‘Treat education as a business, not a service’: Prof Rohit Dhankar

While delivering a lecture at the seventh Kuruvila Jacob memorial, Prof Rohit Dhankar of Azim Premji University, Bengaluru said that instead of treating education as a service, it should be treated as a commodity, which will make it more successful.

In his lecture, Dimensions of Excellence in Education, he said that customer satisfaction can be achieved by those policies which treat education as a business commodity and not a service and thus maintain the quality of education as well.

Focussing on the national education policy of the ministry of human resource development, he said that the current education system is not suitable as the quality is judged on the basis of the marks obtained by the student and not by what he has learned. He said that a major shortcoming of the current education policies are that the quality of education is depending on marks instead of employability skills, cultural heritage, value lessons and knowledge.

While answering to the questions asked from the audience, he said that it is fine to have different boards teaching the same syllabus as every child has a different pace of learning.

He was giving this lecture as a part of Kuruvila Jacob Initiative which first started in the year 2004, on the birth centenary of the first Indian principal of Madras Christian College.