Are Our Leaders of Education Institutions Capable of Thinking Big?

Two weeks back, I was in Kanyakumari to give a talk to group of 50+ Vice Chancellors (VCs) on the need of promoting Innovation and entrepreneurship within university campuses. Before my Innovation session, we had a panel discussion on how to improve the quality of research in our universities. So the panelists highlighted multiple points such as VC should encourage faculty to collaborate with researchers in other areas, ensure that laboratory infrastructure is upgraded to latest instruments and facilities, faculty should be encouraged to think out of the box, identify relevant problems and not just replicate or adopt western ideas. One of the panelist also said that we need to train our university faculty to properly write project proposals so that funding agency finds them interesting. Everyone appreciated the discussion, as improving quality of research in our universities is certainly one of the biggest concern.

Although, I enjoyed the discussion, deep with me, I was feeling that no one spoke about the most important factor but I decided to hold myself back as the session was time bound and my session was scheduled immediately after. I decided to open my talk on ‘Need for Building Innovation and Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Universities’ with my comments on previous session.

I said to this group of 50+ Vice-Chancellors, “this august gathering discussed all the steps VC should take to improve quality of research in previous session but you forgot the most important requirement and that is to encourage faculty/researchers to ‘Dream Big’ or try solving ‘Big Challenges’. Majority of our faculty are just aiming to do some incremental work, they have low ambition and majority of them allow facility constraints within their institution dictate their research. Faculty are not ready to take risks and think really BIG. VCs should promote and back the risk takers to the hilt”.

I continued and said, “let me give you two examples from my own work. In 2015, then Municipal Commissioner for Pune Shri Kunal Kumar was working on Pune’s Smart City Proposal. During our discussion he asked whether, we can do some innovative model of citizen engagement for developing this proposal which no one else has done in India? I suggested that let us do a Pune Hackathon. He or any of this team members were not aware of the concept of Hackathon. I explained them that Hackathons are innovative product development competition of nonstop 36 or 28 hrs during which techies build products for any given problem statement. Let us identify 15-20 problems of PMC, Pune Police, PMRDA and PMPML and use these problems to challenge our technology students from Pune to offer innovative and out-of-the-box solutions”.

Mr. Kunal Kumar liked the concept and we decided to do Digital Pune Hackathon. As majority of our technical institutions were completely unaware of the concept, I went to almost each and every college in Pune explaining faculty and students about the concept. We also partnered with Sakal newspaper and as a result we got bumper participation.

When I spoke to students during the actual Hackathon, they said that they are really enjoying working because they are developing products which may be useful for Pune city. They are working for development of Pune and in turn nation. They are doing their bit for national development.

I realized the potential of this emotion and felt that if we can excite students across India, then we can create miracles. I just decided to convert this local initiative into a pan-India national initiative. All my colleagues ridiculed me. For Digital Pune Hackathon, we had participation of 36 teams from 20 Colleges and now I am suddenly thinking of scaling to few thousand institutions from across India.

Dr. Anand Deshpande was my sole supporter initially and he said “Abhay if you are thinking of conceptualizing national level initiative, then it is certainly an herculean task but I will support you. We need to approach right people in in Delhi who will understand the value of this concept. Let us write to Prof. Anil Sahasrabudhe, Chairman AICTE and Dr. Vinay Sahasrabuddhe who are open to new ideas”.

So we wrote to both of them and within no time they lapped the concept. Both of them felt that together we should approach then HRD Minister Shri Prakash Javadekar and convince him. After going to minister-ji’s home, Dr. Vinay said “Javadekar-ji, we have one great concept and we want MHRD’s support. We want to organize Hackathon at National scale involving all technical institutions in India”.

As expected, Minister was not aware of the concept and neither had heard word Hackathon before. So I was asked to explain the concept. I was really amazed with his Javadekar-ji’s grasp. Within just 3-4 minutes he said started some really relevant question which I answered to best of my ability. He immediately said “Jere start working on it and you will get my complete support” and rest is the history.

Now Smart India Hackathon (SIH) has evolved as the world’s biggest Hackathon and world’s largest open innovation model. Now lakhs of students, thousands of institutions and many renowned industries are participating. Because of SIH, now Hackathons are happening in every part of country and has started becoming quite routine activity. We have kick-started innovation movement of India.

Although, I established a national initiative for engineering students, I was not very satisfied, as I felt I haven’t done anything for large pool of Life Sciences /Biology/Pharmacy students. We have lakhs of students doing BSc, MSc, Bharm, MPharm, etc. I was constantly asking myself that how can we extract energy and creativity from these youngsters for doing something big. I pondered upon few ideas but was not happy as they were not big enough to involve the large pool of these students.

One fine morning in April 2017, I thought about project Manav: Human Atlas Initiative. Till date, human biology researchers across the globe have published more than 60 lakhs of research papers in in area of human biology but till date no one has tried collecting and systematically collating information from all these papers and built a Google Maps like model or atlas of Human body by linking all available macro-to-micro level information in a seamless fashion. I asked, banking on India’s demographic divided, can we take up this challenge?

I again spoke to Dr. Anand Deshpande and even this time, I was lucky. He decided to back it and said that I should start creating a detailed project report. But I couldn’t control my excitement and same night I sent 20-30 lined SMS to Dr. Vijayraghavan, then Secretary Dept of Biotechnology briefly explaining the concept and requested appointment for detailed presentation.

We all know the cliché luck favors the brave, I received quite enthusiastic reply from Dr. Vijayraghavan and he invited me to Delhi for detailed presentation. Now project Manav is funded by DBT with active support from current DBT secretary Dr. Renu Swarup. Persistent Systems is also making huge investment on this project and we now have team of more than 30 researchers working to build the IT platforms which will be used to engage thousands of our students to systematically collect scientific human biology data to build atlas of human body. We have already started Beta testing of the platform and students are loving it. They are also learning lot of science and gaining experience on reading and understanding scientific literature.

I am not highlighting these examples to prove that I am great but I am but just trying to convey that if we are ready to think big and take some risks then big projects are possible. If India has to emerge as world’s prominent knowledge based economy, then we need to train our faculty to aim really very high and Vice Chancellors role in very critical in this regard.