Five years since the National Education Policy 2020 promised to reimagine Indian higher education from flexible curricula to multidisciplinary learning and a target Gross Enrolment Ratio of 50 per cent by 2035 the sector finds itself caught between ambition and execution. New-age universities are being built with NEP‘s vision at their core, but the country’s vast, legacy institutional infrastructure has been far slower to change. The gap between what policy promises on paper and what students and faculty experience on the ground remains one of the defining tensions of Indian higher education today.It is this tension between prescription and autonomy, between “new-age” branding and genuine excellence that Dr Naushad Forbes, Chancellor of Nayanta University, chose to interrogate in an exclusive interview with ETEducation. A well-known industry voice who has long worked at the intersection of academia and enterprise, Forbes offered a sharply argued, occasionally contrarian take on where Indian higher education is headed: from why AI must never become an excuse for mediocrity, to why he distrusts the very term “new-age university,” to why he believes policymakers must simply step back and let institutions be judged on outcomes rather than compliance. Edited excerpts from the conversation.NEP has given direction, but not enough change on the ground
Forbes begins with a candid assessment of NEP 2020 itself. “The National Education Policy is very welcome. It provides great direction,” he says but is quick to add a caveat. “Unfortunately, it has not resulted in enough change on the ground. It needs to actually show up on the ground, both in the Union Government and in the State Governments.”
His diagnosis is a familiar one to observers of Indian policy implementation: reform tends to reach the new before it reaches the old. “While it’s providing direction for new institutions that are coming up, it’s not yet reflected in enough change in the huge existing infrastructure of institutions that we have,” he notes – a distinction that runs through much of his thinking on where the sector’s real work still lies.
AI as a tool, not an alibi
On artificial intelligence arguably the most disruptive force in classrooms today, Forbes resists the temptation to treat it as either saviour or threat. He starts, instead, from first principles about what learning actually is. “The best education happens one-on-one,” he says. “It happens when knowledge that’s in a faculty member’s head transfers to the student, and that transfer happens best not so much in a classroom, but one-on-one through various exchanges of which classroom interaction would be one forum, but not the only forum.”
Seen against that backdrop, AI has a clearly bounded role. “AI is best seen as a tool. It is not an alternative to this one-on-one learning that happens as the core of quality higher education,” he says. He is happy to see it embraced as a productivity aid “as an efficiency tool, as a tool that helps the quality of writing and clarity of expression” but insists that its use cannot dilute accountability.
That accountability, for Forbes, is non-negotiable. “Together with the use of AI as a tool comes the responsibility as a human being that one has used that tool. You can’t ever blame the tool for something that’s wrong.” His policy on this is unambiguous: “Whatever output the faculty member puts out with his or her name is on the individual faculty member or student — they are 100% accountable for what’s said. They cannot at any point in time ever blame AI, and if they do, frankly I would dismiss both faculty member and student. I would have a zero tolerance policy of accepting AI ever as the excuse for something that is wrong or substandard.”
Agility isn’t the goal – Excellence is
Ask Forbes about the industry buzzword “agile curriculum,” and he pushes back on the framing itself. “In principle, I don’t think agility is the objective. Excellence must be the objective,” he says. The real question, in his view, is how institutions build excellence that can respond to a fast-changing world and his answer to that is structural, not procedural: agility comes from decentralisation, not design.
“You can only achieve agility if you leave things to the individuals who have to be agile,” he argues. “It certainly isn’t the policy maker’s job to prescribe a curriculum in an agile way. It is not the policy maker’s job to prescribe a curriculum at all. They have no role in prescribing curriculum. It should be left to the institution, and it should be left indeed to the individual professor to decide what the right curriculum is for a particular course.”
He draws on his own experience as a young academic to make the case. “When I first started teaching, my first course that I developed on my own was within three months of getting my Ph.D. degree. And when I taught that course, no one from the University or anyone else, or even my department, looked at what I was teaching, what the schedule was, what the curriculum was, what I was asking students to do, how I was grading them. It was left to me. No one oversaw that.” That absence of oversight, he says, sharpened rather than diluted his sense of ownership. “Since I was very clear that I was responsible for everything that was going to go on in that course, I was also accountable for quality and couldn’t rely as a crutch on anyone else. So, I did a good job and I think that’s how you achieve agility. You achieve it by leaving it to the individual professor and letting the professor decide what should be taught, how it should be taught, and how it should be assessed.”
Why he rejects the label “New-Age University”
Given that Nayanta University itself sits in the category of new institutions built on NEP-era thinking, Forbes’ take on the phrase “new-age university” is a pointed one. “I do not think universities should be new age,” he says flatly. “The best universities in the world are centuries old. That’s not a new technology. Universities are institutions that have been around for long periods of time.”
For him, the marker of a good university isn’t novelty but currency of thought, a distinction he’s careful to draw. “Universities should reflect current research, and that current research should show up in current teaching. ‘New-age’ is a fad. It’s a fashion statement, and I would avoid using it especially in the context of universities and in terms of ties between academia and industry.”
Building academia-industry ties: Start small, build up
On the long-debated question of bridging the skills gap through industry-academia collaboration, Forbes offers a framework rather than a slogan: think of it as a hierarchy that has to be climbed, not a partnership that can be declared into existence. “One should start small and with small interactions,” he says. “And those small interactions will happen between one company and not an institution, but a particular faculty member or a particular department at a time.”
He points to his own experience at CII, where the goal was to systematise this progression. “What we tried to do in CII some time ago was to productise industry-academia interaction. We had an interaction where you could have guest lectures, student internships, etc. in industry, faculty co-teaching of courses, and then sponsored research.”
His frustration is with institutions that skip the groundwork. “Too often, we like to straightaway say, why aren’t we getting large research grants happening between companies and institutions? I think that should be seen as some steps down the process of interacting between industry and institution, where each gets to know the other, and you build those relationships, and then you build on those relationships to do something bigger and more fundamentally critical to the success of the company and the institution. That’s the future of crossover between education and research.”
Cross-border partnerships must move both ways
International collaborations, Forbes says, too often end at the signing ceremony. “Very often, we seek partnerships with various institutions, and after having signed it, the interaction ends,” he observes. His prescription for making them meaningful rests on reciprocity in both directions, on both fronts. “We should ensure that the partnerships enable two particular things. First, it should enable student exchange, and student exchange in both directionsIndian students going overseas and overseas students coming to Indian institutions. It should enable faculty exchange, again in both directions faculty from India going overseas and faculty from overseas coming to India. That’s what any interaction across borders should enable: exchange that provides for better teaching and exchange that provides for better research.”
A closing message: Chase excellence, trust the sector
Asked to leave educators and policymakers with a final thought, Forbes offers two distinct messages one for each audience, but both anchored in the same idea. To educators: “We should chase excellence, and we should chase excellence in research and in teaching in both, not one or the other. And we should judge everything that we do on that basis. Is it enhancing research excellence, or is it enhancing teaching excellence, or is it enhancing excellence in both? That’s the single metric. If it doesn’t enhance excellence, it’s not worth doing and spending time on.”
To policymakers, his message is more provocative and more pointed than anything else in the conversation. “Trust the sector,” he says. “For years, we’ve tried to regulate quality into the sector, and we have failed. And I think we should just recognise that we failed and move on from trying to prescribe what institutions must do, what they should teach, who they should hire with what qualifications, how many faculty they should have, how many students they should have, which courses they should offer, what you should call degrees all of that stuff. We’re so prescriptive who should be on the boards of institutions, who should be Vice Chancellors. Why is this a policymaker’s prerogative? It shouldn’t be prescribed at all. It should be left to the institution.”
His closing formulation is, in effect, a manifesto: “Give full autonomy, and then hold the institution accountable for overall quality. So, provide freedom with autonomy, and then judge the institution on the final quality that they actually provide as a service to society.”
It’s a message that cuts against the grain of decades of regulatory instinct in Indian higher education and one that, coming from someone now building an institution from the ground up, carries the weight of both experience and impatience.
