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February 20, 2007
India gets it
From BusinessWeek - India's Designs on Innovation:
In India, design has never been a part of the business lexicon. Now, New Delhi wants to change that. This month, 40 years after setting up the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in the western state of Gujarat, the Indian government finally ratified a design policy to make the discipline a national priority.
To achieve this, the new policy envisages a "platform for creative design development, design promotion and partnerships across many sectors, states, and regions for integrating design with traditional and technological resources."
Not only has the NID been deemed a university, the government wants to set up four more NIDs and make design a part of the curriculum in engineering and other educational pursuits. Finer details are still scarce, but with education as the key issue, it will bank on public-private partnerships to foster design.
So far, India has only a dozen design programs, compared with 241 in China. There are 300 design colleges in Korea, in contrast to India's 10. While China churns out 30,000 design students annually, India produces just one-third of that number. And while Asia is increasingly becoming the hotbed of design, India is nowhere on the scene.
And where is the US national policy making design a priority for the American economy?
Posted by Ken Jarboe at February 20, 2007 8:30 AM
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