Without a common syllabus, there can't be a CET: VIT Chancellor Viswanathan

Chennai: “Unless we have a common syllabus across India, we can’t have a common entrance test,” said VIT Chancellor G.Viswanathan on Monday.

He was interacting with Deccan Chronicle on “Reforms needed in Higher Education.” Pointing out various problems in conducting common entrance test, including the language of the question paper and states’ approval, he said the standards of education between CBSE and state boards vary widely and facilities available for the rural and urban students vary even wider.

He also called for transparency in fixing the fees and announcing the eligibility for the course. By giving a receipt to the fee we can weed out black money in the education sector.

Welcoming the Madras University's decision on increasing the intake of arts and science colleges, he said he is in favour of increasing the seats wherever there is demand.  “We are dealing with the shortage for a long period of time. For example, in Delhi, you have to take the entrance exam for joining in arts and science courses and for many colleges, the cut-off is 98 per cent.

There is a permanent and acute shortage of seats in medicine all over the country,” he said. He said engineering colleges which could not fill up their seats should be allowed to start arts and science courses like B.Sc., and B.Com. He attributed the poor quality in education to affiliation system. Individual colleges cannot decide on anything and they are not responsible for curriculum or question paper. The colleges act like tutorial colleges.

Terming the shortage of medical seats ‘man made’ and ‘artificial shortage’ he said, "There is no transparency in many areas.When there are 17 lakhs seats in engineering, why it is restricted to only 50,000 seats in MBBS in India?” he asked.

“You can see Indian students in Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine. Even in Zheng Zhou university in China, 75 per cent of  medical programmes are filled with Indian students. Even after finishing their studies, we are not allowing them to practice in the name of screening test,” he said.

“We want no shortages in this country. If somebody wants to study a
course it must be available to him or her.” He also said not enough money is being spent in India on research. Universities in the US are spending Rs 5,000 to 10,000 crores onresearch. IISc in Bengaluru is spending the maximum amount on research which is around Rs 500 to Rs 700 crore. “Even now, less than one percent of GDP is being spent on research. I think it is high time to allocate more funds for research,” he said.