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As part of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh's state visit to the United States at the invitation of President Barack Obama on November 24, India and the US are endeavoring to announce the convening of a India-US Education Council on the lines of the US-India Business Council, Human Resource Minister Kapil Sibal disclosed in Washington on Friday.
In an interaction with the media at the Indian embassy in Washington at the end of week-long visit during which he met with the presidents and other key players of leading US universities and colleges--many of them Ivy League institutions--to exhort them to come to India and set up campuses to help catalyze quality higher education there, Sibal said another reason for his visit was to institutionalize an infrastructure in the form of a council so that these collaborations when they do take place can be formalized.
Thus, he said when he had broached the idea with US Education Secretary Arne Duncan, the proposal had been welcomed with the latter also hoping that it could be formalized in time so that it could be one of the tangible dialogues consummated during the Prime Minister visit.
Sibal said that in view of the Prime Minister's visit, "we wanted to see if we could actually start a dialogue with these top universities so that down the road, we could actually enter into some kind of a formal arrangement with these universities."
"And, because the Prime Minister was coming, we had proposed to the Under Secretary William Burns when he came there (to New Delhi) and had a meeting with me that we would be interested in setting up an India-US Education Council much on the lines of the India-US Business Council," he said.
Sibal said, "I raised that issue with the Education Secretary Mr Duncan, who has said that yes, we should try and see if that is possible. And, so a dialogue has already started and hopefully the Ambassador here (Meera Shankar) will carry this dialogue further." "And, if it is possible, maybe that's something that can be put in place before the Prime Minister comes," he said.
When asked in what ways he saw it in terms of the USIBC (which has many Fortune 500 companies that do business in India as members), Sibal said that besides some of the leading universities and colleges in the US coming together with top Indian educational institutions, the Council would also comprise "lots of representatives of industry and entrepreneurs."
Sibal, who had earlier met the presidents of Harvard, MIT, Yale, and Boston University, also held a roundtable with several other university presidents of Washington,DC universities and also some from across the country in DC, and said, "They are extremely interested, and not only are they interested, but they have shown they have been proactive in expressing their hope that the law will be put in place very soon so that actually they can come forward and come to India as foreign education providers." "All that they wanted was a level playing field, which we will give them," he said.
Later, when rediff.com asked him if it wasn't a case of putting the cart before the horse in his making a strong pitch and inviting these universities to come to India, when there was no law yet in place, Sibal said, he fully expected the law to be in place by July 2010.
Earlier US Administration officials had hoped that this law would be in place by fall so that could education pillar that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had mentioned among her five pillars as part of her intentions to take US-India relations to the next level, could be one of the substantive agreements of US-India cooperation that could announced during Dr Singh's visit.