After spending decades building businesses, Dr Sunder Raju turned his attention to a sector he believes is struggling to respond to the pace of change: higher education.The Founder & Chancellor of Atria University believes the problem goes beyond outdated curricula or the familiar industry complaint that graduates are not job-ready. Universities, he argues, have become so entrenched in their traditional structures that they struggle to adapt even as technology, workplaces and society undergo rapid transformation. He also questions whether higher education has lost sight of its original purpose of encouraging young people to explore problems that do not yet have answers.In an exclusive interview with ET Education, Raju discusses why he believes permanent employment structures could increasingly give way to task-based work, the challenges of introducing interdisciplinary education, the growing obsession with placements, and the possibility that artificial intelligence could eventually evolve beyond human control. He also shares his views on the sectors that could drive India’s next phase of growth, including life sciences, renewable energy, mobility and AI.Q. You have spent decades building businesses before venturing into education. What prompted you to enter the education sector and eventually start a university?Dr Sunder Raju: I should qualify that a little. While I was instrumental in securing approvals for the engineering college, I was not directly involved in running it because I was occupied with other businesses. My father drove the engineering college in the direction he thought was right.When he passed away in 2018, I started looking at what Atria Institute of Technology (AIT), the existing engineering college affiliated with VTU, could do differently. I began examining what the next generation of young adults really needed and what we were delivering to them.Within six months, I realised that we were not necessarily delivering what was right for a young adult. We were primarily delivering knowledge-based information through information dissemination, with some application of that knowledge. I started questioning whether this was what young adults actually needed.There was also the constant discussion about graduates not being industry-ready. When students enter the industry, employers say they have to spend another couple of years training them. That was one of the challenges I wanted to address.The second aspect was the transition taking place in the broader societal and industrial ecosystem.When I graduated in 1979-80 and applied for a job in one of the public sector undertakings, I remember looking at its organisational structure. I call it a P2P structure, or peer-to-president. There were around 18 layers in the hierarchy. An employee could move up one level every two years, but it would take practically an entire career of more than 30 years to reach the position of president.By 2018, that structure had shortened to just six or seven layers.Looking at this evolution, my belief is that in the next five, seven or ten years, I don’t know exactly when, organisations will become extremely flat. It is not a question of whether it will happen, but when.Employment will no longer necessarily be about hiring a graduate into a permanent organisational position. Instead, there will be a contract for a task to be completed. People will come together as a group, execute the task, get paid for it, and then move on to find another task. Hopefully, platforms and ecosystems will emerge that keep connecting people with opportunities.This is already happening in areas such as event management and technology through what we call gig work. I believe it will become increasingly common even in the technology sector.Think of platforms such as GitHub, where people post problems and others contribute solutions. You have a repository of solutions to different problems. When a new problem comes up, technology will increasingly help connect the problem with the right group of people who can solve it.We see something similar happening with social media. Based on what you watch and the interests you demonstrate, the platform starts showing you content relevant to those interests.I believe the same principle will eventually apply to work. Technology will connect tasks with people who have the right capabilities to deliver solutions. We are not very far away from that possibility.Q. When you started reimagining Atria, what was the biggest assumption about universities that you wanted to challenge?Dr Sunder Raju: Look at how technology has evolved. When I started studying, valves were an important component of electronics. Today, if you ask a young student about valves, they may barely recognise their relevance. Even transistors and diodes are increasingly becoming less visible to students because integrated solutions such as system-on-a-chip technologies are taking over.Earlier, you had to connect different components, including diodes, transistors, resistors and capacitors, on a printed circuit board to make a circuit work. Today, much of that complexity is integrated into a single solution.Even if you ask second-year engineering students at a university today to put together a breadboard circuit using transistors and diodes, many may struggle to make it work without relying on a microprocessor.Technology is moving forward, but educational institutions are always behind.Before starting the university, I travelled to 51 universities around the world. I attended classes at MIT, Harvard, Stanford and Rice University, among several others. I also visited institutions in Europe and other parts of the world, including universities in Spain. I wanted to understand what was happening across the higher education landscape. What I realised was that education is an enormous silo with phenomenal inertia.Corporations have to survive quarter after quarter. They may not necessarily be nimble, but they are quicker to change. They understand that if they do not adapt, their organisations will not survive. Their timelines for change are often one, two or three years. Educational institutions, on the other hand, sometimes take an extraordinarily long time to change. They are always behind.When you question this, people often say that they are dealing with young people and do not want to treat them like guinea pigs. They want to introduce changes gradually to avoid mistakes. That argument may sound rational, but the reality today is that the pace of change is extremely fast. Things can change within 18 to 24 months.If educational institutions take ten years to change while society changes every two years, they will always remain behind. We started asking how we could address this gap. The National Education Policy (NEP) is also an attempt to address this challenge in the Indian context.The question is how educational institutions can remain aligned with what society needs rather than constantly lagging behind. Policymakers may develop a framework, but there is a considerable difference between those who conceptualise policy and those who translate it into processes and implement it. That creates another gap in the system.I remember having several conversations with Professor K. Kasturirangan and his team in 2017, 2018 and 2019, when the NEP was being formulated. I do not recall artificial intelligence featuring in those discussions. AI subsequently emerged and changed the landscape entirely. The way education is delivered and consumed has changed significantly.Q. Interdisciplinary education is now widely discussed. What have you learnt about its limitations after actually running a university?Dr Sunder Raju: The framework for creating interdisciplinary education is interesting, but we have to remember the people who are expected to drive it. A professor has learnt in a particular way and has been delivering knowledge in a particular fashion for years. There is a familiar example of professors continuing to use notes that may be 20 years old.Some of this is not necessarily intentional. A teacher has learnt something in a particular way and has continued delivering it using that knowledge. In academic institutions, professors often teach the same two or three subjects over an extended period. Even when the world around them changes, they remain within their respective silos.As a result, the system becomes rigid. One challenge is the limited engagement that an individual professor may have with the real world. The second is departmental engagement. Interdepartmental engagement, particularly on the knowledge-delivery side, is almost non-existent. This is not just an Indian problem. I would say this is true of many universities around the world.Now, suddenly, we are talking about creating interdisciplinary frameworks and delivering education in that manner. The faculty-enablement process required to make this happen is itself a significant journey. I am learning quite aggressively because I am pushing these boundaries as much as possible. The amount of faculty development required to prepare teachers for a new era is substantial.Faculty members have to become students again. That creates another challenge: you now have to evaluate them as students.They are accustomed to evaluating others. When you start assessing them on subject knowledge, delivery processes and their ability to work across disciplines, there is resistance, even if it is subtle. You have to overcome that resistance and help them understand that this is a journey. Unless they move from where they are today to the next stage, they risk falling by the wayside.That understanding does not come easily. It requires constant engagement. Sometimes, you feel you have made progress, but then four critical people who have moved forward leave, and you have to restart the process.Q. How difficult is it to build a different university culture when students and parents continue to place so much importance on degrees, rankings and placements?Dr Sunder Raju: There are two ecosystems involved. One is the ecosystem within the institution, and the other is the ecosystem outside, which includes the audience you are engaging with. Both have their own expectations, and those expectations converge.People often look at established institutions as benchmarks. They may have heard of the IITs or been associated with them in some way. In engineering, the IITs and other established institutions become reference points. Even in a city such as Bengaluru, there may be four or five leading engineering institutions. The remaining colleges then aspire to become one of those leading institutions.This creates a certain traditionality that gets reinforced across the ecosystem. Parents also have their own expectations. They have seen how their children are evaluated for jobs and how placements happen, whether through campus recruitment or outside the campus. Employers, too, have a particular perspective. Consider a large technology company recruiting 10,000 students every year. It has to visit 20, 30 or even 40 universities. How does it evaluate students consistently?It standardises its assessment based on curricula that may themselves be ten years old. It tests students and then conducts face-to-face interviews to determine whether someone is slightly better than a rote learner. That is often the only measurable basis available to them.Employers then spend another two years training these graduates and complain that they are not industry-ready.But the way they recruit is also standardised. Educational institutions see how companies recruit and consequently train students to meet those requirements. Ultimately, institutions feel responsible for ensuring that students get placed.Q. Do you think universities have become too focused on employability and lost sight of what higher education is actually meant to achieve? Dr Sunder Raju: I think admission to a university today, particularly in India, is largely driven by one question: What will my child do after completing the degree? What kind of placement will they get?Employment has become the primary criterion, and consequently, everyone is trying to ensure that students get jobs. I think you have made a very interesting observation about how we may have lost sight of why higher education exists in the first place.Higher education originally evolved around the idea of probing problems that did not have answers. You wanted young people to examine those problems, investigate them and gradually find solutions. Hopefully, over the next 10, 20 or 30 years, they would find answers because they had spent considerable time exploring those questions.But higher education has moved away from that purpose. The challenge of democratising education has also evolved, and universities have increasingly become job-giving and job-enabling environments.India has around 6,500 engineering institutions, and most of them have become standardised. We are now in a situation where institutions do not know how to get out of this cycle. Anyone who tries to move away from the established model takes a risk. They are essentially jumping into something without knowing whether they will survive. That is where the challenge lies.Q. AI is forcing universities to rethink learning, teaching and assessment. What changes do you think are unavoidable in the age of AI? Dr Sunder Raju: This is something I think about when I go to sleep and when I wake up.When AI first arrived in 2023 in the form of ChatGPT, everyone thought it was an interesting tool. But look at how far it has travelled in just three years. It has reached a point where it is beginning to challenge the assumption that certain things can only be done by humans. It can perform many tasks better and faster, and it can operate 24 hours a day.AI has now evolved to a stage where one AI system can create another AI agent to solve a problem for which it does not have the necessary tools. Think of it as something similar to procreation in biology. An AI system creates another agent to undertake a task it cannot perform itself.Because the parent system is already trained and can transfer information quickly, the new agent can become more capable in a particular area. This cycle is moving very rapidly.Recently, some leading thinkers and experts in the United States approached the United Nations seeking a regulatory framework. Their concern is that AI could eventually make human beings subservient to the very systems they have created.We think we have built a tool and that we control it. But what happens when that tool evolves beyond our understanding and control?We are still debating whether AI has consciousness and whether that is what distinguishes humans from machines. But AI could potentially learn the elements associated with human decision-making and behaviour.The outcome will also depend on who develops these systems and the environment in which they are created. Someone may build AI with good intentions, while another may develop it for a limited personal advantage. But once released, these systems could continue evolving beyond the original intentions of their creators. We have to ask ourselves whether humanity will remain in control. Two years ago, I would not have raised this question in the same way. Today, it is a fair question to ask.Q. Beyond these larger concerns about AI, universities are already struggling with its impact on examinations and assessments. Students can use tools such as ChatGPT to generate answers. How should institutions respond?Dr Sunder Raju: That is precisely the challenge. We do not even know how to conduct an examination today when AI can provide students with answers.We have to develop a process that allows us to determine whether a human being is actually ahead of AI in terms of understanding, reasoning and the ability to solve problems. We have seen examples, including the incident at IIT Bombay that was discussed, where students were using ChatGPT to obtain answers.The question is how universities can create learning and assessment systems that genuinely evaluate human capabilities in an environment where AI is increasingly capable of doing the work for us.Q. You have built businesses for decades and are now involved in building a university. What has surprised you the most about running an educational institution compared with running a business?Dr Sunder Raju: In my mind, this is the last quarter of my life, and I want to ask myself what I can give back to society.There is enough space in business for growth, and I was among those who helped build and introduce computers when the technology was still emerging. We were constantly pushing the idea of staying ahead.In many ways, I was a technocrat for a long time. I did not fully understand that business requirements could be different from technology requirements. Because I was working with technology and addressing a relatively small ecosystem, I was able to succeed in several areas.For instance, we were among the early players working on specialised training models. Around the time of the Chernobyl disaster, we were in discussions with BARC. Together with ACI, we developed a model to train nuclear power technicians and managers on how to respond to a runaway condition and bring it under control.Today, a lot of that is addressed through equipment and technological safeguards. I believe nuclear energy is as safe as any other form of energy. The risk lies in the possibility of a runaway condition that cannot be controlled. It is a very small probability, and I am not sure that the risks associated with nuclear energy are necessarily greater than those of other major energy sources.Nuclear technology has evolved considerably.Q. You have identified a few sectors that you believe will be critical to India’s growth in the coming years. What are these areas, and why do you see them as important?Dr Sunder Raju: I have identified three or four areas that I believe are critical for the country’s future. Mobility is one, energy services is the second, digital transformation, with AI as a horizontal enabler, is the third, and life sciences is another important area.If you look at what information technology did for India between 1995-96 and 2018-20, I believe biology and life sciences could do something similar over the next 20 years.Q. You have expressed a particularly strong belief in the potential of life sciences. How do you see this sector evolving?Dr Sunder Raju: I am an extremist in my thinking on this. I believe human beings are capable of conquering diseases that shorten our lives. Give it another 15 years, and I believe we could eradicate lifestyle diseases, aggressive diseases and several other conditions that currently challenge humanity.That may sound like an extreme position, but I truly believe it. We have also undertaken sufficient regression analysis internally to understand that this is a model that could work. It may happen through one major breakthrough or through multiple solutions. That is why life sciences is such an important area.Q. Renewable energy is another area you have highlighted. What makes it particularly significant for India’s growth?Dr Sunder Raju: The country cannot grow without expanding its energy capacity. At the same time, we are at a point where climate change has become a major concern. One of the biggest ways human activity contributes to climate change is through energy consumption.We have to move away from fossil fuels and hydrocarbons towards renewable energy. Fortunately, India has significant advantages. The country has more than 200 million hectares of arable land, and sunlight is available across nearly 80% of the country, making solar energy viable in most places.In some locations, the potential may be exceptionally high. But even in areas with relatively lower potential, solar energy remains viable at today’s costs. I believe renewable energy will continue to expand significantly. My companies are already working in the renewable energy space and its applications.Q. AI can also help address the challenge of expanding renewable energy generation without affecting agricultural land and the environment. How do you see this happening?Dr Sunder Raju: AI can help us determine how much agricultural land can be used for energy generation without disturbing agricultural production. India needs to generate 500 gigawatts or more of renewable energy, with solar accounting for the largest share, alongside wind and hydropower.Around 70-80% of this could come from solar energy, which will naturally require land and other resources. But we need to find ways of doing this without disrupting existing ecosystems and agricultural activity.Q. Could you elaborate on the decentralised solar energy model you are exploring in Chittor?Dr Sunder Raju: I am working on an initiative in Chittor where we generate no more than 10 kilowatts of solar energy per acre. Through this approach, we believe we can generate up to one gigawatt of energy in the district without disturbing existing environments.Think about the scale of this opportunity. India has around 800 districts. If we can replicate such models across districts, we should be able to generate substantial amounts of energy without making significant changes to existing land use and environments.
