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The author has brought out the maladies in higher education system in India. The author comments that the assessment of ‘quality of research,’ the citations index used and the definition of ‘international outlook’ of staff, students and research has a pro-western bias. It is not therefore surprising that an analysis undertaken by UK’s Times Higher Education would list 75 universities from the US and 32 from Britain in the top 200! The perplexing question is therefore raised as to how BRIC countries are doing much better in spite of not having any world-class universities at the top. The question can also be asked if these lists are made to promote western, especially US and UK, institutions as destinations for bright young Asian students who are increasingly able to pay their way into high-cost western institutions. In spite of this, it is a very sad state of affairs that not a single Indian university finds a place in top 200 universities worldwide.
The quantitative growth of higher education in India, witnessed over the past decade — with more institutions, more seats, more posts and, above all, more funding, has not translated into equal qualitative development.
This despite the fact that India’s equally poorly-run schooling system produces hundreds of thousands of world-class pupils every year and many of them go to the best institutions worldwide and do shine. Clearly, India’s higher education needs a fix. It faces a huge leadership deficit with institutions unable to translate higher outlays into better outcomes. The deficit in leadership begins at the very top. For a prime minister who spent a part of his career as a university teacher and also Chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC), Manmohan Singh has not paid enough attention to improving the quality of leadership in higher education in India. According to the author, the legislation appears to be in place, there appears to be no dearth of funding either public or private, but there is total lack of administrative and political leadership in education. India has been damned by a succession of ideologically oriented or plain bureaucratic leadership in higher education consisting of persons like Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi or Arjun Singh and the present incumbent Kapil Sibal is not steady in the ministry to make any mark. The author therefore states that India desperately needs better academic, administrative and political leadership in higher education.
