2.4: Higher Education in India

Hi everyone. I’m Alex Usher and this is The World of Higher Education podcast.

It’s something of a cliché to think of India as a “sleeping giant” when it comes to higher education. But in some ways the term fits. India is capable of truly impressive feats of applied science and Engineering – last month’s Chandrayaan-3 moon landing, put together by the Indian Space Research Organization on an absolute pittance is perhaps the example that comes to mind most readily. But when it comes to universities, India has not made much of an impact. No Indian university cracks the world’s top 300 in the Shanghai Rankings, and the country’s total research output – while improving – lags well below that of neighboring China.

One of the reasons for this is that India strove to expand access before turning its attention to research excellence and the way it did so was to create some longer-term problems. Unlike pretty much any other country in the world, India did not primarily massify by creating larger and larger universities. Instead, it did so by allowing the creation of tens of thousands of small colleges dotted around the country which were affiliated to bigger universities – indeed, from 2006 to 2018, an average of six of these colleges were created every single day. Good for access, but providing no basis for the development of research.
Discussing all of this with me today is Dr. Pushkar – just one name – the Director and Chief Executive of the International Centre Goa, and a frequent commentator on higher education in India. We cover how the Modi government is attempting to raise standards through the creation of a National Research Foundation, a system of “Institutions of Eminence” and by inviting foreign universities to set up campuses on the country. Pushkar is a skeptic with respect to the efficacy of such measures – or at least skeptical that things will unfold in the way described by government in it its National Education Policy. And he’s definitely not optimistic about the state of public higher education institutions. But he points out that there is a burgeoning and promising private sector in Indian higher education, and that a number of private institutions are on the cusp of big things and that this is the sector to watch over the coming decade.
But enough from me: let’s hear from Pushkar.

Alex Usher (AU): Pushkar, before we get to recent events, I want to make sure listeners are up on two very unique aspects of India's higher education system. Let's start with the Indian Institutes of Technology. Everyone knows they're very elite institutions. They're sort of equivalent to the American Ivy League or the Chinese C9 league, but the difference is they're not exactly research powerhouses in the same way. Could you tell us a little bit about these institutions? what they do? why the struggle to get into them is so fierce? Also, to what extent are they representative of the broader Indian higher education system?

Dr. Pushkar: With the IITs you have to differentiate between the older IIT's which came up in the late late fifties onwards up to the 1960s and 1970s. Now, at that time and at least up to quite recently, the IITs were focused primarily on undergraduate teaching. When you talk about the competition to get into the IITs, it's because of India's large population and getting into an IIT is something aspirational and getting an engineering degree is something aspirational. In a society like India, which was up to the 1970s and 1980s considered a typically poor country, the IITs offered a pathway for someone to do well at a personal level. At the institutional level, the IITs were apart because they were completely distinctive. They're not just funded by the central government, but in terms of the quality of education, in terms of governance, which is again very important, the IITs set themselves apart from typically other institutions which are funded by the government. Now the part about research, I mean, in a sense, if I look at the history of the IITs it's somewhat disappointing. But it is understandable too, because when you look at the context, 1960s-1970s, the early decades of India's independence, the goal was to teach and produce X number of engineers for India's technological scientific advancement. Some of the faculty were into research, most were not, but they did a good job of producing high quality students. Now these students went abroad and some stayed within India, but they have overall done very well for themselves. So, to that end, they serve their purpose. But beyond that, it is only from around the 1990s onwards, in fact, maybe even 2000s, that things like World University Rankings come into play. Once people start to say “look, what about the IITs? How have they contributed to India's scientific technological process?” Even today, for example, you have India's Moon mission. Now people are saying “how many IIT graduates were part of that as compared to graduates from your regular engineering colleges?” So, the way to think about it is that, the IITs have done well for themselves. They have contributed to job creation, wealth creation, and all those things. But as far as India's science and technology sector is concerned, they haven't done their bit. But over the last 10-15 years, the IITs themselves have started to change. They are becoming more research-oriented, and we'll see them produce better results in the years to come.

AU: Now the second unique facet of the Indian system are its colleges. There are something like 30,000-40,000 of these. It's hard to keep track. I once calculated that between 2006 and 2018, there was one opening every four hours for 13 years. That's a lot of new institutions. And they have very small enrollments, usually measured in the hundreds. They aren't independent institutions, but they're required to have a teaching affiliation to a major university. This is pretty unique. My question is why have this? why has this type of institution played such a major role in the expansion of higher education in India?

Dr. Pushkar: Once you get outside of the elite institutions, you're looking at mass education, right? So, educating the masses. India's gross enrollment ratio today, or the percentage of population 18 to 24 attending college, is around 30%, or just under. Now go back to the 1960s, 1970s, and onwards, it's about making sure that every Indian who wants to go to college is able to go to college. So, colleges open at a very rapid pace. Now, at some point the government realizes it can't put in enough money to build more new colleges, engineering colleges, or business schools and such. So, it allows the private sector, and there’s a difference between some states and others.

Second. The other thing is that the high number is not just because of the population, but a very large number of these colleges are colleges which offer two or three degrees. So, a Bachelor's in education is something, which is popular among parents as something that their daughter especially must complete before she gets married. So, a bachelor's in education degree is very common, or a bachelor's in home economics, or home science. So many of these colleges are admit a very small number of students. Let the numbers not fool anyone. When you talk about the NEP now saying that “look, we want to make sure that these small colleges no longer exist, that they'll be part of larger comprehensive institutions”, that might work fine in India's densely populated areas. But, think of remote areas in India's northeast or, the desert state of Rajasthan, or parts of the Himalayan region. You need to have smaller colleges because the population is pretty scattered. So, if you want to make education accessible, you also need these smaller colleges, but that's not a reason why you have large number of colleges. That's because 1) the government could not meet the demand for education, 2) that more and more Indians started to want to attend college, 3) again, given India's geography there are some areas where you need to have small colleges so that people have greater access to education.

AU: You referenced the idea that the government may want to phase out these colleges and move to larger multidisciplinary universities. That's an idea that, as far as I know, popped up in the 2020 National Education Plan. It was a commitment to phase these out by 2035. So, two questions here. One, why did small colleges fall out of favour and what's the argument in favor of these bigger institutions when, as you say, it doesn't necessarily work in every geographic region? And second, is 2035 a realistic deadline that's not that long to build a lot of new institutions?

Dr. Pushkar: Yeah, see it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen in the way that it is laid out in the National Education Policy. So, even in a small state like Goa, it's a bit like Chile. You have a north and south, it's about two to three hours apart. Now let's say you have a college in the remote south, right? So, students there, of course, have the option to attend a college in neighboring states. But, Goa as a state says “look we need to have some of these colleges because they're providing access to education for people in the south of Goa.” Now extend this argument to other states. That's one reason. So, the logistics of it: do you want to shut down colleges because they cater to a smaller number of people? They're not sustainable in the financial terms or otherwise, but they may still remain open for that reason. The second reason you have to understand is that sometime from the late 1970s-1980s politicians, political leaders, or anybody with some money to spare, got into the business of starting a college. Right? The joke is that if you're a politician, you must start a college, you must run a college and then that college becomes part of some university and its affiliated to a university. And eventually the government basically absorbs that college and salaries are paid by the government.

But looking at just the specific case of whether it'll be possible to build large, comprehensive institutions: I went to McGill, right? You had undergraduate and postgraduate education in the same institution. That has not been the case in India. You have colleges which are separate from postgraduate departments. So, faculty at postgraduate departments don't teach at a college. They are educated to masters and PhD students. Now, what the government wants to do is build North American style comprehensive universities. In some cases, it will happen or it may happen, but I'm not sure how it'll play out because the NEP is being interpreted in different ways by different states. They're saying “look, you can't impose specific set of policies on us. It's simply not feasible” and of course, political leaders have their own interests and, keeping these colleges independent and not part of the universities I mean, they're all affiliated to a university, but so that they do not merge or close down and all those things.

AU: You mentioned a second ago that a lot of the colleges that opened in that big boom of demand in the last 15 years, they are private. I'm kind of interested in the private sector in India because a lot of it seems to be that traditional demand-absorbing, small, low-quality private institution. But you also have some pretty high-quality institutions as well. Institutions that are starting to show up as competing with government institutions, for instance, in the Institutes of Eminence program. So, thinking of places like O. P. Jindal, Shiv Nadar, what can you tell us about private universities in India generally? Are they a boon? Are they a bane? or is it a bit of both?

Dr. Pushkar: I think you have to first look at the rise of private universities. The first one was born in the late sixties. Then private engineering colleges came up from the 1970s onwards. Now, these were typically focused on engineering and what they call professional fields, so business schools, management schools, et cetera things like bachelors of education and other disciplines. The engineering boom in India, really, I mean, 1980s-1990s is the time that the private engineering colleges really open up. So, a university like Manipal University, if you did not get into an IIT, you went to Manal University and over a period of time, Manipal University became good and a credible institution because lots of good students were going there. Not everybody could get into an IIT. So even regional engineering colleges and half decent private universities started to attract good students. Over time, there was pressure, or the private universities felt compelled to, improve the quality of education, hire better teachers and so on. So, it became a virtuous cycle, sort of, good students going in over a period of time then the university itself tries to become better in, in some cases.

There's still not too many of them, which can be considered good institutions the way I would like to understand them. But these are second phase private universities. This started with the creation of the Indian School of Business in 1996 and that was just a business school. But after that, slowly there was a movement towards and some people working towards creating what has now become Ashoka University. Then slowly it was another one and another one. So, these are second wave or second-generation private universities, which have very little in common with the first-generation ones, right? I mean, with the exception of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, and to some extent Manipal, these are completely modeled on American institutions in terms of how they're organized, so there are no separate spaces for undergraduate or postgraduate teaching. It's in one place. It's all happening in one place. Now—

AU: in that sense, they're ahead of the public system to some extent, right?

Dr. Pushkar: Absolutely. Because they have the flexibility. Their decision making can be faster. They're less bureaucratic. They suffer from all kinds of different constraints, but by and large, they have they're more agile, so to say. So, private universities have stepped into the gap.

AU: I want to move us over from, kind of access policy and how do how do you meet the needs of 30 million Indian students to excellence policy. There's two areas, it seems to me where the government has focused its efforts. The first is the Institutes of Eminence project, which I think dates back to around 2017-2018. It's similar to other international excellence programs like we see in Germany, or Japan or France. The second thing is the creation of a new national research foundation. So that's a new institute to support investigator driven research. How are these initiatives going and what do you think the practical impact of them will be over say the next five years?

Dr. Pushkar: First institutions of eminence. It's going to be a dud. It's a dud. Let me put it this way: what the government did was they said: we'll select 10 private universities, 10 public universities, and we'll give them all the support possible. Except that there also made it clear that there would not be any financial support for private universities, right? So, it's just the public. Now what can go on about which private university should have been part of it? Ashoka is not, for example. So, all that the private universities gain from that IOE status, is status and things saying institution of eminence, but nothing else.
Of the public universities that were selected, two of them happened to be state universities under the control of state governments. There's already some controversy about it, like at Jadavpur University in West Bengal, and I think it was wrong for the central government to say that the state government must also contribute to the finances of the Institution of Eminence. I recall that was never stated in the original document that if it is a state university, half of the total investment will come from the state government. So that is one thing.

The other thing is that some institutions, notably IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi, they have received large grants from the central government as part of the Institutions of Eminence scheme, right? So, thousand crore rupees, that is what was promised to them. So, they have expanded and they have benefited from it. But if you look at 20 odd institutions where 10 are public, 10 private, and you say, “well, what is happening to the Institutions of Eminence?” I'll say: Ashoka, whether or not it is part of that group, it doesn't matter, or a bunch of other private universities, I would say it doesn't matter to them one bit because there was nothing coming from the central government financially.

AU: What about the National Research Foundation? That's a newer initiative. How's that going to play out?

Dr. Pushkar: I hadn't read up on it until the THE people said “what do you think?” So, I said: look, it's a science foundation, people from the humanities and social sciences are feeling left out. But it's a good initiative in the sense that there's a single window. Within the foundation it's going to be a large one and you'll have different departments and I don't think there's a problem of access. What worries me is that the government's expectation is that a large sum of money for the National Research Foundation will come from private sources. As an individual, if I was a very rich person and I had to give $10 million, I might think, “okay, I might give it to IIT Bombay” and IIT Bombay has been receiving a lot of money, but I'll do it directly. Why should I give it to the National Research Foundation? I don't know to what end will it be used. Will it be used for research that I have no interest in which my company, for example, has zero benefits from. Whereas I give it to IIT Delhi and I can tell them “I'll give you $10 million, or a hundred crore rupees, and why don't you open this center and do this kind of research, which will be of benefit to us or and a benefit of benefit to India”, right? So, the National Research Foundation is a good idea. We have to wait and see for another 5-10 years to see what comes out of it. I'm not very optimistic. But then, in India, optimism or pessimism means nothing. Things happen slowly.

AU: A lot of the attention that Indian higher education gets in the international press is precisely that. It's about international or more specifically the ability of foreign institutions to set up shop in India. And finally, this year, there was a law passed allowing foreign universities to set up campuses in India. What kind of practical effect will this have, do you think? Which Indian students will want to go to these kinds of institutions and how big are these institutions likely to get?

Dr. Pushkar: I just said that the institutions of Eminence initiative are not amounting to much and I feel the same way about the foreign universities. A select number of institutions might set up shop. None of them are going to be interested in offering courses in humanities and the social sciences. It's always going to be a risk. I have written in the past that for foreign universities to set up shop in India, it's a huge risk. Things change with the government, things change with what happens at the center, things change with what happens at the level of provinces and states, right? But as far as offering technical education is concerned, not a bad idea, but these will remain I think relatively small institutions offering a small number of specialized courses. I do not see them becoming large, comprehensive institutions of the kind that that are discussed in NEP, the new education policy, right? So these will be set up in, for example, the state of Gujarat. Some might come up in other places. I believe there are two Australian universities, which have submitted their proposals and those have been accepted. But whether there'll be a big part of the higher education landscape? I don't think so. They will be popular among some students, see the reason why Indians go abroad is 1) of course, in search of a better-quality education. 2) Indians are becoming more prosperous. The larger numbers of Indians are more prosperous, so, they're sending their kids out. But the other part for which these campuses will be completely useless is you go abroad to study and then you immigrate. Now these campuses are useless for that purpose. So, if you think of somebody who has money, they'll send them to the East Coast. Right? Or they'll send them to Oxford or LSE or wherever, or they'll send them to France or Germany or Australia, wherever. If you have a little less money, then you say well, my kid is not old enough to be living independently and abroad, I'll send them to Ashoka or I'll send them to some other place. Do I want my kid to study at Australian campus in Gujurat? Maybe not. I'll, if I'm smart, I'll look at the faculty teaching at India's best engineering colleges compared to whichever Australian University or British University if one comes and I'll make those choices. If I'm not informed and I say, well, I need my kid to get a foreign university label, fine.

AU: So interestingly, you think that their competitors are actually the good Indian private universities?

Dr. Pushkar: Yes. At the private universities level, they are hypercompetitive for students. I mean, I have another story to tell, but that's for another time.

AU: Another time. Over the past couple weeks, one of the biggest stories coming out of India has been with respect to academic freedom. There's been a case at Ashoka University, which you've referenced a couple times, where our political science professor was internally sanctioned by the university over an article that he'd written about the possibility of election fraud by the ruling BJP in the 2019 general election. Eventually that scholar left the institution. It's interesting because that's not a public institution, that's a private institution, where you'd think that the pressure might be a little less. So how strong are India's protections for academic freedom generally? and how big a problem might this be with respect to the continued rise of academia in India?

Dr. Pushkar: The professor in question is an economist. These days economists do a lot of political science kind of research. But see that's the point I was making earlier: something like academic freedom or intellectual freedom, it's something which can be re-defined and defined by different parties, different groups. For academics, it might be something more absolute and for others academic freedom doesn't mean you can do any kind of research. The point is in the Indian context, that's where the institutions of Eminence initiative - and I said that, the objective was to give more autonomy to private universities - even at that time, I was thinking while reading the document “okay, but what will that mean if somebody writes something controversial? Will the government not get involved? Or will some group not take it up on social media and make it a big issue?” Even in this case, the government has not been involved directly in the Ashoka University case. So, what you have is that based on what's happened in the past few years, based on not just the past 10 years, but also maybe the past 20 and 30 years, these are things which people have in their memories. So, when you think what should I do? What should I not do? Most people I think are already self-censoring themselves to some extent. Why do I want to get into trouble? Why do I want to say something which will attract unnecessary attention?

So, academic freedom is curtailed or limited by the threat of the possibility of catching the government's eye, you don't want to do that. Other people don't mind. So, there are people who will constantly challenge what academic freedom should mean and say that, look, this is really important. A couple of days ago, a scholar published something saying that academic freedom is absolutely essential for a university's growth, and for India to excel and India's higher education sector to excel and India's Universities to excel. For critics, that have had to take issue with that statement, I would say look at China, look at National University of Singapore, look at all these East Asian countries. We are not talking about suppressing intellectual or academic freedom, we are simply talking about suppressing descent. You can critique or you can write critical papers on the United States, on the British, on the Canadians, and everything and that's fine, as long as you don't critique your own country in a way that upsets the government. You can produce, you can have good scientific and technological progress taking place in your universities whether it is at Tsinghua or Beijing or, elsewhere. Some limits to academic freedom in the social sciences, humanities in India, in archeology, and history in particular. I think there's something there, which has to be thought about a great deal more about the importance of academic freedom to and to the growth and development of the higher education sector. The other thing that came to my mind is just because you have liberal education or liberal arts education in the United States or the West and these universities & colleges are known around the world, the question that Indians should also be asking themselves or critiques or critics should be asking is did these liberal institutions over a period of time produce liberal citizens? Now you see what's happening in the United States. You see what may happen in X number of European countries. Now, did that kind of liberal education make liberal citizens? They did not. They have not. So, things change based on the state of the economy. Things change on the kind of leaders you have. Things change on age composition of the population, values, et cetera. So, if you had to take a hard look at India and I, I'm not comfortable making this argument, but the fact is that academic freedom is something which is going to never be fixed. It'll always be constantly challenged by the government, by academics themselves.

AU: When you think about higher education in India in say 2035 what are the elements of the current scene that give you the most hope for the future? What are the things that are going on now that are going to be the most impactful 12 or 13 years from now?

Dr. Pushkar: Easily, one of the big things that has happened is the emergence of a credible private sector. When you look at the 1980s when I was in my teens or 1990s when I was in college, you could really count two or three half decent private universities. Now if you look around, the numbers have gone up and I think many more will come up in the coming years. For example, the owners of BITS Pilani, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, they have opened a business school. So, these are all smaller initiatives, which is why I said the number of elite institutions will remain small, that are very high quality. So, the kind of role that the private sector is playing is different than in the past. Whereas in the past it was focused on engineering and management and now all this will start to be more visible in the next 10 years or so. So, the contribution of the private sector is going to a bigger contribution.
The problem is that, as I said earlier, that the public system, the public sector is in shambles. It really is in shambles. As someone said, people have been talking about this deep crisis in higher education, that the higher education sector is broken, and that it is about to destruct itself, and all those things. I'm afraid all those things are more or less true. So, when we look at the mass education, the institutions that provide mass education, they're in really bad shape. And of course, there is variation. You have state universities in Delhi or colleges, which are pretty good and in Goa, they're not bad. But you go to the most popular states in India, in Uttar Pradesh or in Bihar, there's a lot of variation in terms of quality and what state governments do or do not do. But by and large, these institutions are in really bad shape and I do not see that changing. I do not see them coming out of the mess that they're in.

AU: Pushkar, it has been great to chat with you today. I hope we can have you on again soon. Thanks for being with us.

Dr. Pushkar: Thank you, Alex, for having me.

AU: It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Sam Pufek, and you the listener for tuning in. If you have any comments or suggestions for future podcasts, please get in touch with us at podcast@higheredstrategy.com.

Join us next week when our guest will be Marcelo Nobel, former President of both the University of Campinas and the INSPIR Institute of Learning and Research in Brazil. We'll be talking about what's going on in Brazil post Bolsonaro. See you then.