Reboot Or Rebuild? The Tough Reality Of Transforming India’s Existing Universities

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Hello and welcome to The Core Reports Weekend Edition. My guest for today is Pramath Raj Sinha, a founder and trustee at Ashoka. Pramath, thank you so much for joining me.

So, you know, we're going to talk about liberal arts education in general, but before that, you know, there are some interesting statistics which have become a little more relevant today. The most important being that the number of visas that were earlier being offered to students from India going to countries like the US, UK, Australia, Canada have declined very sharply. So students are being, or rather not being allowed or not being given as many visas as they were before, which obviously builds up the pressure for high quality or higher quality education in India.

Now, from your vantage point as someone who's been in the formative stages of universities like the Indian School of Business or more relevant being Ashoka, how do you see this demand supply problem?

This demand supply problem is perennial and will continue to exist. Unfortunately, if you just look at the demographics of our country, as well as the economic improvement in families and affordability, we will not be able to create as many high quality institutions as the number of young people wanting that high quality education because it's just the physical brick and mortar classroom with a teacher model is just untenable. And I don't mean to sound like a doomsdayer, but the truth is that that model was built for a much smaller scaling up, that the pace of scale up which has to match with the availability of faculty is just an equation that doesn't add up.

And that's unique to India?

I think it is unique to India because we are at a point in our trajectory where the demographic dividend which we keep talking about is also our big limiting factor because there's so many young people so quickly that never in the history of the human race has any country had to deal with this bulge of young people and how to educate them with our current gross enrolment ratio only at 25 percent or 30 percent.

And for it to really grow much more multifold, you know, 30, 35 percent as the government has said, 50 percent and so on, these targets are meaningless unless you can meet that demand with supply. And it's just very, very difficult to set up so many institutions so quickly. That's the key, that the pace at which they are needed.

So people will be forced to look outside. You will see fluctuations in numbers because of geopolitics as you are seeing. People will go to other countries, they will naturally have to find other countries to go to.

Europe, by the way, is starting a lot of English language programmes just for this reason and many many students you are now hearing are going to Germany, France, Italy, Finland, even Russia, Norway, Russia, Ukraine which you would have not heard of before and I wouldn't be surprised if people start going to China by the way in much bigger numbers.

So I mean, I know each family literally will have their own reason and that might sound quite logical but from your again vantage point as you look at the entire universe of young students, why do so many people want to go overseas?

Fundamentally, we are not able to match that experience and the quality that people know is readily available in another country. It's students want to be in a place that they are inspired by, they want to be at a nice campus, they want to experience good teaching, classrooms, facilities and it's not just the infrastructure, it's the overall experience.

Serendipity of it all.

That's right and so we always remember our school and our colleges and especially those special experiences in those and we are just not able to do that consistently and across all our institutions. There are a very small handful of institutions that everybody wants to get into. I mean, that's why the craze for the IITs or the craze for the IITs.

Also, that has a very direct impact on outcomes. At the end of the day, whatever strata of family society you belong to, you want an outcome, you want a job, I mean the simplest form of outcome or you want to get into a better institution, you want opportunities to open up. There are very few people today in India who have enough money to say, oh I don't care about a good education and even as you get richer, you do want a better education, at least for your children.

So, that focus on saying, look I deserve a much better experience, my children deserve a better experience than I was able to do. So, it's not just a matter of numbers, it's also a question of quality and as a simple example, a small community college in Canada is able to provide that experience and I'm not criticising us or praising them, it's just the sheer numbers and again back to the pace. They've had an easy time building and creating that infrastructure and not being pressured into cutting corners.

So, even their worst institutions have a very good baseline quality and we have just been under a rush to meet the demand.

I'll come to India in a moment but when you talked about this community college in Canada and the time they've had to build this, are you talking about like 70-80 years or 100 years plus or is it?

These community colleges in particular are probably decades old but yes, of course, the universities in the west are at least 100 years old. The ones that we generally talk about and particularly the ones in Europe and the west, they've enjoyed that run whereas our first universities are much more recent but again not talking about India yet. The point I'm making is that even the smallest of institutions are of a much higher quality and so when you're making the trade-off, you will almost always find a better experience from an education and learning and just a personal growth perspective for the dollars that you can afford, quite literally and so the proposition is extremely strong that you have to beat.

In my view, other than a few institutions in our country, if you can afford it, you can actually find much better quality outside.

So, let's come to India now. So, you talked about the community college example, you've talked about India and the premier institutions which were originally all mostly government-led. I'm talking about the IIT IIMs. When you along with your co-founders architected Ashoka University, which of these aspects were you thinking of ahead as you were planning and as you were getting ready to build?

Govind, college education is about discovering yourself. It has been like that since Takshashila which is 2500 years ago. This is an indisputable fact.

In college, you're supposed to figure out yourself, what you're going to do next, gain a certain confidence, become your own person. That's why it's 18 and that age it matches your biology. If you don't give students flexibility, choice, the ability to flower, grow, evolve, you are actually killing that very premise with which college education was created.

So, forget all these labels of liberal arts, humanities, critical thinking, this is all just labelling. I was sitting with a parent who happened to come and see me today this morning since I'm in Bombay and she was gushing about Ashoka and this is not a sales pitch.

But many people do.

But when you talk to her, she doesn't know what courses her child took but the fact that she said, look she was able to grow in a way that I had never imagined. I never thought my daughter will become so confident. She's living in Gurgaon because she says, oh my friends are there.

She's developed such a strong network. She speaks with so much confidence. The fact that she could play basketball alongside her studies has made her into a such a wonderful human being and that's serving her well in her consulting job and so on.

And God knows we have our problems. When you hear these stories, you realise that that's what we built it for, is to give students in India a chance to discover themselves. And it's a contrast to my own education where when you go to an IIT, you get slotted into a particular discipline.

You were in Kharagpur.

I was in Kanpur. And this persists even today that based on your rank, based on your exam, one exam, you get slotted into a particular and you can't change.

I mean technically you can but it's almost impossible. You study that subject and not just IITs but all across so-called liberal arts institutions in our country which get called that just because you can study humanities and social science. The crux is that you pick a subject and you stay with that subject.

You just study that, you mostly specialise in that and you don't have too much flexibility on your curriculum. That really restricts your growth and that's the real crux of what we were trying to solve.

So helping or allowing the discovery of self by students who are coming into age as it were in undergrad and onwards. How do you architect that? This is the thought, I think it's the first principle. So how do you know?

So the way you architect that is again a solved problem. The way you architect that is you require them to do certain things but then you force them to choose and make trade-offs and decisions. Now because first while in school they didn't have too much flexibility, so now you open up the aperture of decision making.

You say you choose your own major, you choose to do something else with your major, we can allow you to do that also. So you can do philosophy but you're still interested in math, you can do a minor or study computer science and on top of that we give you enough room to play. So we create enough room in the curriculum that you can study whatever you want.

You basically craft your four years and all that is doing is it is forcing people to take fundamental choices and by the way you know that frankly whether they go this way or that way they will be fine. So you rely on the larger metacognition of saying I'm teaching them how to think, I'm teaching them how to choose, I'm teaching them how to make trade-offs, I'm teaching them how to prioritise. I'm teaching them how to make bad choices and learn from their mistakes.

Those are the things that allow them to gain confidence to say I can do this, I don't want to do this, maybe I need to do this. I know I want to do this but I'm not so good, I need to make an effort, I need to take some extra classes, I need to grow myself in these areas which is really what life is about, if you think about it. You are constantly making choices, should I do this half hour with Pramath or should I call somebody else?

If I am doing Pramath then what are the questions to ask? So I think that's what it fundamentally does and now the crux of this though is that you can design whatever you want but somebody has to deliver it. You can create an interview guide for Pramath Sena but suppose you are not here and you want somebody else to do it, who's now going to do that interview because just asking Pramath questions that I wrote down is not going to deliver.

So then it boils down to who's the faculty, who's going to deliver this programme. Now the best faculty also don't want to be dictated to, suppose you pick your best colleague to do the interview, they'll say okay Govind gave me these questions but look if the interview goes this way, I want to be able to have the flexibility. So you tell the faculty member that look you have to teach broadly this but look I leave it to you to design the curriculum, to run your own pedagogy, to do your own assessment.

I am not as a university going to dictate what you teach, how you teach and how you evaluate. This is another crux of it which is to bring in great minds and great scholars but give them the freedom to decide how and what they're going to teach.

And I mean and just to sort of touch upon it because this comes up pretty often, the freedom is also something that gets expressed outside of the four walls of the university and that's landed Ashoka University into trouble in the past. So I mean getting into the each cases because you've had so many, is this something that you thought of right in the beginning would happen, if not if then what and if so how did you create the kind of.

Absolutely, again all universities have a code of conduct. We have a code of conduct too. All universities in the world will say look you cannot curtail academic freedom and of course as a society you cannot curtail freedom of speech, we are part of society.

When academic freedom does get curtailed you have to deal with it and you have to be prepared as a university to deal with it. I have said this before and I say this again, I think the challenges happen when in the name of academic freedom, people are also making other statements and those statements then affect the institution that is actually giving you that freedom. That's where we as a institution have to come in and say where do we make the balance because you have to protect the institution also.

If the institution doesn't survive, what's the point of debating what freedom it does and does not offer. So we are very clear, we are not going to tell you what to say, what to write, what to teach, how to do it because that is your right and without that right you won't join me but equally if by what you do, I as an institution am getting impacted. My 3000 students are getting impacted, my remaining 199 out of the 200 faculty are getting impacted and alumni are getting important, our funding is getting impacted then I need to do something about that.

I need to at least say look this is not what the university is saying, this is not what we are brainwashing all our kids with which is sometimes the impression that all of Ashoka is like this only because of this one statement that somebody made. We have to clarify and clear that. Now that obviously leads to conflict because then the person who said feels that they are being disenfranchised by the institution which is not our intent.

In fact, if we were stopping them then they would not say what they did. So of course, you say what you do and you are willing, you're welcome to write but then you face the consequences and you deal with it. We will face our consequences and we will deal with it.

So that's how you're drawing the line. So for example, if an academic makes a statement in his or her private capacity responding to some situation that's happening outside, you're saying that essentially this has nothing to do with me as a university and therefore you manage it.

Often a lot of what has happened at us is that. In some cases there are things that come out of real academic work.

And that's also happened.

That has also happened. There we are forced to say look yes we recognise this is academic work and we either support it or if we feel that it is not real academic work then we also have to call it out. The fact is academic work is not debated on social media as far as we are concerned.

The only debates that should happen about academic work are in the realm of research journals, conferences and so on. Now sometimes what happens is somebody will put forth an academic work but somebody else will pick it up and give it a certain political spin which is what happened in that case.

So when you look back at some of these cases, I mean I'm sure you're trying to assess the brand value so to speak of Ashoka in this case or any university and say okay has all of this affected my fundamental premise or the first principles on which this was built and the ability to attract high quality faculty of the kind that I've always been attracting. Has that changed in any way?

Govind, I have to tell you and you'll think that I'm saying this because I'm biassed. We are just doing, I've just been doing some interviews. I was just in the United States.

I've just been doing some interviews for some senior positions that we are hiring for at Ashoka. I'm amazed at the quality of people who are today willing to come back to India despite everything and the pollution in Delhi to come join Ashoka and give back to the country. I can tell you that I would not have predicted this three four five years ago.

I just interviewed three amazing people who I would not even have considered approaching. By the way, the biggest thing that has happened is what's going on in the US and UK with regard to funding and curtailing of rights at universities. Most of these academics are saying look, what you are going through is par for the course and I've spoken to many administrators.

They are saying the kind of conversations we are having with our academics and our students on what they can and cannot do is unbelievable and they've been telling me about some of those things. We are thankfully not there yet and I hope we'll never get there yet but they are all saying look, they are perhaps prematurely saying game over. I want to move on to a next stage in my life.

I don't want to deal with this anymore and by the way, if I have to make a big pivot and deal with this disruption, I might as well come home. It's not a compromise, it's just that they are now saying look, I would rather take on a larger cause. They are also realising that fighting the current political environment is pointless.

Let's focus on our research, let's focus on our students, let's focus on doing great work. This is in the US or in both in US and UK. I just came back and I'm also doing follow-on meetings with those academics and I can tell you I'm most excited about that.

I think the biggest opportunity staring us in the face right now is to play this right so that we can bring some of our best academics back and I think Ashoka's platform to be able to do that has never been stronger which by the way because of what you are asking me in the question, I was also not sure but for a fact I found out that thanks to the juxtaposition of actors, nothing to do only with us has created the situation.

So I'm very bullish.

I'm sure they also ask you questions about academic freedom and overall freedom.

By the way, they ask less questions than people ask me here and that's also very revealing because they've been hit so hard and you cannot believe the top universities of the world are saying we have to cut this programme, we have to cut this centre. I was just talking to a dean who runs multiple centres, all the centres have been shut down. She oversees I think 14 centres which I won't get into details but focus on international affairs, languages, all shut down.

I was talking to a scientist in a top ivy league university, entire postdoc programme shut down because all our funding would come from NASA. She's saying Pramod can you help me raise some money in India because a lot of my postdocs were actually Indians and maybe you can help me support them. So it's actually much worse than we know when we go into the nitty-gritties of how it is affecting individual faculty, students.

It's not just the visas, it's the funding.

So I'm going to come back to that part in a moment but the question that I was asking you before we veered off here is on the architecting. So you pointed out how the importance of choice and selection even as you enter the college or just as you enter the college. You also talked about for example how you're defining let's say the guardrails or lack of it for the academics in the institution.

My question really is but you also need some guardrails to say in terms of let's say quality, in terms of structure, in terms of saying how do you go ensure that that student who is in any case fairly self-empowered moving from one stage to the other and growing and all of that all of which has to come into a neat structure. This is a new university, it's not something while you can borrow a lot of things you can't borrow everything. So tell us about that phase.

No, so I think the first thing is in education you can't scale and build quality over time. Once you start at a certain quality level then you get stuck there. You bring in a certain set of students, that set of students attracts a certain set of other students.

That set of students then defines the quality of your faculty because when faculty come in you can perhaps initially sell them a big thing. When they come in and they discover that the students are not commensurate with their own intellectual bandwidth then and the resonance is not there then they get disappointed. So you have to make sure that from day one all these elements come together and then you have to be uncompromising about not diluting that quality.

That you can't just say oh I want a thousand students this year and you will fill those seats at whatever cost if you are for some reason not getting the quality that you had.

So how was it in the first year in Ashoka?

First year was difficult, we started with a hundred actually if you think about Ashoka's first year it was the Young India Fellowship Programme. A lot of people forget that we started with 58 students in a rented facility but if you look at the lineup of people who taught them in the first year it was stellar and continues to be stellar today in that programme. That then established for the academics and for the students that we mean business, that we can ensure that experience that I was talking about.

From there when we created the undergraduate programme we only got 128 students but I personally knew almost all those students and their parents because I had to go and stand in front of them in a Hyderabad or a Chennai or a Kolkata and say look trust me, we will give you and not one year, four years of a great experience and that's the effort that it takes that every year of your experience, every class of your four-year experience has to be stellar to be able to set that bar. Now maintaining that as you grow is difficult. Today we take in about a thousand students a year and to maintain that for all these students all the time is just humanly not possible but at the same time we are very focused on that look our quality should not go down.

If a certain faculty member who's not teaching well and is having problems, how do we help them? If there's something that is not working, how do we fix that? Because it was working before or the standards are falling.

So I think then you have to be relentless about maintaining that level or at least improving upon it. As I was telling you about those faculty members, right now I'm going back and saying look the opportunity to bring these people is unprecedented even in our history, we must bring them to raise the bar.

So you don't have specific slots to fill, you're going to create more.

Our mode has always been going if you find a great faculty member forget about slots just get them because they will do good for the larger mission of what we are trying to achieve because really what you're doing at the essence is create a platform that attracts the best students and the best faculty. So you're constantly focused on that larger purpose that what am I doing to improve the attractiveness and there's so many things that detract you, the environment literally the physical environment and so on but you have to constantly keep working on that. So initially you really have to orchestrate this right which is why it is so difficult.

Most people you will hear will talk about numbers, we need so many universities, we let's bring foreign universities and so on and all those are great ideas but how do you actually ensure quality from day one and not everybody has to be an Ashoka in terms of its quality. There are institutions at all level but whatever level you are at you have to be very consistent at that level to be able to stay consistent. What happens is universities in India start with a bang, a lot of the private universities start with a lot of hoopla, everybody is excited then they can't stay the course and because they can't stay the course then they let quality slip and then it's a downward spiral.

Therefore how do you sort of, I mean it's a very subjective question and yet I'm pretty sure it's objective is how do you ensure that consistency and continuity of quality from a monitoring perspective as someone who's let's say governing such a college or if you're a dean or you're sitting with the dean, what are the metrics and parameters?

So there's so many but you look at both again if I go back, you look at student satisfaction scores both in the classroom, outside the classroom, you look at your outcomes, you look at how do you improve placements, where people go to study. We are very proud that we now just got our fourth Rhodes Scholar, you track those kinds of things, you say how do I support more people from getting Rhodes Scholarships, how do I support more people from getting better jobs. Today we just heard that a particular employer is saying that we didn't like this about Ashoka students.

Now there's a whole discussion going on how do we fix that, not just at the last part of their four years but how can we address that right from day one. What did they not like? They said that they would like to see more quant skills in some of our students and it's not true that all our students don't have but yes we could do more to improve the quant skills of all our students.

So I think it's those kinds of things that you relentlessly work and similarly with faculty. If you look at Ashoka's rankings, one of the areas where we've been weak and this is very normal for a new institution is our research scores are much lower even though we have very high quality faculty and that's a function of the fact that there's a certain scale that you need, a minimum scale that you need to make your mark on research. We will not compromise a lot of people's published research in all kinds of journals.

We say we don't want to go that way, we want to focus on quality which means that we then have to have a much higher productivity on research by our faculty in high quality journals. Now what can we do to enable that? Can we get them better PhD students?

Can we get them more funding? So you're constantly tweaking but yes in today's age it might seem like saying we are very data driven, we measure and it is possible to measure these things. This is not new, it is measured around the world but we do something about it, we problem solve around it, we invest behind it, we put teams behind it to start new things.

And since you talked about data and I guess that sort of leads to money and funding. Now if you were to look at the corpus of a university like yours, because there was a I remember a recent kind of public discussion between one of your founders saying that you know my challenge is to raise money. Anyway so that's one part but my question is really why do you need so much outside money if you are getting fees and people are paying?

Because that doesn't pay for the infrastructure built out.

So what's the percentage in terms of how much you earn from fees versus let's say what else?

Right now we are able to almost cover the education part through our fees. No but that operation does not include the research operation which is a very big part of building a great university.

And so you have centres and centres have separate sponsors.

Yes, I think we have to raise money for the extra research that happens. For example, every faculty member needs one or two PhD students if you really want to leverage them. Every PhD student gets a free paid education around the world.

Now there's a cost associated with that. We have 200 PhD students now. Faculty also need money to do research which is not paid through by just the fees.

If you load the fees with all of these things and the fees actually starts to really escalate. Plus in a new institution you are not able to generate the kind of surpluses that you need to be able to keep expanding the infrastructure. We buy land in Haryana at 10 plus crores and acre.

Building buildings is you know 6000-7000 rupees a square feet finished. So every time you build a hostel a 100 crore goes. So you need a lot of chunky large funding initially for these two reasons and then there has been a so far there's been a period of deficit funding for the education part also.

So we were fundraising for three pieces the deficit funding, the research funding and the capex. The deficit funding is more or less under control now after 10 years with the 3000 students and so on. But the research funding is growing bananas and is going very fast.

The demand for research funds is great and we have to build a lot of infrastructure still.

So I mean a quick question on that expansion. So you said you have 3,000 students on campus today.

That's below minimum scale for a university to make an impact around the world. And what should that be? Probably 8-10,000.

So our first point is about 8,000 give or take. So you have to more than double from where you are today. We have to triple actually.

We have to triple. Princeton is about 8,000, it's the smallest of the IVs. So most IVs are 20,000-30,000 students.

So which means that for parents who are listening in that you will keep growing.

We will keep growing and the good news is that many other Ashokas are also coming up in our trail and that's what one of the big reasons why we set up Ashoka. If you look at Laksha, Kriya and many other universities that are coming up, they are all really inspired by what we've done. Their model is similar.

The kind of freedom and experience they are looking to give students is similar.

And I can see students are choosing between, I mean they don't get into this, they go into that. So you've also, before this you were architecting the Indian School of Business. So what are the lessons from there?

Though that came very differently. I remember interviewing Chandrababu Naidu more than 25 years I think now or close to that and talking about, you know, there was a competition. States were fighting with each other to bring ISB in.

Hyderabad won or Andhra undivided at that time won and ISB was set up. And I'm assuming your first lessons in setting up an institution of this kind came from there.

They did and there are certain things that translate. What translates is the helping students grow. What translates is faculty.

What translates is the governance and funding. Governance in the realm of decision making, you know, how do you constantly drive quality. I think those things have really stood us by at ISB and I think those have been reflected in Ashoka.

That's what led to the creation of the Young India Fellowship Programme, the ISB's governance model, funding model, collective philanthropy, shared governance, separating academics and administration, building high quality infrastructure. All of those were lessons from ISB which were very valuable. The complexity here is much greater.

You have a four-year undergraduate education which is highly regulated by the UGC, the state government and you have this notion of multiple majors, multiple departments. There we have one programme largely which is the main PGP. After 25 years, we've now started a two-year programme.

So the complexity and scale of this is just very different and that's where it's very different. Though the initial learnings played a very big role in establishing the foundation and also the pillars, the key pillars of high quality faculty, funding, governance are all from that experience.

Another question that I mean I've tried to sort of wrap my head around is we have so many universities and colleges in India which are well known but maybe are not doing so well today or have lost that sheen that they once had. Why is it not a proposition to take them over or run them assuming of course the government allows you or the state government, some state government allows you or not. But is that an opportunity because you talked about Takshashila when you started.

It is an opportunity but it's very difficult to do.

Because all of this is really greenfield projects and you're saying effectively that greenfield is much more simple.

I think so. Improving an existing running institution is like truly changing the engines on a plane.

But you've thought about that.

Yes and I'm involved in some of them. My first thing to people who ask us, I have some other advisory arm. In that I first and foremost look people in the ISA takes 10 years because what are you going to do with the 400 students you have?

They have to be placed, they can't suddenly be placed in the top firms. The raw material is what it is. What are you going to do with the 200 faculty you have?

So you can't do a switch on switch off and therefore it's easier in that model to maybe start a new programme with a different model. Almost do a new co within an old co or a new college within the old university but that also creates tensions. Why are you charging those guys more?

Why are you giving them air-conditioned classrooms? Why are they getting better faculty? Why giving so much?

So it's a tough challenge and that's what I meant that in education quality is very difficult to scale. Once you get here and the biggest thing is perception. You think about it, your children, your people you know, you will not recommend something that you knew was a little bit hokey in the past.

So you really have to be convinced that legions of batches of graduating students are now getting better outcomes before you'll change your perception about an institution. So I think changing perceptions and perceptions matter a lot. It's all word of mouth.

In education you can keep advertising as much as you want but the student and the parent will tell you whether you should send your child there or not. So turning that wheel around has a huge lag to you doing something in that institution and by the time it shows up out there, it's going to be six, eight years out.

So in a way you're also saying that new or old don't do high decibel advertising because that's not really going to get you the outcome.

People who see this is a very targeted group, they know what to do. They will listen, they will look at your advertising for information. It's good to get information or we are starting a new management programme, we will advertise.

So people should know that Ashoka is now starting an undergraduate in management but ultimately when they apply, they will check. They will check with an existing student, they will check with a parent who they know, they will come and visit campus and then they will form their own judgement.

Right, as we're running out of time, as you look ahead I mean Ashoka and ISB are amongst the most well-known institutions that you work with. We've also worked with a few others and you're I'm guessing working with a few more. Do you feel that these model or that model is easy to replicate from a point of view of solving the larger educational challenge that India faces and from where we started that a lot of students want high quality education, want the campus experience, want self-discovery but they're not finding it or they believe that they won't find it here and they were going abroad.

I think it can be replicated, I wouldn't say it's easy. It's like saying it's easy to replicate what you do. You've taken a hard road, many of your journalist friends have taken an easy road.

So this is the harder road but it can be done. There is a playbook and the main reason, the main driver of success of this playbook is staying the course, having the faith that look this is a proven model. Even in Takshashila, people went there because the teachers were great.

You could fool around with astronomy and medicine and history and military studies and you could go to whoever you wanted to study with. I think that model is well proven. Most people feel jittery about that model that oh, I'm giving up so much control.

How can I let students come when they want? I need so many students to be able to justify my operating deficit. So you have to stay the course.

If you are able to take the road, stay the course, I think there's a playbook that works and it can be replicated.

That's good news to hear for I mean students and parents and everyone.

I'm hoping that there will be many more good institutions. I mean just look at the history at which new institutions are getting formed and what they are inspired by. I think right now there's one or two every year.

You may not even know of them but I do and I think that number could go easily to four, five, six, seven, ten.

Wonderful to hear. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Author:   The Core Team

In the latest The Core Report: Weekend Edition, Govindraj Ethiraj speaks with Pramath Raj Sinha, a founder and trustee at Ashoka University, about how India’s universities can improve, but transformation takes time: better faculty, stronger governance, new models and trust built batch by batch.

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Education university