Higher Education Summit 2007
"Innovation for Quality & Relevance"
November 2-3, 2007, New Delhi

Keynote Address by Chris Patten, Chancellor,
Oxford University & Newcastle University, UK

It is a pleasure to be back in India and a particular honour to be invited to address this Conference. I am delighted, not least, as the British Chairman of the UK-India Round Table, which brings together former public officials like my Indian opposite number Nitin Desai and myself, academics, businessmen, journalists and other members of civil society, to help develop and thicken the relationship between our two countries. We share - India and Britain - a great deal of history, good and bad. In the Round Table we are keen, as both of our Prime Ministers are, that we should share more of today not just of yesterday, and that we should be able to work more effectively together to shape tomorrow. It is salutary for a country, like mine, that played such a major part in the history of the last two centuries, to work with a country like your own, which will play a huge role in making the 21st century. The largest democracy in the world, and soon the most populous country in the world, will I hope through its example, its principles of governance and its success, help forge a world more prosperous, more fair, more stable and more free.

I am an old friend and admirer of India. I have visited many times as a Minister and a European Commissioner. But I recognise I am best known these days not for anything I may have done but for the achievements of my youngest daughter.

As for my credentials to talk about education, well I am sure they are more limited than those of some who have addressed this well-known and equally well-regarded organisation. In British politics I was for a year the Minister responsible for schools and further education. I was particularly interested in education projects as Development Minister. During my five years as governor of Hong Kong I helped with the exponential expansion of higher education, a process that underpinned the territory's transition from a low to high value-added economy and that also provided an important rite of passage for the children of the largely immigrant community. After I stepped down as a European Commissioner, I was asked to chair the committee of distinguished academics and researchers that established the new European Research Council and chose its first governing body. The Council is designed to operate as a Europe-wide equivalent of the National Science Foundation in America, channelling money to high quality, cutting edge research at European universities and research institutions. I am also today the Chancellor of two fine British universities. At the first, Newcastle, I have been Chancellor since 1998. It is a good, civic, research-based university with about 170 Indian students. In 2005, I was elected for life by the graduates of the University of Oxford at the Chancellor at probably the best-known University in the world. Election for life is a form of governance unknown in India, though I know it is aspired to from time to time elsewhere in the region! At Oxford, we have today just over 300 Indian students - about 250 of them postgraduates. We can claim a roll-call of famous Indian alumni including your own Prime Minister. As you will know, the Chancellor does not run a university in Britain. The Vice-Chancellor does that. But, as my predecessor but one, Harold Macmillan, put it rather metaphysically, " If you didn't have a Chancellor, you couldn't have a Vice-Chancellor!"

India has been one of the stars - the shining stars - in the recent story of globalisation. Of course, globalisation is not a modern phenonomen. Considered literally it is simply what has been happening ever since Homo Sapiens trekked north East Africa. But we tend to see it peaking in two periods. First, there was the era from the later years of the nineteenth century to the First World War. Technology - steamships, railway engines, the telegraph - and the dismantling of barriers to international commerce triggered a surge in global trade. We saw the rapid and substantial movement of manufactured goods, food, money and people. The statistics of that period are rivalled by those of the last two decades. Again technology has played its part -reducing the costs of communication and speeding it up. To borrow what is now a cliche, distance has been shrunk. Technology has augmented the effects of another period of trade liberalisation, changing societies - most notably in Asia - more rapidly than could ever previously have been imagined. What has happened in Asia is in my view the most significant factor in keeping growth going since the turn of the century despite wars, terrorist atrocities and a rise in the oil price. 2.5 billion people in India and China have joined the world economy. Until the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, India and China accounted for more than fifty percent of the world's annual tally of wealth. That figure fell for a variety of reasons, political as well as economic, for more than one and a half centuries. Now you are both back on the ladder and climbing fast - to the immeasurable and lasting benefit not only of you but of the rest of us as well.

What does this portend? If I were an Indian politician or policy maker I would be a tad chary about accepting at face valve what some people appear to be saying is happening - or at least what they are interpreted as saying. The herd instinct applies in all parts of the public arena, not just in the market place. There are times when, however many clouds there may be on the horizon, all people see is the blue sky. And there are times when they ignore the blue sky and concentrate entirely on the clouds. Sensible weather forecasters look at both.

Let me turn for evidence to two publications which, I guess, have received more plaudits in India than any others in the last year or so. First there was Mr. Tom Friedman's entertaining book "The World is Flat", second, Glodman Sachs' most recent publications on the economic prospects of Brazil, Russia, India and China - the so - called BRICS.

You will recall that Mr. Friedman's thesis begins with a visit to the highly impressive Infosys campus in Bangalore. I have been there myself. Any European businessman worried about competition from those ubiquitous Polish plumbers of whom we read in the British tabloid papers should meet the 14,000 Indian soft-ware engineers at Infosys - or the hundreds of thousands elsewhere. That is where a large part of the real future competition for America and Europe lies. But does all that mean that the world is flat? Has technology really rolled out all the hills and mountains leaving us with a playing field as level as a Test match wicket (always allowing for the slope at Lords!). You will remember Mr. Friedman's argument. Until 1800 country competed against country. 19th and 20th century technology enabled company to compete against company. Technology in the new century allows one individual to compete against others and that includes millions of Asians empowered by their own intelligence, skills and education. Well, there's some truth in all that. But it is far from the whole story, as even Mr. Friedman concedes by the end of his book. Far from being flat, the world contains lots of hills and mountains for far too many of its inhabitants. On the drive through Bangalore to Infosys, a visitor can see that neither the world, even less the road, even less the road, is anything like flat.

I turn now briefly to the Goldman Sachs' report on India's growth potential. India can become one of the world's three largest economies in less than 30 years. It could be the only BRICs economy to sustain growth above 5 percent throughout the next 45 years. What a story! But notice the "can" and the "could". To do all that India, the economists say, has to build on the reforms that have already taken place with the beginning of the dismantling of the "license raj", India needs all those things with which you are familiar: better infrastructure (roads, airports and power), continuing labour market reforms and - which is the main point I want to make - a huge addition to its educated work-force. This is where Friedman and the bank's economists converge. Yes, technology may have opened up new horizons for development, but it also puts a premium on knowledge, skill and training -as Sam Pitroda and the Knowledge Commission so eloquently assert. There is a heading in the Goldman Sachs' report with which I would take exception if I were an Indian. "Is India poised to be the next China?" the economists ask rather breathlessly. I don't think that should be the way you look at the challenges ahead. After all, India is a free, democratic society under the rule of law - and whatever the unquestioned successes of China (and they are truly immense), sooner or later it is going to have to answer some fundamental even existential questions about what sort of society it is. The issue is not how you will be the next China, but how you will be an even more successful India, with more literate girls, more literate boys, more numerate girls and boys, more young people completing their secondary eductation, and more as a result going on to tertiary education. That would be India's flattened world - and I don't under-estimate the difficulties of accomplishing all of that: a central part of your Prime Minister's wise pursuit of what he calls inclusive growth.

When I was Governor of Hong Kong, I was often asked what accounted for the so-called East Asian economic miracle. Well, even though I am a Catholic, I did not believe that any miracle had taken place. The formula for success in each of the "Tigers" - Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and so on -was pretty familiar and you could read about it in successive volumes of the Asian Development Bank Report. There was land reform; there was a focus on trade and exports; there was enthusiastic encouragement of inward investment and of capitalism - left on its own in Hong Kong, steered in South Korea; and there was investment in people, in their health and their basic education. You saw the result in child mortality, literacy and numeracy statistics. And all those aspects of social policy were linked. Where young people learned to read and write, health improved and fertility and child mortality rates fell. Naturally, where the workforce become better educated, the quality and quantity of employment, the amount of investment, and the growth rate all increased. As my children would say, it was a no-brainer.

You know the scale of the problem in education in India better than I do. The illiteracy rates among girls and boys. The drop-out rates from primary schools. The proportion of the population over the age of 15 without any schooling-a figure that has fallen steeply since 1960 but at 44% is still very high. The problem of managing the teaching profession so that the children in school get the education for which the government has paid. Goldman Sachs argues unequivocally that India has the most work to do among the BRICs to broaden its education.

Clearly India has done far better in the tertiary sector on the back of substantial public investment. Your supply of engineers and knowledge workers has given you advantages in the services sector. Many of these graduates are the managers who have enabled you to create-unlike, on the whole, China-multi-national companies with global brands. While the US for example has three times as many people over the age of 25 with post-secondary education as you have, you have roughly the same number as China and Russia.

I want in the rest of my remarks to concentrate on tertiary education, where you are clearly and rightly focusing so much effort-efforts that are recognised in Britain and elsewhere given the quality of many of your universities and institutes of technology and the quality too of so many of your graduates. There are two obvious reasons why you will want to build on what you have been doing in the tertiary education sector. First, as you provide more young people with primary and secondary education, so the demand to go on to learn a professional skill or to study for a degree will grow. Second, your own economic growth increases the need for skills and training. This is a problem you share with China and other Asian economies. I note that NASSCOM recently estimated that there could be a shortfall of 500,000 IT professionals by 2010. And multinational information technology companies call for more Indian PhDs. Skill shortages produce inflationary wage pressures and speed up job turnover in a tight market - neither of which developments is welcome to managers.

Let me now turn to how we can in India and Britain work successfully together in higher education and research. I want first of all to say why I believe it is good for us in Britain - and I hope you will see the benefits of it for India yourselves. The first point is a very simple one. World-class universities should want and seek to attract world-class students and to conduct world-class research. The research requires institutional and industrial collaboration, and the recruitment of students requires more effort on our behalf in Britain to recruit some of your brightest young minds to do their undergraduate or post-graduate work with us.

I am not satisfied that we are doing that at the moment though we are trying a lot harder. But let me give you one statistic regarding Oxford. As I said earlier, we have approximately 300 Indian students, about 250 of them doing post-graduate research. Alongside them we have 730 Chinese students, 411 doing postgraduate work. Getting on for half of our Maths students this year are Chinese. These figures are for me counter-intuitive. The Chinese students after all have to learn English to come; they do not have more attractive funding arrangements. Only at our Business School, where this year about a quarter of the MBA students are Indian, is the Indian figure much larger than the Chinese. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not seeking to reduce the Chinese numbers, but to increase the Indian for the simple reason that the figures suggest that by not attracting more young Indians we are plainly missing out on some of the best young minds in the world. It is not a matter of money. It is a question of quality.

Education and Research have been near the top of the agenda for the UK India Round Table since it was established. We have therefore strongly supported the UK India Education and Research Initiative launched by our two governments a couple of years ago. The Initiative is as you may know a five-year programme, which aims to improve substantially the educational links between India and the UK. We want to end and reverse the erosion of these links.

The Initiative represents a partnership between government departments, university funding bodies, the British Council and a number of major businesses. The aim is to spend over £23 million over the first five year period, establishing stronger research links between centers of excellence, more doctorate and post-doctorate collaboration through split PhDs., and research fellowships, and the strengthening first of co-operation in the vocational teaching of professional and technical skills, and second of links between schools, for example, for curriculum projects.

A great deal has already been achieved with the awarding of research grants (like a joint project on diabetes and heart disease), PhD. scholarships, research fellowships and technical linkages such as a successful one in the area of fashion design and manufacturing. The minimum aim by 2011 is for 50 new collaborative research projects, 40 new award programmes enrolling 2,000 Indian student, 300 additional Indian research students, 200 UK researchers and 200 UK undergraduates working on Indian subjects. I can assure you that the Round Table will be monitoring progress and will want to build on what we are already achieving.

Of course, apart from this government and industry initiative individual universities are pursuing their own projects. The ones I am best placed to talk about are at Newcastle and Oxford, but many others have their own programmes to strengthen the bonds between higher education and research institutions in our two countries.

In Newcastle, we are trying to attract more Indian students for example in Electrical Engineering and Marine Science and Technology, where we have one of only three master's courses in Pipeline Engineering in the world. We are collaborating on the scope for private provision in education. Our Business School is working to develop its relationship with the National Bank of India, the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade and the International Management Institute. We also have collaborative projects on the environment, cancer research and marine transport. Next year, Newcastle University will have a festival of South Asian writing showcasing the work of some of your most famous figures in the world of literature and launching a major new anthology of Indian poetry.

Oxford's relationship with India goes back a little before our own times - actually it goes back to the sixteenth century. Famous Indian Oxford alumni include two Prime Ministers, one President and two Nobel Prize winners. We are also very proud of our Indian sporting and literary stars.

Research collaboration with India is flourishing. We are particularly pleased about the successful development of the Oxford-India network in theoretical physics which includes the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkota and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai. Another recently successful research network focused on cancer and has drawn in senior oncologists at six Indian centers. Our Business School is aiming to establish an Indian Business Center as a focus for the study of business issues in your country. We are hoping to work closely with business so that the entire research we promote is focused on actual Indian priorities and needs.

The Indian Business Centre is an example of our determination to strengthen our study of contemporary India as well as Indian history and civilization. We are starting new graduate programmes in Indian and South Asian studies. We not only want more young Indians to study in Oxford but more British and other students to study India in Oxford. I am sure that many Indians will continue to associate Oxford with a prized and shared attribute in the modern world, the ability to speak and write English. People still refer not surprisingly to Oxford English, given the fame of the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford University Press, which to our great good fortune is wholly owned by the university.

The possibilities of our working together more closely in higher education and research are almost literally boundless. As I noted earlier, your own astonishing growth and economic and social transformation make education and the acquisition of skills a major priority. For our part in Britain, as a middle-sized country with a population about 3-4 per cent of your own, and with an economy which is still the 4th or 5th largest in the world - a position that you are bound to outstrip before long - we need to invest more in our ancient and in our new universities if we are to continue to be able to punch well above our weight internationally. We have as great an interest in working with you, as I believe you have in working with us you know us well, our history and our language. You have a hugely successful diaspora in our country. They know as you do that while we are no longer a military super-power, we are still an educational power-house with some of the best universities in the world. There is so much we can do together.

People very often talk about globalisation in terms of the dismantling of national borders. That is, up to a point, right, though we have not seen, nor should want to see, nor will we see, the end of nation states. One benign example of the way traditional borders can be rendered meaningless is the educational collaboration and co-operation which are made increasingly easy by technology and cheaper and easier travel. It is perfectly normal these days for a young man or woman to take a first degree on one continent, a second on another, do research on a third, keeping in touch in doing so with a community of scholars on every continent. I hope that in India and Britain we can be at the heart of that process. Make no mistake. To work more closely with you is a real aspiration in Britain whatever the university, whatever the business, whatever the political party in power. We are your friends and we want to be your partners.