The Hindu Business Line : <I>NKC in danger of losing way </I>

The National Knowledge Commission (NKC), set up on June 2, 2005, is to submit its report on October 2, 2008. The tasks entrusted to the Commission encompass every conceivable dimension of production, use and dissemination of knowledge. Nothing is left out: Inculcation of excellence in India's education system to meet the knowledge challenges of the 21st Century, promotion of knowledge creation in S&T laboratories, improving the management of institutions generating Intellectual Property, and ensuring protection of intellectual property rights, diversifying and deepening knowledge applications in agriculture and industry, enhancing the effectiveness of government's knowledge capabilities, making the government more transparent and accountable as a service provider to the citizen, and bringing knowledge within the reach of all for maximum public benefit.

Confronted with this dauntingly gigantic mission, there was no way the NKC could go about its work in a brisk and business-like fashion. The frontispiece of the Commission's interim Report to the Nation released in January 2007, reproduces Rabindranath Tagore's poem Where the Mind is Without Fear, cautioning against losing one's way in `the dreary desert sand of dead habit'. This is exactly the danger the NKC is facing. The pattern of work of the NKC is no different from that of others of its ilk. It has set up a number of working groups and organised a number of seminars and workshops on topics of bewildering range and variety.

The NKC's first batch of recommendations too is not indicative of any cohesive strategy or set of priorities. Just consider the subject headings in the order in which they occur: Libraries, Translation, Language, Knowledge Network, Right to Education, Vocational Education, Higher Education, National Science and Social Science Foundation and E-governance. The Report merely treads on familiar terrain, recapitulating past developments and rehashing the obvious with no evidence of outside the box thinking.

Fuzzy approach

The 20 areas, which the NKC has reserved for more working groups and workshops, are also banal, with some being even irrelevant, if not far-fetched. Just have a look: Literacy, Health Information Network, Portals (Environment, Health, etc), Open and Distance Education, School Education, Legal Education, Medical Education, Management Education, Technical Education, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property Rights, Science and Technology, Agriculture, Traditional Knowledge, Strategies for new technologies (such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, security applications, cryptology), Environment, Public Health, Gender (including education-specific constraints to education of girls), Legal Access issues, including availability of laws and judgments in the public domain, Basic access to clean water, food, etc, Teacher Training, Learning methods, Government process re-engineering, Grassroots/rural/social innovation and grassroots business.

At this rate, the NKC would have to be asking for extension of its term — another habit of past Commissions. Sharpening India's `knowledge edge' with such a fuzzy approach is a far cry. This is a disappointment in view of the Chairperson, Mr Sam Pitroda's reputation as a person outside of the traditional Indian mould who shuns shibboleths and is a go-getter. He must remind himself that the NKC is a Knowledge Commission and not an Education or Information Commission.

Within the remaining 18 months, it should take up hitherto untouched aspects bearing on new frontiers of knowledge, access and affordability and come out with a crisp, compact and punchy plan of action. If it produces too bulky a tome, expatiating drearily on postulates and prescriptions already dwelt at length in numerous reports, it will only be making sure that its report too will be respectfully received and decently buried.

B. S. RAGHAVAN