Edu-leaders

Recalling the considerable progress achieved in bilateral educational relations following the visits by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh to the United States in 2009 and President Obama to India in 2010, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today reaffirmed the strategic partnership between India and the United States for meaningful dialogue, cooperation, and engagement in the field of higher education, and launched a new phase in this partnership. The two leaders acknowledged the immense possibilities for further collaboration between the two countries given the inherent dynamism, emerging challenges, and numerous exciting opportunities available for sharing and growing together.

Minister Sibal and Secretary Clinton emphasised that access to and the development of technology and skills are cross-cutting requirements to meet the challenges that their two countries face. They acknowledged the fruitful collaboration between India and the United States in the areas of education, research, and innovation and noted its contribution to the development of technologies, skills, and knowledge-based societies in both countries. Both leaders emphasised the need to enhance this collaboration.

Expressing their commitment to that vision, they launched the expanded US-India Higher Education Dialogue as an annual bilateral event to map out strategies for partnership in the field of education between the two countries. The dialogue will identify areas for mutually beneficial exchanges and provide a platform for intense and meaningful collaboration among academia, the private sector, and government on both sides.  It will be held alternately in the United States and India.

Sibal and Hillary said they will take forward the areas of consensus arrived at during the summit. Some of these included a continued expanded US-India Higher Education Dialogue with representatives from government, academia, and business that would interact on a periodic basis to inform and underpin the dialogue; Promoting strategic institutional partnerships for further strengthening and expansion of collaboration in the priority areas of higher education; Fostering partnerships in the areas of vocational education and skills enhancement to meet the needs of today’s world; Exploration of models for ‘educational institutions for the 21st century’ (such as ‘meta’ universities); Strengthening educator enrichment and exchange programmes (with the Government of India indicating its intention to sponsor initially up to 1,500 faculty and junior scholars to leading universities and research institutes in the United States) to promote development of human resources while also enhancing broader interaction between the two countries.

Sibal expressed optimism about building on this summit in the expanded US-India Higher Education Dialogue to be held in 2012.