 "Nalanda University")
In 2008, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, accompanied by former President APJ Abdul Kalam, had mud hurled at him by angry villagers of Pilkhi, just outside this town, who were resentful at giving up prime land to fuel the dream of setting up of a world-class international university near the ruins of the great Buddhist centre of learning that existed from the 5th to the 12th century AD at Nalanda.
Those memories might have faded, over time, had a thriving campus, with its promise of regenerating the neighbourhood, actually taken shape. Resentments have, instead, deepened as the villagers gaze, day after day, at 455 acres of empty land, confined by a boundary wall protected by guards and topped by barbed wire. "We grew onions, tomatoes, rice, potatoes, cauliflower," says Mahender Mistri, who gave up three bighas for Rs 3 lakh, "but look at it now. Barren land."
At the makeshift campus of Nalanda University, those empty acres down the road are also being discussed; but optimistically, since it seems that after many false starts, work may finally begin this year on a campus - a full four years after the Bihar government handed over the land to the university.
This was shortly after the Nalanda University Act, 2010, was passed, declaring Nalanda "an institution of national importance". Some Rs 41 crore of public money has been spent between then and now but much remains to be spent on this mammoth project. India will spend an estimated Rs 2,700 crore. Countries in the East Asia Summit have also made small contributions.
Yet, even amid the hopeful talk of a future haven, financed by these funds, with libraries, lakes, walking paths, a club, a restaurant, a hospital, a museum and creche, it is clear that Nalanda's minuscule academic community is struggling with the news of the impending end, amid controversy, to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen's chancellorship of the university.
Infrequent visitor he might have been, but Sen has epitomised the Nalanda brand. He is the reason, many here say, that they took a leap of faith with a new university and signed up. There is a discernable sense of uncertainty, even dread, over how the government, accused by Sen of denying academic freedom to Nalanda, will deal with it in the future.
Says assistant professor Murari Jha sombrely: "If Nalanda fails, it will be a reflection on our capacity to build institutions."
This fledgling university in rural Bihar is not for the faint-hearted. To a visitor, it presents itself as a valiant attempt to create a sense of a campus in a trying environment. University cars are on hand to ferry staff and students back-and-forth on a four-kilometre run between the academic block, housed in a modest two-storey sub divisional magistrate's office donated by the Bihar government, and the three-star Bihar tourism hotel that the university rents for Rs 1 crore a year to house most of them.
Also on offer, every weekend, is a visit to Patna ( the round trip takes not less than five hours) to catch up with the retail opportunities, coffee bars, and cinema halls missing from their lives. Rajgir is a pocket borough of Nitish Kumar with decent roads and a profusion of government institutions bestowed on it, and a stop on the Buddhist and Jain circuit besides. But it is still a humdrum provincial town.
Students, staff and faculty, the latter drawn from various foreign campuses, exude the idealism of pioneers staking out new territory in a rugged terrain. They declare themselves entranced by the opportunity to be part of the grand revival of Nalanda; to study, or teach, a syllabus with pan-Asian resonances, in an environment that is, as Aditya Malik, the articulate dean of the history school, puts it, "open-minded yet rigorous and critical".
Yet, there are difficulties. Says administrative officer Aditya Gogoi, "The streets are deserted after dark, and for a decent doctor you have to go 23 km away to Biharsharif." Faculty member Niggol Seo, a natural resource economist with a Ph D from Yale University, calls Nalanda a "special experience" but wants "an international airport to connect it to the outside world".
Strikingly, the entire university can be accommodated in one lecture room. A mere 15 students were selected for the two programmes with which Nalanda opened its doors last September. Two have dropped out, leaving the university with an unusual student-teacher ratio of 13 students to 10 regular faculty, and one visiting professor.
Why were such few students drawn from more than 1,500 hundred applications? Vice-Chancellor Gopa Sabharwal, speaking on the phone, (she was away when Business Standard visited Rajgir), says the university could not compromise on academic excellence. "Not many applicants," she explains, "were able to write a coherent 500 word statement of purpose." She also says it's unfair to compare the intake at Nalanda with that achieved by, say, Ashoka, a new private liberal arts university running mainly undergraduate programmes near Delhi.
"This is not a mass university, it is a research university, with post-graduate courses," stresses Sabharwal. Yet, pressure to increase intake is being felt: tuition fees have been slashed from over Rs 6 lakh, initially, for a two year programme to Rs 1.12 lakh now.
"Not having a campus in a place like Bihar, where not just government but private infrastructure is deficient makes it hard to attract talent," says Shaibal Gupta, director of the Patna-based Asian Development Research Institute, adding, sympathetically, "The university should have been allowed to wait till it had one, institution-building takes a lot of time."
But time was not on Nalanda's side. A member of Nalanda's governing board says dates given earlier for starting classes could not be extended, on account of growing impatience at the fact that a high-profile project, initiated in 2007 with the forming of a Nalanda Mentor Group (NMG) led by Sen appeared, in the public eye, to be in a leisurely state of drift. The villagers of Pilkhi palpably share that impatience.
