What is the issue?
- Poor quality, increasing privatisation and politicisation have been chronic problems that our education system faces.
- There currently seems to be some positive churn, but much remains to be done to usher in significant progress.
What is the current state of affairs?
- Since independence, it has been a challenge to build a quality higher education infrastructure with limited funds.
- While excellence is possible, as the IITs and IIMs show, it is limited to a tiny segment of a system that enrols 35 million students.
- Internationalisation is central to academic success in the 21st century — and India has been notably weak.
- India has shown academic innovations over the years, but on a limited scale and never in the comprehensive universities.
- In recent times, things seem to be changing, at least at the top levels of our higher education eco-system.
What are the new changes?
- NIRF - “National Institutional Ranking Framework”, implemented in 2016, is India’s first government-supported ranking of colleges and universities.
- It demands the participating institutions to submit data on critical areas and also makes a distinction between universities and colleges.
- NIRF may in the future guide government financial support for higher education and also aid in education related policy making.
- IoE project - Institutions of Eminence (IoE) project seeks to identify 10 public and 10 private institutions as IoE, to enable their further development.
- It has been proposed that the identified IoE will be provided enhanced autonomy and financial support (funds only for public institutes).
- Graded Autonomy programme (GAP) - This is an initiative that plans to give participating institutions considerable freedom in certain domains.
- The vision is to promote “Academic, financial and administrative innovations” in these institutions by liberalising them (if they fulfil certain conditions).
- Given the often stifling bureaucracy of higher education, GAP will be a significant stimulus for innovation in both public and private institutions.
How is our system opening up to foreign collaborations?
- Traditionally, colleges and universities have been restricted from international collaboration, which is proving to be an obstacle to excellence.
- People - Emphasis on attracting international students has been poor and only 47,000 foreigners study in India, in comparison to China’s 4 lakhs.
- The new “Study in India initiative” seeks to attract international students mainly from a group of African and Asian countries.
- It seeks to improve India’s share of “global student mobility” from the current 1% to 2% in the near future.
- The Graded Autonomy programme makes it easier to hire international faculty, which was very difficult to do earlier.
- Degree - India is moving towards signing a pact on mutual recognition of academic qualifications with 30 countries.
- Recently, a government-to-government MoU was signed between India and France to mutually recognise academic qualifications.
What are the challenges?
- Upgrading 20 or more Indian universities to world-class quality is big task and will take time and way more consistent funding than currently estimated.
- Further, autonomy will need to be greatly increased, which might be difficult as freedom from bureaucratic shackles of the government is not easy to attain.
- Innovative ideas from within top universities are another vital factor needed for ushering in progress, but there has been little evidence of this till now.
- Ensuring that universities have imaginative leaders within their ranks and deriving ideas from foreign models are other aspects that need attention.
What is the way ahead?
- The national ranking initiative needs to be extended throughout the higher education system and requires simplification for enhancing its ambit.
- The “Study in India initiative” and proposals relating to relationships between Indian and foreign institutions are useful beginnings.
- But more thinking must go into these ideas, and the focus on attracting students needs to be broadened beyond just Asia and Africa.
- Innovation in course design is vital to attract students as students and post-docs from western countries might prefer taking up shorter-duration course.
- Significantly, unlike China, India has the advantage of using English as the main language of higher education, an advantage that needs to be capitalised.
Source: The Hindu
