TRANSITION OF INDIAN UNIVERSITIES FROM MULTI DISCIPLINARY TO INTERDISCIPLINARY: LESSONS FROM INDIAN KNOWLEDGE SYSTEM (IKS)

One of the major proposals in the New Education Policy (NEP 2020) is the creation of Multidisciplinary Universities (MDUs), one in every district of the country. While we have over 875 universities, only a handful are truly multidisciplinary. Most of the developed states have more than one university per district but the north-eastern and hill states and others like Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha have less than one university per district. In order to meet the one MDU per district criterion, over 100 plus new MDUs would need to be set up and many of the existing ones would need substantial expansion and strengthening to confer a multidisciplinary character. MDU has been understood to imply a bouquet of disciplines such as arts, sciences, commerce, law, architecture, engineering, medicine for study within the university. The underlying philosophy of promoting MDUs is laudable as students are free to choose courses from different disciplines which not only gives them a liberal outlook thr...