Proof that Indian bureaucrats live in ivory towers or a make-believe world was provided by Rita Teaotia, secretary of the Union commerce and industry ministry, at the 12th FICCI Higher Education Summit held in Delhi on November 10-12. Addressing the inaugural plenary session of the ‘Learn in India, Learn for the World’ three-day conference and exhibition, Teaotia said the Services Export Promotion Council of the ministry has drawn up a strategy to make Indian higher education attractive for students around the world. 

This grandiose aspiration clearly ignores the ground reality that education standards in India’s 37,000 colleges and 800 universities have been steadily declining. Currently, the top-ranked university in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings is the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, ranked in the 251-300 band with the previously better ranked IIT-Delhi and IIT-Bombay having lost their perches within the Top 200. Unsurprisingly, an estimated 320,000 Indian students flee abroad for higher education paying tuition and lodging fees which are many multiples of what they would pay in India. This swelling exodus of Indian students to foreign institutions of higher learning at a time when tuition and living costs abroad are rising and the rupee is sliding, results in an annual expense of $1.5 billion (Rs.10,200 crore) for aspirational middle class households and the Indian economy. 

And if domestic students are losing faith in India’s increasingly obsolescing colleges and universities, it’s hardly surprising that foreign students are also losing interest in India where substandard teaching and research apart, they have to suffer racial and ethnic discrimination. Little wonder that the number of foreign students in India has declined from 93,693 in 2013 to 66,855 in 2015 (see www.educationworld.in archives June 2016 special report). 
According to informed monitors of Indian education, the root cause of the poor condition of India’s public higher education institutions — indeed all education institutions — is inadequate budgetary provision. Despite the Kothari Commission having strongly recommended providing 6 percent of GDP for public education way back in 1966, annual education outlays (Centre plus states) have averaged a mere 3.5 percent for the past 69 years. Against this, the global national average is 5 percent and developed OECD countries spend 7-10 percent of their GDP on public education. 

Inadequate public expenditure is compounded by excessive and universal subsidisation of higher education. Students’ tuition fees in public institutions of higher education barely cover 4 percent of institutional expenditure against the global average of 20 percent. In addition, higher education in India is obliged to suffer excessive controls, regulation and standardisation imposed by government supervisory organisations. A Foreign Education Institutions Bill, which would have permitted reputable foreign universities to establish campuses in India introduced six years ago, has lapsed and is unlikely to be revived by the incumbent BJP/NDA government in Delhi. 

Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar attributes the low rankings of India’s higher education institutions in the THE and QS World University Rankings to a “perceptions issue”. “We will be addressing this perception issue by reaching out to the Indian diaspora and roping them in to spread word about our higher education institutions,” he said, adding that his ministry is finalising guidelines for establishing 20 world-class universities which would be given all government assistance to become as good as any worldwide. “These universities will be provided generous government funding but will be fully autonomous,” he promises. 

Meanwhile, striking a discordant but realistic note at the summit, a FICCI-EY report titled ‘Future of Jobs and its Implications for Indian Higher Education’ released during the summit, censured higher education regulators for being far behind the innovation curve, with the result that college/university pedagogies are outdated while technology is sub-optimally leveraged. 

These, among a myriad infirmities of higher education insitutions, will have to be addressed and resolved before foreign students flock to India. There aren’t any quick-fix solutions.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)