The author here mentions about developing a refined versioned of GDP that is presently proposed by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy to include subjective factors as a part of GDP instead of just quantitative factors.
The commission includes Nobel Prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen. The idea here is to include subjective indicators like happiness, life satisfaction etc but equates human welfare with money then the value. GDP also does not take into account the environmental depletion that takes on account of usage of natural resources in the economic activities. The argument here is that not all economic activities results in social welfare. Thus GDP should cover all the measures that encompass all aspects of human welfare rather then the sum total of all economic activities in monetary terms.
Drawing lines from the UN HDI, the commission need to work on all the indicators of social and environmental development. Thus, we need to supplement GDP, not supplant it.
The author criticizes the government move to make UGC regulate the deemed universities across the country with respect to the fee structure and admission process they follow for student intake.
This clearly makes a mockery of definition of deemed universities. Deemed University is a status given to an institution that is seemed to be able to achieve excellence through greater autonomy in terms of fee structure, syllabus followed, student intake process and faculty compensation etc. This does not happen overnight. But then it’s a fair game since the non-performers would eventually get weed out. According to National Knowledge Commission, set up by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said that present regulatory framework is itself a huge barrier to higher education institutions to grow. AICTE is also being accused of creating artificial scarcity where demand exceeds supply by wide margin. But it’s to be known that demand will eventually match supply when the cost of education falls down.
The current structure of government would only create unemployable graduates and its claim of creating “world class” institutions cannot be realized by just fiat. As per the suggestion of NKC, government needs to create a regulatory authority that regulates these universities in a light manner which is more needed in the current knowledge economy.
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