Barriers to Scholarship in India: Trading freely in ideas
Our persistence in obstructing foreign scholars and scholarship in India is unfortunate. We continue to subject all research projects by foreign scholars to an elaborate approval process involving one or more ministries. Economic Times, December 19 2001 THIS past September, I had the delightful experience of participating in a conference on the Indian economy at the University of Michigan’s William Davidson Institute. The conference brought home the realisation that after declining for over two decades scholarship on India was once again beginning to gather momentum in the United States. Scholars from such distinguished universities as Harvard, MIT, Michigan and Carnegie Mellon came to present their ongoing research on India. Study of India by foreign scholars is, of course, nothing new. In his monumental work, Discovery of India, late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru offers a fascinating account of the two-way exchange of scholars that took place between India and China throughout the first millennium. Following the missionaries of emperor Ashoka, who blazed the trail in third century BC, thousands of Indian and Chinese scholars crossed the Gobi desert to reach one another…
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