Union govt selects 17 centres to develop courses in ‘Indian Knowledge System’
Domains of the Indian Knowledge System, include Indian mathematics, Vastu Shastra, Pashu Ayurveda, Indian psychology, and Yoga.
New Delhi: The Union government has selected proposals from 17 higher education institutions across the country to set up specialized centres to develop courses in different domains of the Indian Knowledge System, including Indian mathematics, Vastu Shastra, Pashu Ayurveda, Indian psychology, and Yoga, for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, officials familiar with the development said.
The Indian Knowledge System (IKS) division of the union ministry of education invited applications from education institutions to set up these “Prashikshana Kendras” under its new scheme in June; the selections were announced on Tuesday.
The initiative was launched by the division, which was created in 2020, to support the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 that recommends induction of IKS at all levels of education, and as a follow-up to University Grants Commission’s (UGC) April guidelines that recommended that higher education institutions incorporate IKS courses in their curricula.
The selected centres will be set up in several educational institutions including IIT-Kanpur, IIT-Bombay, and IIT(BHU), Aryabhatta College in Delhi University, and Trinity College of Engineering, Pune , announced Ganti S Murthy, national coordinator, IKS division. To be sure, most of these institutions already have IKS centers working on different projects, although those almost exclusively deal with Indian languages (and not specialised domains).
The selected institutions will develop courses on various IKS topics including Indian mathematics, Indian psychology, Indian Chemistry, material Science and metallurgy, Indian architecture and Vastu Shastra, ancient Indian astronomy, Pashu Ayurveda, Yoga, and India’s continuous maritime tradition, Murthy added.
Each centre will receive ₹8.5 lakh per course, and initially, the IKS division will allow each to develop between two and four courses.
“The primary task of these centres will be to create curated content videos along with support material to enable faculty in the higher educational institutions to deliver the specialized IKS courses to students in various disciplines as core electives,” Murthy said.
The IKS division followed a three-step process to select the proposals for funding. “We received 51 good proposals and then shortlisted 26 of them. The experts did a deep review of those shortlisted proposals and after that the institutions made presentations before an expert committee,” said another official at the division, requesting anonymity.
Each course developed by these centres will have 30-40 lectures of 45-50 minute duration delivered by experts in the field. “The experts must be present at the centre for the recording of the lectures. Online delivery of the lectures by using ZOOM/Google Meet, or any other online platform is expressly prohibited,” says project document issued by the division.
Once approved, these courses will be made available for all higher education institutions to offer at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, the official quoted above said.
Meanwhile, the IKS division will appoint principal investigators to monitor the functioning of the centres. “IKS Division reserves the right to discontinue funding if there is no satisfactory progress (as indicated by an independent expert review) in any IKS Center at any time after the first six months of the project,” the project document cited above added.
