank you so much for you know patiently answering all the questions and we're all invited for tea in the canteen and once again now