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.
Sources in the Ministry of Education (MoE) said that The National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA), after evaluating the scheme, recommended its continuation.
According to the data accessed by The Hindu, of the 2,101 approved courses, 193 courses were withdrawn and 1,772 courses were delivered till October 2023. Since the beginning of the scheme in 2015-16, 1,612 foreign faculty members have visited the country to deliver courses from 59 countries. After two years of COVID lull, phase four applications for GIAN began only in July 2023, MoE sources said.
As many as 692 (39%) of 1,772 courses were delivered in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campuses, while the second largest cohort of lectures, 436 (24.6%), took place in the National Institute of Technology (NITs). As compared to Central institutes, fewer courses took place in State Universities — 241 (10.8%) of all courses. The rest was conducted at the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), Indian Institute of Sciences (IISC), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs), management institutes, Central universities and All India Council of Technical Education’s engineering colleges.
“IITs are very well funded and a number of foreign faculties regularly come there. We need to take more efforts for renowned faculty to visit State universities and smaller colleges, which have little exposure to high-quality lecturership,” a GIAN course co-ordinator from one of the partnering universities told The Hindu.
Up to 41.4% (668) of academicians who visited India belonged to the U.S. The rest consisted of experts from the U.K. (143), Germany (93), Canada (89), France (56), Italy (58), Nordic countries (47), China, Japan and Taiwan (63), ASEAN countries (42) and other countries (259). Up to 72,000 Indian students directly benefitted.
“While in earlier phases, many foreign faculty were reluctant to publicly upload videos of their lectures and research for online consumption, the MoE has now insisted in Phase four approval process that those experts who will allow video recording and optional web-casting of their course will be given preference,” the course co-ordinator said.
MoE is also planning to make the repository of GIAN lectures available to universities across India through an online consortium to be used as a teaching and assessment tool. “These lectures can be accessed with a specific log in ID and password for students and teachers across multiple universities under the new phase four proposal,” the co-ordinator said.
