Against the backdrop of a gradual sea change in higher education, privately promoted universities are set to dominate the higher education segment, lamentations of left intellectuals notwithstanding.

Private institutions of higher education are the abused step children of the Indian State and society. In the lexicon of the “socialistic pattern of society” which Jawaharlal Nehru and his heirs within the Congress party imposed upon the newly-independent country despite its  five-millennia tradition of free trade and markets, “commercialisation of education”  became one of the seven deadly sins uncritically accepted as such by the Supreme Court and society. Although in the new millennium the learned judges of the apex court have shown signs of awareness that with the number of youth aspiring for high-quality post-secondary education rising exponentially, the promotion of commercially viable private colleges and universities has become necessary, within academia and society there’s still a bad odour about private institutions of higher education.

Yet the plain truth is that without the great pioneers in private higher education and their stoic determination to establish professional education institutions, especially engineering and medical colleges, India’s globally-acknowledged information communication technology (ICT) services industry which contributes $105 billion (Rs.668,219 crore) per year to the Indian economy, would have been a non-starter. The country’s doctor-pupil ratio (1:2,000) would be even worse.

However, instead of society’s gratitude, the country’s pioneer edupreneurs had to endure continuous calumny and suffer expropriation by the State of up to 80 percent of capacity. Indeed, right up to the dawn of the 21st century, even after Indian industry was freed from the worst constraints of neta-babu socialism, the Supreme Court — packed with committed judges by Indira Gandhi and successive Congress governments — continued to legitimise expropriation of huge capacity in private colleges by state governments. In 1993 in Unnikrishnan vs. State of Andhra Pradesh, a full bench of the apex court legitimised a complex matrix of government quota, merit and management seats in private professional colleges under which only 20 percent of admissions could be made at the discretion of promoter-managements.

With the combined investment of the Central and state governments in education averaging a mere 3.25 percent of GDP for the past 68 years since independence as against 5 percent globally, and the developed OECD countries allocating 7-10 percent of their GDP towards education, the nation owes a debt of gratitude to edupreneurs such as the late Dr. TMA Pai (1898-1979) who established the Manipal Education Group; Dr. S.B. Mujumdar (Symbiosis Group); P.S. Govindaswamy Naidu (PSG Group)  and Dr. KVV Satyanarayan Raju (Chaitanya Group) among others. Despite every official discouragement, with dogged determination they promoted and developed  globally-benchmarked institutes of professional education which have trained and certified millions of engineers, medical practitioners, nurses, pharmacists and media, communication and animation among other professionals, without whom the Indian economy would be even more backward than it is currently. 

Providentially, following the Narasimha Rao-led Congress government’s economic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of 1991-92 which immediately lifted the Indian economy out of its 3.5 percent per annum Hindu rate of GDP growth orbit, the attitude of their lordships of the Supreme Court towards private initiatives in professional education began to thaw in the new millennium. In October 2002 in a historic, landmark judgement delivered in TMA Pai Foundation vs Union of India, in a rare mea culpa, a 11-strong bench of the apex court pointedly overruled its own judgement in Unnikrishnan’s Case, and held that promotion and administration of education institutions is a fundamental right of all citizens under Article 19 (1) (g) of the Constitution.

Although because it was bound by precedent, the court stopped short of legitimising education provision as a ‘business’, it classified it as a legitimate ‘occupation’ under Article 19 (1) (g). Specifically, the court conferred the rights of devising their own admission processes (subject to merit) and determining their own reasonable tuition fees (dependent upon investment in infrastructure and faculty) upon private professional education colleges. Although the full impact of the judgement was diluted by a five-judge bench of the apex court in the Islamic Academy Case (2003), which decreed establishment of committees headed by retired high court judges in all states to supervise whether the admission systems of private colleges are fair and merit-based, and tuition fees levied are reasonable, the ratio decidendi of the landmark TMA Pai judgement was upheld by the Supreme Court in Inamdar vs. State of Maharashtra (2005).

Unfortunately, the five-judge bench’s judgement and the establishment of retired judges committees to supervise admissions and fees, provided state governments opportunity to bully and browbeat private professional colleges/universities to ‘negotiate’ quotas for merit students topping state governments’ CET (common entrance tests) at highly subsidised tuition fees and also to stipulate the fees they should levy on all other — except management quota — students. In effect most state governments, especially in southern India, have substantially diluted the impact of the TMA Pai and Inamdar judgements, thereby slowing down capacity expansion in high quality professional, especially medical education.    

However, with teaching-learning standards and learning outcomes in government — especially state government — sponsored higher education institutions continuously declining,  business and industry protests about the poor quality of graduates streaming out of India’s colleges and universities growing louder, and graduate unemployment starting to pose serious law and order problems, state governments have begun liberally permitting the promotion of private universities. Under the Constitution, education is in the concurrent list with both the Centre and states permitted to enact legislation relating to it.

Thus in the new millennium and during the past decade in particular, several new genre universities licensed through special state legislation have mushroomed countrywide. Among them: Amity University (Noida, Uttar Pradesh), Azim Premji University (Bengaluru, Karnataka), Ashoka  University (Sonipat, Haryana), OP Jindal Global University (Sonipat), BML Munjal University (Gurgaon, Haryana), Shiv Nadar University (G.B. Nagar, Uttar Pradesh), Symbiosis International University (Pune, Maharashtra), NIIT University (Neemrana, Rajasthan) and Shoolini University (Bajol, Himachal Pradesh). Moreover, for their excellent infrastructure and high teaching-learning standards, several privately promoted colleges have been conferred ‘deemed university’ status by the Union government on the advice of the University Grants Commission (estb. 1956) which has supervisory jurisdiction  over all non-technical universities countrywide. 

Against this backdrop of an imminent even if gradual, sea change in higher education with privately-promoted universities — who it is worth noting, levy the lowest tuition fees among private varsities worldwide — set to dominate this segment despite the lamentations of self-styled socialists who prefer to burden the poor with the cost of educating post-independence India’s greedy and uncaring middle class — the managements of hitherto pilloried privately-funded universities are relieved to receive overdue public appreciation and approbation.

“I am very comfortable that the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, has been ranked #6 all-India and the country’s #1 private university. BITS is a carefully nurtured institution which is steadily moving forward to increase aggregate enrolment from the current 12,000 to 18,000 students across our four campuses — in Pilani, Hyderabad, Goa and Dubai — and develop into a multi-disciplinary university offering economics, finance, social sciences and development studies programmes. And since we are wholly residential, we have to plan our growth and development carefully,” says Dr. BN Jain, an alumnus of IIT-Kanpur and the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who served a long stint (1975-2010) on the faculty of IIT-Delhi where he rose to become deputy director, before being appointed vice chancellor of BITS University in 2010.

Although he is satisfied with the steady rise of BITS in the national university league tables, Jain acknowledges that the varsity has to build its research and development capabilities to be ranked among the world’s best. “We are continuously increasing our efforts and investment in research and creating a research-conducive culture on all our campuses. But for the growth of research and innovation in academia, Indian industry also needs to develop a research mindset and invest in long-term and sustained funding of research projects. Moreover, greater research activity must go hand-in hand with teaching excellence so that faculty and students work together to develop new knowledge and innovations which are beneficial for industry, the economy and society. This is the development agenda of BITS University,” says Jain.

News that the 5,689 informed sample respondents of the EW India University Rankings 2015 have ranked the low-profile Manipal University (estb. 1953), based in the eponymous township (pop. 34,000) in Karnataka #15 all-India and #3 among private universities countrywide, has also been well received.

“This is very encouraging and will spur our efforts to improve our performance under all parameters of academic excellence included in your survey. I quite agree that in the newly emergent globalised world, Indian universities, including Manipal, have to be well-ranked in international as well as national surveys. International rankings accord heavy weightage to academic research which is a low priority in Indian universities. But for research activity to increase, Indian industry also has to become involved and commission research projects in a bigger way. We cannot burden students with high tuition fees beyond a point to fund research initiatives,” says Dr. Ramdas Pai, chancellor of Manipal University. An alumnus of Temple University, Dr. Pai took over the reins of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education after the death of the legendary Dr. TMA Pai in 1979, and has since nurtured its growth into one of India’s routinely top-ranked not-for-profit universities.

Simultaneously the Bangalore-based Manipal Global Education Services (MaGE), engineered and managed by his son Dr. Ranjan Pai, has matured into India’s #1 higher education multinational. It has established and manages for-profit professional education colleges in Dubai, Malaysia and the West Indies.

Quite clearly, India’s higher education system is experiencing an overdue makeover. Given that not a single one of the country’s 693 universities is ranked among the Top 200 in the World University Rankings league tables, government management of colleges/universities has been a disaster. According to a devastating McKinsey World Institute-NASSCOM study of 2005, 85 percent of the country’s arts, commerce and science graduates, and 75 percent of engineers are unemployable in multinational companies. Likewise a more recent (2013) study by Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based recruitment firm concludes that 47 percent of graduates from the country’s 35,000 colleges are “not employable in any sector, given their insufficient English language and cognitive skills”. 

Crippled by excessive government controls, deficient funding, social justice imperatives, and myriad administrative scams, government colleges and universities have lost the plot and cannot produce the high quality human resources the Indian economy needs to attain the high annual rates of economic growth required to absorb the massive flow of rural hopefuls into industry. Although the new genre private universities have the potential to make good this national deficiency, it’s touch and go whether the unholy combination of populist politicians and status quo left intellectuals who dominate the academy and public discourse, will permit them to flower,  flourish and rise to respectable positions in league tables of international rating and ranking agencies.

To read India’s Top Private Universities league table visit: http://www.educationworld.in/rank-private_university/2015.html