India, a country renowned for its engineering and information-technology education, wants to do more to spur the social sciences by setting up a research center that will award 10 annual fellowships, report The Hindu and The Hindustan Times. The proposed center would be established with a $200-million endowment. “Unless we are able to lift the quality of research in India in social sciences, we will not be able to get the kind of data which are fundamental for policy makers to take decisions,” said Kapil Sibal, India’s education minister, at an international conference. The fellowships will be named after Amartya Sen, the Indian-born Nobel laureate in economics. India’s education ministry has asked the Indian Council of Social Science Research to establish the National Social Science Research Innovation Centre to identify innovative research and assist in building a network for…

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India has announced a new effort to deal with the country’s skills shortage by upgrading its vocational-education system. A new National Vocational Education Qualification Framework is to be adopted by Indian polytechnics, engineering schools, and other colleges starting this year, the Press Information Bureau reports. The plan envisages training five million students a year and providing new certificates in areas like information technology, construction, and tourism. India’s education ministry says the framework will help increase gross enrollment to 30 percent from the current 15 percent.

India’s ambitious plan to start 14 so-called  innovation universities, which are meant to be model institutions, some built with assistance from foreign partners, has been scaled down by the education ministry, reports the Indian Express. The effort had attracted the interest of American universities, including Yale. The ministry sent a note to the Indian Cabinet saying the number of proposed institutions will be reduced without specifying by exactly how many. A ministry source told the newspaper that only a couple will be started because it isn’t feasible to start so many new universities. The legislation authorizing the new universities, the Universities of Innovation bill, is expected to be presented to the Cabinet soon, after which it has to be passed by Parliament.

In an unusual grant, the Indian government is providing $1.5-million to set up the “Indian Ministry of Culture Vivekananda Chair” at the University of Chicago, reports the Indian Press Information Bureau. The contribution is to mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vivekananda, a Hindu philosopher credited with spreading the Hindu religion to Western countries. He represented India at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions, which was held in Chicago, and conducted hundreds of lectures on Hinduism’s main texts, the Vedas, and yoga. Under the terms of the agreement, “the University of Chicago will take into an account the feedback from the government of India before making its final selection from the pool of selected candidates.”

India’s University Grants Commission has proposed a sweeping effort to increase women’s education in the country, saying it plans to establish 20 universities and 800 colleges affiliated to federally supported universities all exclusively for female students, report The Times of India and India Today. The university regulator is seeking $36-billion for the new institutions and other proposals over the next five years, an amount that is four times what it has sought during its previous five years. In addition to the effort to better serve female students, it has proposed that 30 of the 43 federally financed universities double their student numbers. Despite the ambitious proposals, the regulator’s plans face daunting obstacles, like India’s significant shortage of faculty members.

One of India’s top universities, the University of Delhi, is facing a faculty rebellion of sorts. A group of faculty members is protesting the university’s leader for pushing through Western-style reforms, such as a semester system, report The Hindustan Times and Indian Express. About a 1,000 professors took part in a demonstration Thursday outside the office of Dines Singh, the university’s vice chancellor. Before the protest, Mr. Singh’s office told the leaders of the university’s colleges that any professors participating in a demonstration would have vacation days taken off for missing classes. The Delhi University Teachers’ Association has said the university administration is unwilling to talk with professors about the reforms, including a plan to introduce a four-year undergraduate degree instead of the traditional three-year one. It also has accused the…

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India’s education ministry last October introduced what it called the world’s cheapest computer, the $35 Aakash, as a means to fight poverty and promote digital literary. But now the ministry may end up shelving the entire project, reports India Today. The ministry wants DataWind, the Montreal-based company that is manufacturing the tablet, to upgrade the device’s electronics after users complained about it. But sources tell the newspaper that DataWind has refused unless it receives more money. So far, the ministry has received 30,000 of an initial order of 100,000 computers.

Indian police Sunday foiled an elaborate scheme involving cellphones and fake students to cheat on a top medical school’s entrance exam, report The Times of India and Mail Today. During the three-and-a-half-hour test at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, several people impersonated exam takers and scanned the 23-page question booklet using Bluetooth devices stitched into their shirt collars and Android cellphones strapped to their wrists. The images were sent to other members of the gang, who solved the questions and dictated the answers to those taking the exam using tiny earphones. According to police, who arrested the fraudsters about halfway through the exam, students allegedly paid around $60,000 each to have the test taken for them.

Even though India wants to expand its higher-education system to meet student demand, the country’s professional-education regulator said the number of applications to start new colleges in 2012 was less than half compared with the previous year, the Indian Express reports. The regulator, the All India Council for Technical Education, has received 400 applications nationwide for new institutes in 2012 in disciplines like engineering, technology, management, architecture, and hotel management, while last year it received 1,067  and in 2010 it received 2,176 such applications. Observers blamed the decline on the global economic slowdown. “People are playing it safe and adopting a wait-and-watch policy,” said S. S. Mantha, the regulator’s chairman. Other reasons for the drop could be a glut of engineering seats as well as a federal crackdown on corrupt government officials who took…

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To ease a chronic faculty shortage and improve teaching quality, India’s education ministry said it is prepared to finance postdoctoral studies abroad for Indian academics, reports the Indian Express. The ministry plans to pick 1,500 applicants from across India and support their studies at “reputed” institutions abroad. “The idea is that the government invests in improving and developing the faculty base on the condition that on completion of studies, this faculty must return to India and teach in institutes here,” said a ministry official.