Given the government’s focus on primary and secondary education over the past few decades, higher education in India has become a “huge unmet need. This has left private institutions to fill the higher education space.
Indeed, unlike the United States and China, India tended to foster more of these smaller institutions. The Brookings Reviving Higher Education report notes that Indian institutions have an average enrollment of about 690 students, while China has an average of 16,000 students per institution, allowing the country to grow faster.
According to AISHE’s 2019-2020 report, a total of 78.6 percent of India’s colleges are private, accounting for about a third of the total college enrollment. However, while much of the growth in enrollment at Indian institutions of higher education has come from the expansion of these private institutions, the quality is uneven. The All India Council for Technical Education has imposed a moratorium on approving new engineering colleges because of a lack of attendance in the country, notes the Times of India . This ties in with another item on the NEP’s list of goals: to ensure a minimum enrollment of 3,000 students and to phase out smaller colleges with smaller enrollments.
Some small, private, pop-up universities, however, are better resourced and have broken out of the model by making significant progress in providing a more resource-rich education to a small number of students, but these institutions remain only a small part of the overall picture.
ะก. S. Lahotia, a distinguished professor at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), wonders whether the availability of larger institutions necessarily improves. “I’m not sure that fewer but larger institutions will be the answer to the gigantic task of providing reasonable quality higher education to a huge population,” he says. I think we need a combination of both in order to effectively meet the different learning and logistical needs of rural and urban populations on the one hand, and the vastly different local needs on the other.”
Structural challenges
The structure of India’s higher education system poses its own challenges, which the NEP seeks to address. At the center of the system are the public universities. Most are affiliated with numerous small, often private colleges, usually less prestigious and of lower quality.
Public universities are overburdened. Their professors are poorly paid and have to work two or three jobs. They can’t devote the time to research, and they lack the technology in classrooms that can be found in China.
One example of an overburdened public institution is BHU, located in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Recognized as an outstanding institution in 2020, the university was founded in 1916 with strong national support, an ambitious vision, and extensive resources. Its 1,300-acre campus houses a residential university as well as three other affiliated colleges: a women’s college, the Institute of Health Sciences, and the Institute of Technology, which was recently spun off as an independent institution. But BHU has faced challenges in recent years.
The diversity of subjects, the huge campus, and the large number of students and faculty have indeed created many administrative and academic challenges.
NEP’s goal in overcoming these challenges is to move away from the affiliation model and create a new system of research universities, teaching universities and colleges. The merger of institutions would create larger, multidisciplinary educational and research institutions and give more autonomy to the best universities.
