Quota not ideal in higher education: Moily

New Delhi: An ideal situation in the higher education sector in India would be not to go in for reservation, a stage which the country has not yet reached, Administrative Reforms Commission Chairman Veerappa Moily said on Sunday.

Moily,a former Chief Minister of Karnataka, described as totally unfounded and incorrect, the argument that reservation in higher education would bring down quality standards.

The need of the hour, he said, was to bring in major changes in higher education, with quality and accountability at all levels in private and public educational institutions. "We need to humanize and sensitize our educational system."

"Unless education is treated as for the public good, we cannot achieve our goals. Broad thinking is required in the educational field. Expansion, inclusion and excellence should be need of the hour in higher education," he said.

If India, with its vast human resources, wanted to become a world leader, steps should be taken to ensure that at least 20 per cent of its youth entered the portals of universities in the next 15 years from the present seven per cent, he said.

Moily also stressed the need to ensure that education was not influenced by profit. He said the UPA government had placed more emphasis on 'capacity building', with investment of crores of rupees for providing scholarships. The government was also now looking at various aspects of regulatory agencies such as the UGC and AICTE, including on how to fund them.

He said the Administrative Reforms Commission, now working on civil service reforms, would submit its report to the government in two months. He opined that Mangalore was the ideal site for setting up an electronic city after Bangalore, where export of electronic goods had touched Rs 40,000 crore per annum.

Moily said undivided Dakshina Kannada had the advantage of high literacy and living standards, low crime rate and a good environment for investment. With a Special Economic Zone slated to come up, Mangalore was poised for a huge leap economically. The SEZ, to come up at an investment of Rs 17,000 crore, would provide employment to about seven lakh youth, he claimed.

Besides major industries like ONGC petrochemical complex, IT companies, software companies, about 20 other major downstream projects, with an additional investment of Rs 2,000 crore was also in the pipeline, he said.