Speaking at Patna University on October 14, prime minister Narendra Modi is reported as having voiced his dismay about none of India’s universities being ranked among the world’s Top 500. Actually, the PM was only voicing two views on the state of our higher education sector that are quite widely held in the country. The first is a kind of despair at the poor standing of Indian universities relative to the global norms reflected in world university rankings. The other is the belief that the poor condition of our universities is entirely due to political interference and that standards will improve once they are released from the stranglehold of the government. In this brief essay I would only be able to address the former.

On the matter of Indian universities’ low ranking, not every parameter of evaluation in today’s leading rating exercises — notably the QS (Quacquarelli-Symonds) and The Times Higher Education World University Rankings — needs be treated as self-evident or accorded equal treatment. For instance, while it is desirable that India’s universities should host a significant number of international students, this by itself is not of paramount importance. Equally when we come to ‘industry-academic partnership’. This feature has received a great deal of attention in the 21st century when universities have come to be seen as adjuncts to the economy and their output is adjudged in terms of what it can command in the marketplace. Again, this criterion cannot be treated as all important. On the other hand, what we should be worried about is how our universities fare in terms of two parameters which are usually adopted in global rating exercises. The first is the contribution made to knowledge creation and, second, public perception of the quality of higher education institutions of a country.

The contribution to knowledge creation made by a university is adjudged in terms of the number of publications of its faculty in globally recognised peer-reviewed journals. Even though economic globalisation may be in retreat first after Brexit and then the ascent of Donald Trump, the criterion that ideas must stand scrutiny in the global arena has come to stay. Indian universities can no longer claim that they cater to a local constituency and therefore are not bound by global standards. It’s also noteworthy that India’s oldest universities are of over 150 years vintage, but are ranked much lower than many in Asia that are relatively more recent. 

This takes us to the second point I have flagged — public perception. Our institutions of higher education are confronted with a crisis of credibility, with young Indians wary of their credentials. With the cost of information having plummeted, the global standard in terms of the dissemination of knowledge — effected through teaching — leave alone the production of knowledge in terms of research and publication, is easily understood. There is substantial demand among India’s youth for Massive Open Online Courses (Moocs) offered by leading academics in the United States. Also, what was westward migration by Indians for postgraduate programmes is now down to the undergraduate level. As a British university administrator stated some decades ago, when the citizens of a country buy foreign-made cars it need not be a cause for concern, but when they no longer value the education provided by their own universities, it should be seen as a matter for alarm. There is no denying the reality that we are today facing a situation of this kind in India.          

So what needs to be done? It must be stated upfront that though the decline of the higher education sector in India was flagged almost 50 years ago, notably by Dr. Amartya Sen in a series of public lectures titled ‘The Crisis in Indian Education’, the neglect has become especially noticeable in the current decade. This is partly reflected in the fact that we no longer have experienced ministers of education at the Centre, a portfolio once held by visionaries of stature of M.C. Chagla and V.K.R.V. Rao. High quality institutional leadership is vital if we are to bring about a change in the higher education scenario of India. Lacklustre leadership at the ministerial level has translated into low quality heads of once-proud public educational institutions of India. 

At this juncture the imperative is to review the role of the regulator. We have every reason to believe that the UGC’s Academic Performance Indicator, introduced about five years ago, has had disastrous consequences. In the cause of transparency it has not just introduced an additional layer of bureaucracy into the system, it has contributed to publications of very poor quality being described as ‘research’. Concurrently, teaching may have been given the go by leaving poorly-schooled entrants into universities without any guidance about negotiating the thicket of ideas.

The immediate focus should be how to free university teachers from the current research evaluation scheme by which they are governed while simultaneously introducing the practice of student evaluation of courses including their delivery. The latter would put an immediate end not just to truancy of the faculty but lead to improved learning outcomes. And we need to stop the uncontrolled expansion of the higher education sector while it is yet plagued by poor quality in existing institutions. At last count, we had 17 IITs and 20 IIMs. 
 

(Dr. Pulapre Balakrishnan is professor of economics at Ashoka University, Sonipat and senior fellow of IIM, Kozhikode)