Mumbai univ looks overseas

IN CONVERSATION

Mumbai University is planning to have tie-ups with foreign universities, A D Sawant, pro-VC of Mumbai University, tells Business Standard. Excerpts:

What's the nature of the tie-ups with the foreign universities?

The tie-ups will be for graduate and post-graduate studies in academic disciplines, spanning engineering, IT, computers, management and select areas in sciences.

The Melbourne University, London School of Economics and Manchester University are some of universities with whom these tie-ups are being firmed up. MoUs are in the making with at least three to four universities and over 100 delegations are already here.

What are you doing to increase the industry relevance of your professional courses?

Take any branch of professional courses and you will see a lot of changes that are tuned to modern requirement. Earlier we had instrumentation engineering, but today students are not just studying instrumentation but the technology behind the same and, in turn, they are equipped to innovate, modernise and enable change processes in industries.

Similarly, those who can't get into engineering can now enrol for a simple BSC with IT and this is equivalent to being an electronic engineer or computer engineer. In the five-year law course, we also offer a special course in cyberlaw.

What are you doing to ensure that graduates and post-graduates become employable?

Students now have a chance to change streams. Those studying 12th commerce, for instance, can enrol for BSc IT. This means the candidate gets into science graduation after doing 12th commerce and vice versa.

Someone doing science can go for hotel management tourism or law. Someone with an engineering background is allowed to undertake a study in commerce.

Similarly, students pursuing Botany or Chemistry can do a certificate course in tourism, nursery management, food processing, computers or electronics. We call them value-added courses because they help in getting a job.

How do you plan to improve the distance-education courses?

Distance-education students can now do a post-graduate engineering course. MSc IT and MSc computer science are in distance-education mode. It's something we never did earlier.

Imparting practical knowledge was the difficult part. To resolve that, we have selected centres where students will be given a 15-day programme to do practicals.

Some corporates believe that engineers don't pass out with the right skills. Your comments.

The bottomline is that corporates have to fund education In many universities abroad, around 50 per cent of the total fee comes from corporate houses, 30 per cent from the government and 20 per cent from student fees. In India, the total cost of education is borne by the students in professional education like medical or engineering.