Pune, Apr 23: The education sector is taking baby steps to tap the fabled China opportunities. A reciprocal interest is shown as well by the Chinese, who are keen to go beyond business and learn how India manages its education.

Foundation for Liberal and Management Education (Flame) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Jiangsu University recently, while another MOU is on its way with Soochow University.

A delegation from Soochow University, comprising Tam Yukun, director and Zhang Xue Guang, president and Miao Jing Cheng, dean, visited Flame’s campus in Pune and agreed to sign an MOU.

Flame is a not-for-profit institution founded by Nemish Shah of Enam Financial Consultants and Parag Shah. It runs thee schools, School of Liberal Education that offers undergraduate programmes, School of Business--for post-graduate programmes--and School of Communication, which offers both graduate and post-graduate studies.

Dr Indira Parikh, president of Flame, who has been visiting universities in China, signed the MOU in Zhenjiang. Jiangsu University is more than 100-years-old. She has also been to the Donghua University and is hopeful of striking more tie-ups.

The Jiangsu agreement will see an exchange of students, faculty, academics and cultural programmes with Chinese teams spending time at Pune and Flame students going to Jiangsu University. The academic exchange will see the Chinese sending faculty to India to teach Mandarin. “Eventually we will work out a plan for Chinese SME owners who could come here and offer similar exposure to the Indian SMEs,” Parikh said.

“There is scope for doing collaborative research. They are interested in understanding our management practices, how the industry has succeeded here, family-owned businesses and documentation of all these which is missing in China,” Parikh said.

Dr YSP Thorat, dean, international affairs, said with India occupying the contextual space, it is to the advantage of foreign universities to collaborate with Flame. “We are not doing this to provide a global and cross-cultural perspective,” Thorat said.