Singh at the release of the first report of the NIC in New Delhi on Tuesday. Picture by Ramakant Kushwaha

New Delhi, Nov. 15: A government think tank has proposed a network of universities to allow students to pick courses from across disciplines from different institutions, permitting, say, an engineering student in Bangalore to also study literature from Calcutta.

The National Innovation Council has proposed that a high-speed, fibre-based broadband network that will soon connect more than 400 universities and academic institutions across the country should be used to pioneer the concept of a “meta university”.

The meta university will enable breaking down silos of academic disciplines and help students gain multi-disciplinary understanding, creating more “rounded” intellectuals for society, the NIC has said in its first report released by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today.

“This would enable a student of astrophysics at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, for example, to take up a course in comparative literature at Jadavpur University,” Singh said, after releasing the NIC report. “Such creative reconfigurations are expected to create new minds conducive for innovation,” Singh said.

The high-speed broadband network linking educational institutions is expected to allow universities to share courseware, even lectures, with other institutions in the network.

“We want to use this tool to rethink about education,” said NIC chairperson Sam Pitroda, a telecom and computing innovator who had helped transform India’s telecom sector and guided India’s technology missions during the late 1980s.

“Students wishing to study across different institutions would have to first clear the competency levels required by each of those institutions,” said R. Gopalakrishnan, the member secretary in the NIC.

While technology could facilitate a meta university, sections of the academic community say it is unclear how fast such a change could be introduced given what they say is an academic lethargy that has prevented the implementation of similar proposals made earlier.

The three Indian science academies had more than two years ago jointly proposed changes to allow students pick courses across disciplines within the same university. “But even that has remained unimplemented today,” said Subhash Lakhotia, a senior zoologist at the Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi.

The University Grants Commission has also been discussing transfer of course credits across universities, but there is little progress, Lakhotia said. “The idea of a meta university is very good — but the question is: are our universities ready to take this up?”

“I think a combination of incentives and force will be necessary to do this,” he said.

A member of the NIC said the Union human resource development ministry had expressed enthusiasm for the meta university. “We expect only a small number of institutions to start with, but we’re hoping the number will grow over the years,” the NIC member said.

Academic institutions that are already involved in distance education or make available their lessons and lectures through the Internet are likely to be the earliest members of the meta university network.

Charles Vest, president-emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, had first proposed the emergence of the meta university in a talk more than five years ago. The NIC has tried to tailor that idea of a collaborative platform to offer students in India what it says will be a “customised learning experience”.