Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.
— Mark Twain
While the creator of Tom Sawyer may have said this largely in jest, when you consider that by 2030 global demand for fresh water is likely to outstrip supply by 40 per cent (Foreign Policy, May 5, 2011), one might begin to understand that Twain might have been a visionary.
Future wars of the world will be water wars, one reads this all too often. So when we heard about a Masters programme on “water” started by Shiv Nadar University (SNU), t2 decided to check out whether this unique course, well, holds much water.
Titled ‘Masters in Water Science and Policy’, the designing of this course has been led by Mihir Shah, one of India’s foremost authorities on water. “You can cover everything under ‘water’. From groundwater to agriculture to life on Mars… flooding to pollution,” said Rupamanjari Ghosh, the vice-chancellor of SNU.
USP: FIELD WORK
Science and application will be taught in the first two semesters, the third semester will be for field work, the fourth for dissertation. “SNU has identified projects already available in India, in irrigation, groundwater planning, organic farming… those will be the third semester projects,” Ghosh said. “Research is in our DNA. You don’t have to be a Phd student, a faculty member or a post-doc to do research. Everybody at SNU does research.”
This focus on research was evident in each conversation t2 had at SNU, be it with students, faculty or administrators. The other buzzword here is interdisciplinary-multidisciplinary.
UP NEXT: SECURITY & IR
SNU chancellor S.N. Balakrishnan, a professor of aerospace engineering at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, US, was visiting the Greater Noida campus to take part in the third annual convocation of this new university. He spoke on some of the future plans of SNU regarding interdisciplinary research.
“We will look at some problems of national need. After water, we are looking at security, and international relations. We will work with three lieutenant generals and a military secretary to the government. We call ourselves a national university, and I believe a good university should look at problems of national need and offer solutions. We will look at warfare, and we will create a centre…. We will start with some parts of Asia. Environment is another thing we will look at.”
AT A GLANCE
♦ Name: Shiv Nadar University
♦ Location: Dadri, Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh
♦ Distance from Connaught Place, Delhi: 55km
♦ Established: 2011
♦ Campus area: 286 acres
♦ Faculty members: 197
♦ Students: 2,115
♦ Student-faculty ratio: 10:1
♦ Labs and studios: 154
♦ Books and book chapters: 116
♦ Journal articles published: 462
♦ Conference papers and presentation: 552
PRIVATE EDUCATION
Ram Sagar Misra, who moved from the University of Oxford to SNU and is currently the toast of his fraternity after successfully creating a molecule that can radically increase yield of crops like wheat, pointed out that private universities in India are not very well-accepted.
“In India, private education up to the high school level is appreciated, but as far as higher education is concerned, no. At SNU, we want to break this perception and show that private university can also do very good research,” he said.
Being a private university, and a young one, SNU is able to create its own path. “We don’t have baggage. We can innovate.
Many universities, even in the US, are tied by structures, here it is new. So we can talk about new things. The world of tomorrow is going to be more interdisciplinary. We can implement that here. What we are going to do with engineering here, and creative design, does not exist anywhere,” promised chancellor Balakrishnan.
