Eight years after its inception, past its brief discontinuation during the COVID period, the Ministry of Education is gearing up to restart the fourth phase of the Global Initiative of Academic Networks (GIAN) — Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s pet project to rope in eminent scholars from across the world to teach at Indian universities.
The Central government has spent at least ₹126 crore in payment to support foreign faculty’s travel and honorarium since the inception of GIAN. Each foreign faculty member is paid a lavish sum of $8000 (~ ₹7 lakh) for a week of teaching and $12,000 (~ ₹12 lakh) for conducting a two-week course. As many as 1,073 academicians have taught the one week course, while 553 experts have held two-week courses.
Among these are noted experts like David Shulman, a renowned indologist from Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Bhanu Pratap Jena, a renowned American cell biologist who discovered the porosome, and Subir Sarkar, an Oxford University-based physicist who taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Tabish Khair, a noted author and professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, taught postcolonial world literature in IIT Bhubaneshwar.
