India’s higher education sector is adrift. Resource inadequacy, quality deficit and policy opacity are ruining our 35,000 undergraduate colleges and 700 universities. Although some of these institutions — especially the universities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras — were established in the 1850s, not even one Indian university (IITs included) has ever been ranked among the Top 200 in the World University Rankings published annually by the highly-respected London-based rating agencies Quacquarelli Symonds and Times Higher Education.

The continuous decline of learning outcomes at all levels — primary, secondary and tertiary — in Indian education is hardly surprising. The annual outlay for education (Centre plus states) has averaged 3.3 percent for the past 67 years as against the Kothari Commission’s recommendation of 6 percent made way back in 1966. Three subsequent commissions — the Birla-Ambani Commission (2000), Knowledge Commission (2009) and the Narayan Murthy Committee (2012) — have endorsed the recommendation of the Kothari Commission and all political parties including the incumbent BJP which swept General Election 2014 in  summer, have routinely promised to increase education expenditure to 6 percent of GDP, all to no avail. On the other hand developed OECD countries are investing 5-7 percent of their GDP in education according to the UNDP’s Human Development Report 2014.

Indeed instead of greater allocations for quality higher education — the prerequisite of India Inc being able to compete in the emerging global economy — the trend seems to be in the opposite direction. After the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (primary education for all) programme was introduced in the new millennium following the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations, while the annual allocation for primary-secondary education has risen to 2.3 percent of GDP, national expenditure for higher education has averaged a static 1 percent of GDP for the past decade. With the Central and state governments reluctant to increase tuition fees which contribute a mere 5 percent of the expenditure of government colleges and universities (against the normative 20 percent), it’s unsurprising that the great majority of the country’s government — especially state government — colleges are in a pathetic condition defined by run-down infrastructure, obsolete curriculums, huge faculty vacancies and lack of research funding.

Inadequate funding for the country’s colleges and particularly universities has not only adversely affected teaching-learning, but more critically research and development and creation of new knowledge suitable for Indian conditions. While developed countries spend an average 3 percent of their significantly higher per capita GDP on R&D, official and private spending on research in India aggregates a mere 0.7 percent of GDP, a crippling infirmity for which the country’s corporate organisations are as much to blame as the governments at the Centre and in the states. Ill-conceived confiscatory taxation policies and the emergence of a self-centred new middle class unmindful of the poverty and misery around them, have prevented the promotion of great philanthropic organisations such as the Rockefeller, Ford, and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations which have contributed significantly to the rise of America’s great universities such as Harvard, MIT, Yale and Princeton which are hubs of R&D and cutting-edge technologies.

Populist over-subsidisation of higher education is compounded by the introduction of opaque policies which are implemented half-heartedly. The major programmes of the Central government for development and expansion of the higher education system are RUSA (Rashtriya Uchartar Shikhya Abhiyan), TEQIP (Technical Education Quality Improvement Programme) and loans and subsidy schemes.

In the 12th Plan (2012-17) RUSA was introduced to create an additional 80 universities by converting college clusters into state universities. But while a token Rs.400 crore — Rs.5 crore per university — was allocated to implement RUSA in 2013-14, no allocation has been made this year. For TEQIP, a programme introduced in 2012 to upgrade the infrastructure of state government engineering and technology colleges, last year’s grudging budget has been increased by a mere 10 percent in the current year to Rs.450 crore. Although the outlay for financial aid through subsidies and scholarships was raised substantially in 2014-15 to Rs.2,336 crore as against Rs.1,426 crore last year, there is little point in sending larger numbers of youth inadequately prepared by the school system into substandard and ill-equipped institutions of higher education.

While there’s no denying that foundational school education is a higher priority for national development, there’s a coterminous need for continuous quality improvement in higher education bearing in mind factors such as skills upgradation, world university rankings, industrial and business competiveness, research, innovation and industry-academia interface. The challenge in higher education is not merely to improve GER to 25 percent as targeted by the 12th Plan, but for India to rise from the current 135th rank to a respectable position in the UNDP’s Human Development Index.

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(Dr. Mona Lisa Bal is chairperson of KiiT International School, Bhubaneswar)