With 34 years of experience teaching Plant Physiology, Biological Chemistry and Cell and Molecular Biology and 36 years of research with 16 students already awarded their Ph. D degree under his supervision, Professor Tandon is today a very knowledgeable and well versed teacher. Add to that, administrative experience of managing university affairs as a member of academic bodies of many universities, an active role as a member of many Task Forces of the government of India, a rich experience of planning, execution and evaluation of major inter disciplinary research programmes at the national level and what you get is a very able and very resourceful person at the helm of affairs of NEHU.

Below are the excerpts from the interview:

Q. Since you have taken over as the Vice Chancellor of this institute, what are the new initiatives that have been taken up to improve the current standard of the institute?

A. When I took over as Vice Chancellor, the first thing that I said was that we would provide clean and transparent administration and quality with regard to administration. With regard to academics, we have started some new courses. The department of Bio technology and school of law have been started.

Then we will start the school of technology where information technology and electronics and telecommunication engineering will be started. Now for all this, an all India entrance test is there for technology. These programmes are going to be useful to the students from here who have always been forced to go down south or north to study biotechnology and they had to pay a lot of capitation fee and spend a lot of money in studying there and myself being a plant biotechnologist I had realized long ago that we need to start courses in emerging areas. So it is my considered opinion that we should have new courses in emerging areas where employability is there. It is not enough for us to remain a degree awarding institution. Our students that pass out should be employed, should be able to compete with the rest of the world.

Education has a global scenario now, globalization of education has taken place and cut throat competition is there and therefore it is very important that we impart quality education to our students who will be able to compete anywhere in this country and also abroad.

Q. In spite of this, we find that more than 50 thousand students are going out of the Northeast every year for studies. So how do you stop them and what are the reasons for their leaving the Northeast? In spite of that fact, every state has a university now.

A. There is a problem which is that these universities that are there in the Northeast still do not have courses which will attract the students. I mentioned that we need to have courses in emerging areas, nano technology, bio technology, information technology and so on so that we can provide quality education to the students at affordable prices here itself in the Northeast. I think that in the 11th plan, all the universities in the Northeast must see what is required by the students and offer those courses here.

Another reason which I think, to some extent, is responsible for the exodus of the students is that here, big campus life as you will find anywhere else in the country; the academically vibrant campuses, is not there. By four o’clock you will find that most of the people are back home or back in the hostel. This was another of my priorities. That is, we should have housing for all of the students and faculty members and non teaching staff so that this campus becomes academically vibrant. I have studied in places where labs are never closed and students work 24 hours a day and this is what we would like to have here. If you go to JNU, Pune University or Delhi University, you will find that students are busy there throughout the day and night.

Q. There is another reason that needs to be considered which is, we don’t have the faculty/ staff, the best teachers are not coming here. Is that a reason?

A. Well, to some extent it is true that attracting faculty, good faculty and retaining them is a major problem and this problem is primarily due to the lack of good housing. Shillong is a place where housing is so difficult to find. Similar situations may be there in other parts of the Northeast as well. So, in that situation, we need to provide for the best of the faculty members and you will find that they will stay.

I have been here for the last 30 years. I could have gone to any other place in the country but then I and certain others in the university chose to stay back and we all came from some of the best institutions. Even now you will find that more than 50 to 60% of our faculty at the university has been trained abroad. So the issue is not whether we have the best teachers or not, the issue is to provide them with the best of the academic world, living environment and you will see that people will remain here.

Q. Another point in that same dimension is, there is no placement here. Your university was declared an institute with potential for excellence. In spite of this fact, you don’t see any companies coming here. In metros, multi national companies are recruiting their staff directly from the universities. I want to know from you, are you taking any initiative to appoint a placement officer and see that the recruitment of the students is taking part in the campus itself when they are in their fourth semester.

A. I think this is not fully true because if you look at the statistics of the students from the Northeast going into the BPOs and other stations, their number is far greater than those from the rest of the country. Coming back to this issue of placement, yes, we do not have a placement cell here and we need to have one and should have one. But then, private companies who want to hire people are looking for graduates, not post graduates because they can train them right at the very beginning. In BPOs there are hardly any post graduates except for the specialized courses like bio technology. However for others from the social sciences, companies prefer graduates.

Last year, when I met Mr. Narayan Modi at IIT Bombay, we were discussing how to bring in more people from the Northeast into this kind of thing and straight away he sent a big team and since then they have come here twice. They have hired people from here, banks have hired people from here, they have been organizing test courses, even other companies, HP, WIPRO, have hired people from our university. So yes, I agree with you, there is a need to have a placement cell here where we will be able to tell the students about the opportunities available and bring hiring companies to our campus.

Q. Can you elaborate on “potential for excellence?”

A. You mentioned that the university having the potential for excellence. Now I would like to dwell a little bit on this. Our university has been in existence for more than 3 decades. Here in Shillong, it has been a premiere institution. We have to apply for this status; it did not come on its own. We have to compete for this status with the other universities in the country. This has not come to us because we are located in the Northeast or anything of that kind. It is based on hard data, hard publication record, hard administration report, our student placement and numerous other things. And out of 35 universities which had applied for it, only five were accepted. Even Delhi University is not a university with potential for excellence. So we are among the top universities in the country. Our emphasis is to look after the people affairs because I firmly believe that the kind of education that we should provide should be relevant to the society in which we live. We have chosen area study as one study.

The Northeast, as you know, is rich in cultural, ethnic, linguistic bio diversity. Such a rich diversity. So under area study, we want to do everything that is related to the region and which is going to be of help to the society. We need to preserve this cultural heritage that we have. It is such a rich cultural heritage. When you talk of bio diversity, the Northeast is only 9% of the geographical area of the whole of India. Still, you have 220 languages spoken here. You have 50% of the county’s flora and fauna located here. Such enormous wealth.

At the global level, the Northeast is a very important genes centre because of these diversities and the key to our survival and success depends on how well we can utilize these resources that we have and I believe that the Northeast can progress and develop if we use the bio resources of the area to the fullest. We have something like more than 650 billion dollars of herbal products, 60 million U.S dollars of floriculture trade is being exported by India right now. Are we getting even 50% of that? No, we are not. The region can progress only when we are able to utilize these resources.

Q. But someone has to teach them how to do this.

A. We have been doing this for the last many years. We have research programmes funded by the department of bio technology, women in rural development, like orchid multiplication, multiplication of some rare and endangered plants from here, multiplication of medicinal plants. For all this, we are holding a training programme for womenfolk from different villages, trying to teach them how to do this. This does not cost them anything but then it will bring revenue to them within 2 to 3 years time. So this is what is needed in a bigger scale. What we are doing as an academic institution is something small scale. What I suggest is that the state government or some NGOs take this up on a big scale.

Q. You can provide the technical support to them?

A. Sure. That is what we have been doing all these years.

Q. Your comment on Look East Policy?

A. Because of the renewed interest in the Look East Policy of the government of India, educational institutions in the Northeast would be expected to be very important. If we are going to have border trade with our neighbours, we need to know their language, we need to know their systems and I think that the educational institutions will be expected to play a very important role.

Also our university has received more funding in the last 2 years than ever before for infrastructure. I said at the beginning that we need to have academically vibrant campus. Now we have a multi youth convention centre which is worth 3.5 crores, state of the art facilities, we now have a community centre, we have a shopping complex, we have indoor stadium where national events can take place, we have a health centre, hostels, however, are not there. We have 3000 plus students and only 5 hostels were there. We have constructed another 6 and we are going to do more. We will have more residences for teachers and non teaching staff. We now have the building for the school of technology. We have buildings for bio technology, environment science and law. I think that another big initiative that we have taken up is the establishment of North East India Centre of Diversity.

Q. What is this?

A. We want to showcase the strengths of our region and we have in there cultural art, all the activities related to this will be housed here, be it linguistics, be it cultural heritage, be it social issues and things like that. The other is, Bio Park. When we want to study the herbal plants, the medicinal plants, the orchids, floriculture, horticulture, all those things are going to be done in the bio park. This has already been approved and we have received the funding from UGC. We received something like 32.8 crores to begin with and we have procured the equipments and the construction of the buildings will begin very soon.

Further, all the departments now have the multi – media projection facilities and state of the art facilities. Because I think that teaching aids also must improve if you want to provide the best. Now we are trying to get the best of the internet connectivity for the campus which is very difficult for the Northeast. So all this is going to make our university not only a university with the potential for excellence but a truly excellent university within the next 5 years. Because my goal is to see that this university is not only among the best in the country but elsewhere too. We are attracting foreign students and we have already constructed international housing for them. We have students from Germany, Netherlands, and Bangladesh and today we are having some French visitors coming to visit our university. You will not believe that every month we have at least 3 to 4 major conferences with 100 to 200 participants. Yesterday we completed a workshop in linguistics.

Q. To sum up, is the university very vibrant?

A. I think yes. But this is for the people to see, let them evaluate.