What is the idea behind Chanakya University?
The process to establish the university had started way back in mid-2020. After that it took its own time for the idea to take shape and preparations to be made. The purpose of the university is to create knowledge and nurture transformative leaders for holistic development. Basically, as a university, we need to focus on knowledge and dissemination through research and other methods. We need to make some kind of original contribution in that area over a period of time. That knowledge must equip the people coming out of the university to be transformative. This is not lopsided, but a holistic development. While talking about this, we have two important contexts. First, what prompted us was that in July 2020, the National Education Policy (NEP) was put forth. We thought that as the idea for the university was brought about, it should represent the vision of the policy. Secondly, we have our own heritage, culture and significant knowledge systems in our country. The time has come for us to position all this knowledge and culture to provide solutions to global challenges.
Many people involved with the university have worked on NEP. Why was the decision taken to establish this as a private university as opposed to a state or central university?
This is something we as a sponsoring body thought we must bring in. We have requested and approached many like-minded people who have agreed to make an effort towards establishing the university. Secondly, it is not a private university in the conventional sense. It is a philanthropy-driven private university. So, a lot of people have come to support the university in the last few months alone. They have also agreed to support it in the future. It’s a private university rooted in philanthropy.
When do you predict that the university will be completely NEP-compliant?
It is a continuous process. The basic principles of NEP must first be brought in, which is the starting point. We have an advantage, because we are starting with a clean slate. You can write and implement NEP on that clean slate. It becomes NEP-integrated from day one, especially with the kind of core structure and framework that we are developing, as well as the choices and flexibility that students will be given. As and when the statutory bodies bring in the necessary changes, we will immediately incorporate them from day one.
There are few things that are under the control of the university, which we are doing 100 per cent. But there are also a few things that are not exclusive to our domain. We have to go by the framework of the statutory bodies, like the University Grants Commission (UGC) and others. As and when they are implemented by the bodies, we will implement them immediately. For example, UGC recently came out with its ‘professors of practice’ guidelines and we have immediately implemented it. We already have three professors of practice at our university. Similarly, with the new PhD regulations. We have already implemented them. The clean slate allows us to make sure that we can implement the NEP-inclined guidelines as given by the statutory bodies immediately. We are preparing the kind of framework, structure and mindset needed for this. The basic impediment in any sort of reform is the mindset. So we have remedied this by already preparing the mindset of the faculty and students, so that changes given by statutory bodies can be implemented without difficulty.