Formula One and Mumbai University

It's fun to see the contrasting elements that make up India.

On 30th October, we were hosts to a formula-One race, two days later, a news report said that Mumbai University (MU) had fewer taker's for its post-graduation courses.

Well the decline of Mumbai University ain't news. It's been happening since a looong time. I often laugh at the fact that we have just one university for so many in Mumbai.

MU is the oldest of the modern universities, and if we need the economy to cruise, say to be a formula-one economy, we can't afford this, can we?

To become a developed economy, we need something called as Meta-Ideas. These are the institutions that help create new ideas. University is just one of them.

Paul Romer writes in the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

Perhaps the most important ideas of all are meta-ideas—ideas about how to support the production and transmission of other ideas. In the seventeenth century, the British invented the modern concept of a patent that protects an invention. North Americans invented the modern research university and the agricultural extension service in the nineteenth century, and peer-reviewed competitive grants for basic research in the twentieth. The challenge now facing all of the industrialized countries is to invent new institutions that encourage a higher level of applied, commercially relevant research and development in the private sector.

My remedy: Break up Mumbai University. It's just too big to manage folks.