India's New Higher-Education Minister Welcomes Foreign Universities

New Delhi — The new government seated after the recent national elections in India has ousted the reform-resistant minister in charge of higher education and replaced him with Kapil Sibal, a strong proponent of allowing foreign universities into India and of promoting private investment in higher education.

His predecessor, Arjun Singh, was often publicly criticized, even by members of his own party, for his intransigence on reforms, and he was kept on, despite his disagreements on education policy with the prime minister, for political reasons.

Mr. Sibal, a former lawyer and minister of science and technology, pledged prompt action on long-delayed legislation to permit foreign universities to operate in India. The new minister, who is officially in charge of the Ministry of Human Resources Development, which oversees all education, has master’s degrees from the Harvard Law School and the University of Delhi.

Speaking to reporters today, Mr. Sibal said that education programs begun by Mr. Singh would not be scrapped, but he said, without being specific, that changes would be made as needed. “We have to march forward to be able to compete at the international level,” he said, citing outdated curricula in particular as hampering young Indian university graduates’ access to good job opportunities.

Mr. Sibal has often publicly criticized India’s myriad higher-education regulators for “destroying” efforts to improve the education system. He has noted with approval how, in some Western countries, colleges and universities operate with relative independence of state control.

“There is not such a thing as University Grants Commission, there is not such a thing as All India Council of Technical Education, there is not such a thing as Medical Council of India” in the West, he said last September at a meeting with Indian, Chinese, and American scientists. Those Indian regulatory institutions, he said, have, “what can I say, destroyed our entire efforts to take education forward.”

Mr. Sibal has stressed that it is extremely important “to release” higher-education institutions from the control of government to promote a competitive environment. “It’s our misfortune that we have not created an environment that’s appropriate to bring in that kind investment in a cohesive manner,” he said. “We need to allow our institutes to borrow from market. We should allow our universities to float their own degrees.” In a competitive environment, he added, only good universities will survive. —Shailaja Neelakantan