IS THIS GUY A SALES AGENT OF AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES?

We all know the "seminars" Australian Universities hold every year in India to catch the rich kids. Education is business in Australia and Indians are the biggest customers. Or, shall we say the raw material or the fuel to keep their teaching factories going?

But, Narayan Murthy is professing that India spends five billion dollars every year in educating our students in American Universities for next fifty years!

Mr Murthy! Why not spend five billion dollars every year in India to set up world class Universities? One can set up a Harvard style University in India for about 100 million dollars or say 700 crore Rupees. We could set up fifty Harvard Universities in India for five billion dollars. Fifty every year, that is. For next fifty years!

We will not get good teachers, you would say. Then set up forty Harvard style Universities for four billion dollars and employ the best professors for the remaining billion dollars. You could get the best in the world for that kind of money. 

The problem, Mr Murthy, is not sending 10,000 PhD students every year to the USA. The problem is what jobs we will offer them when they come back. Do we have the laboratories and research houses to employ ten thousand PhDs every year? And what salaries will we offer them? That of the peon? Didn't you hear that nearly two million candidates, some of them PhDs and MTechs, applied for a mere three hundred jobs of peons in Uttar Pradesh?

On second thoughts, why not spend half of five billion dollars in setting up twenty five Harvards or MITs in India and spend the rest in setting up high class research labs. But again, who will be the customers of such labs and of the fantastic designs they will churn out year after year? Does the Indian industry have it in them to absorb such research products? 

Well, Mr. Murthy! You need to read up some economics after all that COBOL programming that you have learnt. You can't develop an economy in such a lopsided manner. And please stop being an agent of the American Education system. It is sinking for some time now and it is going down for reasons well known to them. We will not prop them up.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Send-10k-PhD-students-each-year-to-US-Narayana-Murthy/articleshow/50780069.cms