This ‘sick child’ needs more than words

Knowledge is the key variable in defining the global distribution of power in the 21st century, and India’s economic success relies crucially on its high-tech industries. But given the fragile state of India’s higher education system, it is not clear if it will be able to sustain its present growth trajectory. While India’s nearest competitor, China, is re-orienting its higher education sector to meet future challenges, India ignores the problem. It is as if it believes the absence of world-class research in its universities is something that will get rectified on its own. While India may be producing well-trained engineers and managers from its flagship IITs and IIMs, it is not doing so in sufficient numbers. There is also a growing concern that while private engineering and management institutions are flourishing, their products are not of the quality that can help India compete effectively in the global marketplace.

India has the third largest higher education system in the world — next only to US and China — and churns out around 2.5 million graduates every year. Not only is this catering to just about 10 per cent of Indian youth, the quality of the output is also below par. Apart from the IITs, the IIMs, and some other institutions like AIIMS and IISc, we find a higher education sector that is increasingly unwilling and unable to bear the weight of the rising expectations of an emerging India. Indian universities, which should have been at the cutting edge of research and a hub of intellectual activity, are more in the news for political machinations. Years of underinvestment has ensured that neither do the academics have adequate support to provide top-quality education, nor do they have any incentive to undertake cutting-edge research. India desperately needs research-oriented, globally recognised universities.

In his meditation on the state of higher education in the US, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom concludes that “a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis” for a democratic nation. Although the crisis that he was pointing out to arose from a different set of issues facing the US academia in the 1960s and 1970s, the present crisis in Indian universities is equally profound.

This brings us to the larger issue in this debate about the future of higher education. Because of the demands of the market, most students today find engineering, medicine or management to be the most lucrative options. The education system has created an artificial divide between the various streams so that the context in which its engineers, doctors and managers are emerging is not shaped by the liberal ethic of higher education. Social science and humanities are being devalued, and this can have serious social consequences. Democracy requires a questioning citizenry brought up on a liberal education that gives its citizens the ability to interrogate and investigate the claims of authority.

It has been pointed out that privatisation of higher education system is under way in India not because of some comprehensive programme of reform but as a consequence of the collapse of the public sector. This is worrisome and it is hoped that the government realises that just by pumping in more money or by building more universities, it will not be able to address the underlying rot. With the Knowledge Commission calling for a fundamental change in higher education and the HRD minister finally realising that something drastic needs to be done, the stage is hopefully set for a radical overhaul of this sector.

The writer teaches at King’s College London