‘Summer Fellows’ to help improve education in A.P.

Youngsters from the IITs, BITS-Pilani, Columbia University, ISB, National University of Singapore, St. Stephen’s and others from both under-graduate, post-graduate levels and conducting research will be engaged by the State for the next couple of months.

Early next week, 18 highly-qualified youngsters drawn from reputed universities in India and across the globe will become the ‘Summer Fellows’ of the A.P. Government studying and assimilating best of global practices in higher education to come up with deliverable action programmes to propel State Universities qualitatively.

Youngsters from the IITs, BITS-Pilani, Columbia University, ISB, National University of Singapore, St. Stephen’s and others from both under-graduate, post-graduate levels and conducting research will be engaged by the State for the next couple of months scouring around the public universities looking into the present-day conditions and how to go about improving standards, scale up skills, initiate entrepreneurship abilities, enhance research outputs, etc.

Knowledge Hub

This is part of a plan of the Government to transform the State into a ‘Knowledge Hub’ for creation of a human talent pool to improve higher education, make it relevant to modern needs and thereby help achieve double-digit growth.

“We want to take the reforms in the higher education to the next level. We need to know which universities are performing and how to progress on international collaborations so as to supplant our efforts. We are already collaborating with several foreign varsities and even sent our VCs abroad,” explains Higher Education Principal Secretary Sumita Dawra.

Selection

The idea has been borrowed from the Economic Development Board of the Finance Department which had similar successful summer fellowships programme last year. For higher education, more than 300 had applied including working professionals and 90 were shortlisted with the help of essays on their vision on how to go about in their preferred area of work.

After pursuing the CVs, 45 were called for interviews via Skype and finally 18 were chosen. “We are not interested in project reports from them lest they gather dust but for deliverable works in the areas of innovation centres, university rankings, smart campuses, common recruitment portal, publication of papers in reputed journals, e-learning portals and so on,” says Akshay Jain, Consultant.

Mentors

Mentors like Prof. Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Rajan Saxena of Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies ( NMIMS), Janaki Ramachandran of IIM - Visakhapatnam and others from important institutions were identified to ‘Summer Fellows’ in their work. “We want to institutionalise the system so that it becomes a practice,” says Ms. Dawra.

Each person would be paid an honorarium of Rs. 70,000 for performance rated ‘satisfactory’, Rs. 85,000 for performance rated ‘Good’ and Rs. 1,00,000 for performance rated ‘Outstanding’ for the entire fellowship period, as determined by the process formulated for the performance appraisal.

If the performance is rated “Unsatisfactory”, the Higher Education Department reserves the right to pay an amount deemed suitable on a case-to-case basis.