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Amartya Sen first saw the colossal, red-brick ruins of Nalanda University at the age of 11. After he told his family that he wanted to be a professor, his grandfather took him to see the remains of what is described as India’s oldest university, a place where history has the cast of epic myth.
Founded in the fifth century, Nalanda at its peak attracted some 10,000 students from across Asia to study Buddhism, law, literature, and philosophy. It is said to have been the first global institution of higher learning — and, Indians note, one created long before the development of universities in Europe.
Mr. Sen, the Harvard economist and Nobel laureate, is now part of an effort to capitalize on Nalanda’s legacy by building a new university with the same name, not far from the original site, in what is now the northeastern state of Bihar. The rebuilt Nalanda University would be a graduate-level institution, meant to bring the latest research and teaching practices to the country. It is set up as a quasi-public university, receiving government funds but freed from some national and state rules to give it more flexibility.
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The Chronicle of Higher Education
The plans, however, have been complicated by myriad obstacles. The university’s construction and opening have faced delays because of bureaucracy. The local news media have questioned the role of international academics. Others speculate that the venture is simply too ambitious to succeed — a point that Mr. Sen and other organizers disagree with.
"Our idea is not gigantic,” Mr. Sen, who heads Nalanda’s governing board, said in an interview. "It is to have a university which would be of high quality, which would be Asian in tradition and concentration.”
While India’s education and social needs are vast, and one institution will hardly solve them all, he said, Nalanda will fill an important role in India.
"We need education, we need health care, we need scientific research, and we need everything from elementary immunization of children to high-level medical expertise and skill,” Mr. Sen said. "We also need a connection with our own history, because it has an inspirational quality and is indeed something to learn from.”
In 2006, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, then India’s president, first proposed the plan to revive Nalanda, and the project has steadily gained international support. Besides Mr. Sen, the other 11 members of governing board include academics from top universities in Britain, China, Singapore, the United States, and Thailand.
The Indian Parliament passed a bill in 2010 authorizing the development of the university. The government pledged more than $330 million to the project; other governments, including those of China and Australia, have each pledged $1 million; Singapore promised up to $7 million to build a library.
Nalanda is expected to open in September, with about 40 students taking courses in history and environmental studies. The university eventually plans to enroll over 2,000 students, with programs in Buddhist studies, philosophy, linguistics, literature, international relations, information science and technology, economics, and management.
Organizers hope that graduate students will come from all over the world for experiences that are like those of a field school — doing ecological research in nearby villages, for example.
Because of delays, however, no faculty members have been hired, and the university still consists of only a converted government compound. Bihar has allocated 450 acres of rice paddies and wheat fields for a state-of-the-art campus, but parliamentary meetings and financial reviews have delayed construction.
Part of the problem is that members of Parliament and other government officials seem taken aback by the level of autonomy the university seeks. Among other plans, Nalanda wants a professor-student ratio of one to five, while the University Grants Commission, which regulates India’s federal universities but will not oversee Nalanda, said a higher ratio, 15 to 20 students per instructor, would be suitable.
Gopa Sabharwal, the university’s vice chancellor, has argued that India needs to throw out the rule book if it wants to forge a top-tier research institution.
"There’s never a precedent for someone who does something the first time around,” she said.
Some Indian academics have also criticized the salaries that the university wants to offer, taking issue with the vice chancellor’s salary of almost $100,000, an unheard-of amount at Indian universities.
Ms. Sabharwal has agreed to a salary 60 percent lower than originally offered, in part to deflect criticism. But without being able to set faculty pay higher than that at India’s public universities, Nalanda will have trouble attracting top talent, she said.
"There’s very little incentive in our university system for someone who’s good, young, eager and more productive to get fast-tracked to professorship,” Ms. Sabharwal said.
The local news media have given substantial coverage to such controversies, making the debate over Nalanda a very public issue.
Nalanda’s challenges mirror in some ways the problems that American universities have faced in trying to establish branch campuses and other academic programs in India. While the university has backing from Indians, there is also a perception that it is largely a foreign-led project.
Ramachandra Guha, a historian whose name was mentioned as an early candidate for vice chancellor, declined to comment on Nalanda specifically but wrote in an email, "India needs many top-tier, international-caliber research universities, not just one.”
"These, however, have to be built from the bottom up, by mentors and scholars based in different parts of the country (not abroad), aided by Indian philanthropists and/or public funds,” Mr. Guha added.
Pramath Raj Sinha, the founding dean of the Indian School of Business, who is setting up a private liberal-arts college, Ashoka University, is sympathetic to Nalanda’s circumstances. But the price tag for starting a top graduate research university from scratch, he said, may be too high.
"It’s like saying you’d set up Harvard without the undergraduate institution,” Mr. Sinha said. "Education is really a money business, and if they want to make a mark on the world with research, they will need funding.”
Mr. Sen defended Nalanda’s goals, arguing that ambitious ideas are what India needs to move forward.
"Our problem,” he said, "has always been to cut through the barrier of people who think too small rather than too big.”
Indians Plan Rebirth for 5th-Century University
