The Ahmedabad University (AU) recently launched an International Fintech Institute (IFI) at GIFT city along with IIT-Gandhinagar and University of California, San Diego. In an exclusive interview with The Indian Express, AU Vice Chancellor Dr Pankaj Chandra talks about the need for IIMs to “convert to universities”, the value of liberal arts, and challenges faced by students today.
Where do you see the IFI in the next five years?
GIFT City (Gujarat International Finance Tec-City) is really a large fintech place and one of the challenges there is that there are about 600-odd companies, which kept saying we don’t have adequate talent…The biggest challenge is that operations guys have no clue about technology. Which finance programme in this country teaches you technology? And the tech guys coming out with computer science have zero knowledge on banking, on finance, on regulatory tech, insurance, pension etc. And hence, the need to train people differently. These trained people (from IFI) will become a strong (source of) supply of very relevant talent for GIFT companies or other firms in the country and those who want to get into start-ups.
How would you compare AU with other institutions?
We have the advantage of newness. You could do experiments without any penalty… If we, at a new institution, start to design things like them (existing institutions), why should we be here? So, we have to think very differently.
By ‘them’ you mean the IIMs?
IIMs, IITs, JNU, Delhi University — all the existing institutions in that sense. I was from IIMA, my other colleagues were from the IITs and some others were coming from other university systems. We felt that we needed to bring complex problems into the classroom. So, we built four studio courses. These are called: Water; Climate Change; Democracy and Justice; and Neighbourhoods, which is a proxy for urbanisation. (From 2024-25, the fourth studio has been replaced with critical thinking and writing)… in the water studio, the very first day, we give the kids a bottle to get samples from every ward of the city. For the first time, kids are going from South Bopal (a posh area in West Ahmedabad) to Maninagar (south Ahmedabad) or in Juhapura (a Muslim neighbourhood) or somewhere else. And that’s an education in my mind. Because you will engage, you’ll see people doing different kinds of things. So, they’ll go collect data. Then, they build an instrument and after that, measure the quality (of water). Then, they learn data science, put this data on a GIS map. they’ll put the whole city’s map — That’s research-based thinking. Now, you can teach them any theory you want because you have primed them.
Have you faced parents objecting to their wards going to certain areas in the city?
We cancel (their) admission. Go home (we say). This is our education…we launched in 2019…I sat with a class of 50 kids on the first day. There was a clear divide with engineers and science guys saying, “what nonsense is this foundation programme?”, and the humanity and social science management children who were happy. And now, students are coming to AU from all over the country because of our foundation programme.
What have been the major challenges since you took charge in 2015?
Our education system is very content-oriented. Everybody talks about content and not pedagogy…we had to bring in very different kinds of people. In nine years, we have built a curriculum structure, which is very different from anybody in India and several places globally…We won’t have departments because we want people to talk with each other. And that’s why we put arts and sciences together. Physicists sit next to the biologists who sit next to a history person and they talk and conduct courses together. The NAAC chair told us: “You are an institution of the future.”
How much of NEP (National Education Policy) have you implemented?
We have not done it (the implementation) ‘as NEP’. We’ve just done it as good practices that we have learned from many other places. We have a very long way to go. If I have 20 steps to climb, I am probably on step five. We have a plan for 2035.
Any expansion plans?
We will grow but in terms of student numbers and not geography. Today, we have about 75-80% undergraduate students and 20-25% masters and Ph D. We will grow our masters and Ph D… We have around 4,000 students; in five years, we may go up to 6,000. We have about 200 full-time faculty, we are going to go up to 500. We are putting out a new school of performing in visual arts. We are enhancing STEM very strongly and setting up a new lab. We have just started India’s first M Tech programme in composites, in partnership with ATIRA (Ahmedabad Textile Industry Research Association)…last academic year, we started a new programme, which we call BXMX, where you do a bachelors in one and masters in another school.
A large number of people are pursuing liberal arts but not getting jobs. How do you see this panning out?
I think liberal arts’ education is very valuable. The challenge is with the companies. They need to understand the value of liberal arts, parents need to understand. These kids are very bright; they cannot make it to MBA at IIM because of that stupid CAT test, which is skewed towards those who are quantitatively inclined. You want to talk about business in industry that’s an agent of social change. How do you make that agent? Not through engineers. You make it by bringing such people into the workforce who think differently, whose training is different, whose understanding of society is different. I think it’s a long haul for Liberal Arts education.
Where do you see the problem with the IIMs?
These (IIT, IIM, AIIMS) are “siloed” institutions. Today, you can no longer solve epidemics like COVID if you are just a biologist. You cannot solve a financial crisis if you are just a management guy. You need humanities. You need social sciences. You need a whole lot of others to come here, which only universities provide…all great business schools (globally) are part of a university, like Harvard, Wharton and Stanford. These (IIMs etc) are institutions that have served India very well, they have very good faculty and get absolutely top-class students. But I think these institutions need to enlarge and become a university with other knowledge systems influencing them. Otherwise, they would shrivel and die in due course of time.
Recently, there were incidents such as a student dying by alleged suicide at the IIMA and an MBBS student’s death in an alleged ragging incident. What do you make of these?
It is very complex. I think with rising income there’s been a very big gap between parents and children. There are lots of resources at the disposal of children very early on, things are happening for them and as a result, this resilience has vanished… Somewhere or the other, the bridge between the parent and the child has broken…The internet has so much information and things that these kids are not mature enough to handle. We have a counselling system and I keep getting reports every month on the areas that the kids are conversing in…it is all about family and relationship, not about academics, not about pressures from jobs.
Growing up (in my time), you always had a student who looked out for you; I don’t think they (the present generation) have such bonds. Schools have also become “over pressured”. Despite all pressures, we (at AU) have decided not to keep any examination or test. Each test heightens your anxiety.
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