Rakesh Mohan

New Delhi, March 12: Yale, an Ivy League university in the US, may have gained a top economist as a faculty member because India’s slumbering higher education system refuses to seek out talent unlike top institutions in the West.

Former Reserve Bank deputy governor Rakesh Mohan today announced he was joining Yale’s faculty after the university pursued him, in stark contrast to India where no one approached him.

“None of the Indian universities offered me to join them as a professor. When one of the top dozen universities (in the world) sends you a call, you do not deny,” he said when asked why he was not teaching in India. Mohan, who was deputy governor at the RBI till July 2009, has also worked at Stanford University in the US.

He had never applied to an Indian university for a teaching post and his decision to join Yale does not mean that institutions here rejected him or his academic potential.

Mohan’s comment does, however, throw into focus the failure of India’s higher education system to actively look out for academicians they may wish to hire.

Top US universities compete with each other for the best faculty, tracking individuals they want for years and often offering them remuneration far higher than what a professor may earn.

In contrast, Indian higher education institutions have rarely sought out specific faculty members. This was, however, not so in the early days after Independence when K.N. Raj, for example, sought out young talents like Amartya Sen for the Delhi School of Economics.

The IITs, IIMs and a few university departments do occasionally try and convince individual academicians to teach their students. But unlike the US, where each university can draw on its endowment fund to pay more than the usual to specific faculty members, Indian public-funded institutions cannot.

Indian public institutions must pay all teachers according to inflexible government scales. Institutions have frequently complained that this lack of pay flexibility robs them of the ability to compete with top international institutions for the best faculty.

Under Kapil Sibal, the human resource development ministry is now finalising a “brain gain” policy that will allow public-funded institutions greater freedom to seek out and hire top faculty.

The proposed 14 “innovation” universities promised by the Prime Minister will also have complete freedom from government regulations in acquiring faculty.

Recently, former National Knowledge Commission chairman Sam Pitroda proposed a $500-million fund to attract international academics. The HRD ministry is evaluating the proposal.

In February, the Prime Minister appointed Mohan as the chairman of an inter-ministry national transport development policy committee to recommend a new transport policy.

Mohan will serve as professor in international economics and finance at the Yale School of Management for four months of the year. He will spend the remaining eight months in India.

Mohan did his BA in economics from Yale itself, before pursuing his postgraduation and PhD at Princeton University.

He joins a faculty including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, American diplomat John Negroponte and India’s Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.