– Professor Avanish Kumar, Dean – School of Public Policy & Governance & Center of Excellence & Faculty In-charge PGDM-PPM, MDI Gurgaon
In the 21st century, sustainability is no longer a choice; it’s a universal demand. The call for sustainability arises from the urgent need to mitigate risks associated with the rapid depletion of resources and the decentralization of power. As awareness of resource scarcity grows, efforts to enhance adaptive capacity have intensified. Moreover, the devolution of power, coupled with increased access to information, has led to the emergence of various accountability mechanisms. Together, sustainability aims to improve both risk management and revenue generation.
The strength of the term sustainability lies in its broad applicability. While its literal meaning is rooted in the ‘ability to sustain,’ sustainability in education encompasses the development of facilities and services that promote knowledge, attitudes, and practices conducive to equitable growth. This involves not only generating revenue but also conserving resources for the future.
Education and research institutions, especially those focused on applied academia, play a crucial role in creating human capital in today’s complex and rapidly changing geopolitical environment. At the global level, SDG four on education demands every country to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.’ However, challenges such as conflicts, climate change, and COVID-19 perpetuate the difficulties faced by educational institutions. According to the UN, the pandemic caused learning losses in all the 104 countries studied. Low and lower-middle-income countries face a nearly $100 billion annual financial gap in reaching their educational targets.
The key challenges associated with implementing sustainable practices in the educational system lie in leadership’s adoption of innovative strategies for prioritizing assets and investments. Investment in one capital fundamentally results in compromise in other capitals, at least in the short term. While no capital is more sustainable than knowledge capital, knowledge capital perpetually falls under the risk of its long gestational period of outcomes. Unlike other capitals, the knowledge capital yields results after a long gestation period—this period of silent spring with little or no fruits of realization for an academic institution levy relaxation.
The challenges facing Indian academic institutions have further accumulated with the rise of competition due to the introduction of the New Education Policy, 2020. The policy provision for setting up campuses by foreign universities in India creates competition to attract the best students. This, combined with a credit bank system that allows students to move between academic institutions, fundamentally shifts the control of academic institutions into the hands of the students. It is expected to challenge existing academic institutions to be at the forefront of innovation. Additionally, the demands of millennials and the market from academic institutions are to create responsible leaders with experience and expertise in resilience. Among the leading academic institutions in India, the Management Development Institute was one of the pioneers to adopt sustainability in its vision and strategy in 2020. MDI’s vision aims to nurture responsible leaders who can create sustainable alternatives.
The above challenges become more complex with diminishing financial resources, dynamic sustainability demands, and increasing competition to provide diverse and dynamic skills.
The government, through ranking and regulation, attempts to ensure the adoption of sustainable practices by academic institutions. However, in the absence of a governance model to interface with industry and society for a sustainable laboratory to experiment and solve real-world problems, Indian academia lags in avenues for generating sustainable alternatives for business, society, and government. Recently, the government has promoted the business-academia interface, which is required to provide a corpus that can speed innovation in academia. One of the essential lessons from the developed world is to resolve the issue of rights regarding equitable sharing of benefits from knowledge product development. Intellectual Property Rights remain a tussle between the industries that fund financial resources and academia, which fuels innovation. To sustain academia-business partnerships on sustainability, one of the significant challenges for academic institutions is to cope with the speed and scale of rapidly changing demands. Countries like India need the setting of laboratories that allow experimentation on collaborative models. However, medical education is quite ahead of other disciplines in this regard. Hospitals create knowledge for students while solving real-life problems for patients. However, due to the high investment cost in infrastructure and facilities, private medical colleges seek benefits at both ends – creating knowledge, charging students, and treating patients. Lack of regulation turns into rising out-of-pocket expenditure, ultimately causing medical poverty. The government urgently needs to increase strategic investment in sustainable education infrastructure, maybe by providing tax subsidies for creating sustainable products, including constructing real-life laboratories.
Though economic development creates educational resources, it also promotes demand to redress risks associated with unsustainable practices. More importantly, with the reduced life-cycle of the products, it becomes pertinent for businesses to cope with risks and uncertainties. It provides opportunities for educational institutions to promote knowledge and skills to solve problems. Till now, industry and academia have responded to the global goalposts of SDGs. The need of the hour is to realize domestic challenges and reduce the gap between demands and supply in business-education partnerships.
There are multiple examples of successful sustainability initiatives in education across the world. Due to a lack of holistic education, creating one innovative solution often results in another set of problems. What matters is for students and scholars to develop holistic education that can bridge the gap between three fundamental pillars, i.e., science-society, intelligentsia-industry, and products-purpose. One of the finest examples of such holistic education comes from a university setup in India more than 500 years before Oxford and Europe’s oldest University, Nalanda University, produced scholars who redefined science and turned around philosophy and spirituality across Asia. In recent years, Banaras Hindu University and the Indian Institute of Science have been examples of collaborative governance. It involved the donation of financial resources to promote scholarships without personal benefits. While India is bestowed with human and knowledge capital, Indian academia has yet to find a suitable partnership model that provides financial support to promote holistic education.
Sustainability is fundamentally rooted in principles of long-term equitable gain with little or no negative impact. The future of sustainability in education lies in moving away from silos of green carpeting and corporate catering. Integrating sustainability into core strategy is more critical than ever. Currently, most organizations run Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, and Environment Social Governance in silos. It is corporate catering to government or SDG demands; it has yet to internalize its core business strategy. Similarly, in academic institutions, faculties and scholars preach and publish on sustainability but rarely practice it. The gap between preaching, publishing, and practice will be reduced to create sustainable alternatives.
