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The Fearless Nadia
Occasional Papers
on India-Australia
Relations
The Fearless Nadia Occasional
papers are original essays
commissioned by the Australia India
Institute focusing on various aspects
of the relationship between India and
Australia. Fearless Nadia (19081996) was an Australian actress
born Mary Ann Evans in Perth,
Western Australia, who began her
career working in the Zarko circus
and eventually became a celebrated
star of Hindi films in India. Fearless
Nadia brought a new joie de vivre and
chutzpah into Indian cinema with her
breathtaking ‘stunts’. Her role in the
renowned film Hunterwali, where she
appeared dressed in boots and wielding
a whip, became an iconic image in
1930s Bombay. The Occasional
Papers series seeks to inject a similar
audacity and creative dialogue into
the relationship between India and
Australia.
Challenges
Facing Indian
Higher
Education
Fazal Rizvi & Radhika Gorur
Winter 2011: Volume Two
www.aii.unimelb.edu.au
The Australia India Institute was established to contribute
to greater understanding, cooperation and partnership
between India and Australia. The Australia India Institute
sees itself as a bridge between nations by creating strong
academic, professional and cultural links.
Editor: Genevieve Costigan
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author
and not necessarily of the Australia India Institute.
The Australia India Institute is funded by the Australian
Government Department of Education, Employment and
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Permission to use the name and image of “Fearless Nadia” is a
courtesy extended by Wadia Movietone to the Australia India
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The Australia India Institute expresses its deep gratitude
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the contribution of JBH Wadia who thought up the
Hunterwali character, gave Mary Evans her screen name, and
popularized the Fearless Nadia persona through his films.
Challenges
Facing Indian Higher
Education
Fazal Rizvi & Radhika Gorur
Google “India growth” and you get some 269 million wide-ranging entries, most of them celebratory
in their tone regarding India’s economic success. Finance Minister Pranab Mukherji asserts, for
example, in an interview in Washington DC, that despite monetary tightening, he sees no reason
to revise the projected growth figure of 8.5 per cent in the current year.1 As a market, the size and
spending power of India’s middle classes makes the world’s mouth water – the McKinsey Quarterly
expects India’s middle class to expand from 5 per cent to 40 percent over the next couple of decades,
to create the world’s fifth-largest consumer market 2. Although some contest these predictions3,
the triumphalism expressed in a recent ‘India Shining’ campaign appears persistent. As a political
slogan, ‘India Shining’ refers to the overall feeling of economic optimism, in light, in particular,
of the Indian IT boom. Developed initially as part of an Indian government campaign intended to
promote India internationally, the slogan served to highlight the potential India had to become a
major economic power.
Not everyone has bought into this hype, of course. Studies at Harvard and the University of
Michigan, reported in the New York Times, suggest that India is shining for a much smaller group
that was often assumed. Its prosperity has not lessened malnutrition among children, and its
affluence may have only benefited the privileged in society4. In a Business Week Roundtable that
asked ‘Will India ever grow as fast as China?’ Subroto Bagchi suggests that growth at China’s pace
may threaten democracy5. The Australian reports that despite an astonishing rate of growth, the
mood among many in India is gloomy. Even beneficiaries of India’s boom, like Wipro Chairperson
Azim Premji, together with other business leaders, retired Supreme Court justices and former
governors of India’s central bank, have issued an open letter to the government saying things are
seriously amiss and that the benefits of India’s huge growth have not reached the poorer sections of
India’s population6. Elsewhere, discussion is around India’s importance as a stabilizing influence
in a dangerously volatile region. A story in the Daily Telegraph7 titled The smelly truth of India’s
incredible growth ruefully suggests that ‘India’s great strength and power is that the world wants to
believe its ‘incredible growth story’ (IGS) and that the great tortoises of the developed world are so
desperate to believe India can drive new growth that they cannot smell the truth: India talks a good
game, tells a cracking yarn, but cannot finish what it starts.’
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It is easy to see that the whole world is talking about India, and recognizes its importance to global
economic and political stability. Most commentators around the world attribute such success as
India has achieved to the Government’s decision in the early 1990s to open up its economy, and
to deregulate and privatize its key institutions. It is suggested, by Bhagwati (2005) for example,
that India’s economic success is, to a large extent, due to its strategic engagement with the global
economy, which has led many Indian companies to establish Indian robust links with transnational
corporations. These links have enabled India to utilise its enormous pool of knowledge workers,
particularly in the rapidly growing globally-networked information industries, providing
competitively priced labour to corporations hungry for technology skills and business process
engineering.
At the same time, however, there is a deep level of nervousness, particularly within India, about
its capacity to sustain growth, and indeed about the distribution of the benefits of growth. Major
concerns surround the country’s poor infrastructure. With years of neglect and under-investment,
it is argued, the Indian Government has been too slow to pursue a vigorous program of reform.
This is said, in particular, of Indian higher education, which, as a system, remains in a poor shape,
characterized by inadequate infrastructure, poor operating conditions and ineffective teaching
and learning programs, producing large cohorts of graduates who are barely employable in the
professions for which they have ostensibly been trained (Reddy & Andrade 2010). In 2007, no less an
authority than the then Indian Minister of Human Resource Development, Arjun Singh, referred, as
reported in The Times of India (September 18, 2007) to Indian higher education as a ‘sick child’. It is
clear that the Indian system of higher education faces enormous challenges.
Since 2007 however, the Indian government has taken a number of major steps to institute reforms,
greatly increasingly investment in higher education around new policy understandings of what
needs to be done to tackle long-standing problems. In this paper, we want to discuss and critique
some of these initiatives, and argue that while higher levels of public investment are clearly
necessary to meet the challenges facing Indian higher education, these are not enough. This is
so because India confronts a range of complex dilemmas with respect to the purposes of higher
education, the competing social and economic priorities that it must somehow reconcile, as well
as its strategies for reform within the context of India’s complex state apparatus. The key issues
of ‘reform for what and how’ lie at the heart of these dilemmas, and the failure to recognize and
confront them will lead inevitably to changes that are far too piecemeal and uneven, and perhaps
even incompatible.
Indian Higher Education: An Overview
The Indian system of higher education is both enormous and complex. Established in the image
of British universities in the mid nineteenth century, it has now acquired a more hybrid form,
influenced after independence by both the Soviet and American traditions. India now boasts over
375 public and 40 private universities, with almost 20,000 affiliated colleges that teach programs
developed and examined by key state universities (Agarwal 2009). India also has around 250
specialist teaching and research institutions, established to provide training in such areas as
medicine, engineering, agriculture, and computer science, and to conduct high-level research
(Jayaram 2004: 91). The system as a whole employs more than 400,000 teachers and caters for almost
10 million students. Increase in demand for higher education in India has averaged more than 4
per cent over the past four decades, and shows no sign of decline. The growth of the financially
independent, for-profit sector in higher education has perhaps been one of the most noteworthy
recent developments in India. Also significant has been the increase in open and distance
institutions, which now enroll over two million students. Indian higher education has evolved in
distinct and divergent streams, all monitored by an apex body, the Ministry of Human Resource
Development (MHRD). The Planning Commission of India sets the broad parameters for the
funding of Indian higher education, while the University Grants Commission (UGC) is responsible
for distributing resources and promoting reforms. The UGC also has a role in the processes of
coordination, accreditation and quality control. However, within the framework of a complex
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federalism (Pinto 1984), legislatively, it is the state governments that establish and oversee the work
of most universities. Within a system that is intrinsically political, the attempts by the national
government to assume greater control have been resisted by the states, despite the existence of
twenty so-called central universities, with many more planned (Ambani & Birla 2000). As Jayaram
(2004: 90) points out, in the context of India, ‘the term ‘higher education’ suggests a homogeneity,
which glosses over the enormous structural and functional diversity within the system’. Institutions
vary in their objectives and funding sources, and in faculty and student commitment, and zealously
attempt to guard some level of autonomy.
Policy Anxieties
The complexity of Indian higher education has made it difficult for both central and state
governments to implement programs of reform in any systematic and coordinated manner.
In 1985, for example, the Indian Ministry of Education proposed an extensive reform package
that included such measures as a moratorium on the expansion of conventional colleges and
universities; a fair and robust admissions regime based on scholarly merit; a new accreditation
and accountability scheme; decentralization of educational planning; and a campaign to ensure
‘academic de-politicization’. As sensible as these reforms were, they were widely resisted by
most state bureaucracies and universities, and produced little improvement, leading one writer
to conclude that ‘higher education in India stands as an immobile colossus – insensitive to the
changing contexts of contemporary life, unresponsive to the challenges of today and tomorrow,
and absorbed so completely in trying to preserve its structural form that it does not have the time
to consider its own larger purpose’ (Dube 1988: 46). Subsequent reform attempts have met a similar
fate, while the system has become ever more complex and unwieldy, and the challenges ever more
urgent (Neelakantan 2009).
Most commentators, both within India and abroad, now realize that, apart from a very small
group of elite public sector institutions and a few emerging, privately-funded ones, Indian higher
education is in deep trouble. Despite its many distinct advantages, such as having the third
largest student numbers in the world (after China and the United States), the use of English as a
primary language of higher education and research, a long tradition of academic freedom and a
highly talented pool of students, India is burdened by a system of mass higher education that is
bureaucratically inflexible, hampered by poor governance structures and characterised by uneven
and modest quality at best (Venkatesh & Dutta 2007). Lack of resources has clearly been a major
issue. Despite the Kothari Commission’s target of 1.5 percent of the GDP in 1966, government
support for higher education remained until recently at less than 0.8 percent (Tilak 2004). Indian
universities face a number of other difficult issues as well. While many more Indian students now
have access to higher education, the system as a whole is characterized by gross inequalities (Desai
& Kulkarni 2008). What is even more alarming is that affirmative action initiatives have themselves
become a major source of debilitating identity politics that inhibits systemic organizational reform.
Within a system that is overloaded, the growth of private higher education in India has been rapid,
but is taking place in a policy vacuum, as a major private education bill has languished in the
Indian parliament for over two decades (Johnson & Bowles 2010). The quality of education at these
private colleges varies widely, with corrupt practices in staff appointment and student enrolment
rife at many institutions (Altbach 2005). The demand for higher education is so great that many
colleges are able to remain in business despite a poor reputation. At the same time, the regulatory
framework, accreditation mechanisms and the processes of quality assurance remain confused
(Vantesh & Dutta 2007). Although individual researchers and some institutions perform creditably,
serious problems afflict research performance in India. In various global ranking systems, such
as Shanghai’s Jia Tong, Indian universities perform poorly, with only the Indian Institutes of
Technology and Management ranked in the top three hundred (Agarwal 2009).
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These concerns are now widely acknowledged throughout India’s policy community, especially
given the backdrop of India’s growing participation in the global knowledge economy (National
Knowledge Commission 2006). It is generally believed that India cannot sustain high rates of
growth without major reforms to its system of higher education (Agarwal 2006). Deep anxieties
exist about inadequate conditions and ineffective teaching and learning programs, producing
graduates with outmoded set of skills. Yet, as Sanat (2006) points out, ‘…in order to ensure that
India does not throw away its advantage in BPO/KPO [Business Process Outsourcing/Knowledge
Process Outsourcing], it is imperative that it continues to produce a critical mass of highly skilled
manpower at an accelerated pace.’
If the criticisms of the state of higher education within the national policy community are extensive
then the external sources of criticism are even more severe. A strident critic, Altbach (2005), has
repeatedly argued that for India to continue to succeed in the knowledge-based global economy,
its system of higher education needs (1) sustained financial support, with an appropriate mix
of accountability and autonomy; (2) development of a clearly differentiated academic system—
specifying distinct missions, resources, and purposes for each component; (3) managerial reforms
and effective administration; and (4) truly meritocratic hiring and promotion policies for academics,
and similarly rigorous and honest student recruitment, selection, and instruction. Transnational
corporations investing in India have similarly suggested that India cannot continue to achieve
economic success with cheap labour, call centres and “low-tech” manufacturing alone, but needs a
more differentiated academic system that fosters excellence by preparing students to work within a
global context characterized by a networked logic and higher levels of mobility. Similar arguments
are made by the Indian academic diaspora (Ahmed & Varshney 2008).
Reforms Unleashed
Against these criticisms, internal policy dynamics in India appear to be shifting at last. India has
begun to interpret its higher education system as inextricably located within a global framework,
contributing to universities around the world and also benefiting from their intellectual input. It has
recognized the need to respond to the complex requirements of the globalizing context and to the
opportunities created by the increasing levels of global interconnectedness. It is attempting to align
this logic of globalization with responses to local pressures: growth in demand and greater access to
higher education; diversification and privatization of institutions; and the need to reform not only
institutional governance but also curriculum and pedagogy. A new policy discourse is emerging,
more open to external input, which seeks to reconcile exogenous pressures of globalization and the
knowledge economy with India’s distinctive endogenous policy traditions.
The Indian government now freely acknowledges that it risks losing its advantage in the fiercely
competitive global knowledge economy unless its universities are re-engineered (Singh 2004). It has
begun to draw on overseas expertise in higher education policy, both from its academic diaspora
and from international organizations such as UNESCO. Over the past decade, the UGC has, for
example, established a number of task forces, many of which draw upon these overseas resources
in establishing new policy processes designed to accommodate both external and domestic policy
inputs. It appears then that the Indian government has at last recognized the need to utilize global
policy resources with which to develop new strategies for institutional re-positioning, new processes
and structures for governance, and new imaginings of desirable futures (Vincent-Lancrin 2007).
In response, the Indian system of higher education has unleashed a major program of reforms.
Many of these reforms can be traced back to a policy template provided by the National Knowledge
Commission (NKC) set up by the Prime Minister in 2005, and chaired by a diasporic Indian
entrepreneur, Sam Pitroda. The Commission’s template for reform has been highly influential,
responding, as it did, to the set of policy anxieties discussed above. Based on what the NKC saw as
‘global imperatives’, many of its forty recommendations for reform in higher education drew heavily
on neo-liberal policy ideas circulating around the world (Srivanstva 2007; Rizvi & Lingard 2010). It
maintained, for example, that, ‘to respond to the global challenges more strongly than ever before,
India today needs a knowledge-oriented paradigm of development to give the country a competitive
advantage in all fields of knowledge’ (NKC 2006: 11).
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NKC’s recommendations for reform are structured around five key dimensions of knowledge:
Access to Knowledge; Knowledge Concepts; Creation of Knowledge; Knowledge Applications; and
Delivery of Services. More specifically, the Commission has recommended a rapid expansion of
the system creating many more universities (1500, up from the existing 400, to attain the gross
enrolment ratio of 15 percent by 2015); changes to the system of regulation of higher education by
establishing the Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education (IRAHE); an increase in
public spending and diversification in sources of finance for higher education; and the establishment
of fifty new national universities. NKC has also sought reform of existing universities; and the
restructuring of undergraduate colleges, placing a greater emphasis on measures to enhance quality.
And finally, it has sought greater inclusion of disadvantaged groups in Indian higher education,
ensuring access for all ‘deserving students’, through more targeted and efficient programs of
affirmative action.
When these highly ambitious recommendations for reform were first presented by NKC in 2006,
it would be true to say that they were met with considerable cynicism. But, to its credit, the Indian
government has taken up many of the Commission’s proposals. So, for example, India’s Eleventh
Five-Year Plan (2007-2012) for higher education has been crafted within the framework of NKC’s
policy recommendations. It is perhaps the nation’s most ambitious Five-Year Plan ever, significantly
increasing levels of public funding for higher education. The Plan has also begun to loosen some of
the bureaucratic rigidities in the system, giving universities greater organizational autonomy, and
enabling them to develop collaborative links with universities abroad. One of the Plan’s various
objectives is to establish thirty new Central Universities, sixteen in states where these do not exist
and fourteen as World Class Universities. Each of these universities is expected to develop a new
admissions system; robust processes of course evaluation, review and credits; strong incentives
for faculty; and linkages with industry and research institutions. Funding is also allocated to
establish a National Science and Engineering Research Board for the rejuvenation of research in
universities, and for the launch of a National Mission to ensure greater broadband connectivity
through a National Knowledge Network. Over the past five years, staff salaries have been increased
significantly, making employment in higher education more attractive than it has been for decades.
The Indian government has also allocated substantial new funding to enable greater access to higher
education in rural and regional areas, leading to an explosion in the emergence of new colleges.
Most of the resources promised by the Eleventh Five Year Plan are in fact being delivered. Under the
charismatic leadership of the new HRD Minister, Kapil Sibal, the pace of change has accelerated.
New local educational entrepreneurs have appeared on the scene, taking advantage of the funds
allocated to set up new private colleges. A Foreign Education Bill has been introduced, permitting
the entry of foreign educational providers in India, and encouraging transnational collaborations.
As significant and welcome as this new investment is, in what follows, we wish to argue that it is not
sufficient to bring about the reforms required. This is so because much of the new money is either
allocated to allow staff salaries to be raised to a more acceptable level or to build new institutions,
both at the elite end of the institutes of technology and management and at the level of colleges in
various disadvantaged areas.
Tensions
What this new investment regime does not adequately address is the quality of educational provision
in the colleges. Nor does it adequately deal with the issue of the organizational cultures
of Indian universities and colleges which, after years of neglect, are widely known for their
outmoded approaches to curriculum and pedagogy, their ineffective modes of assessment,
and corrupt practices of staff recruitment and promotion. Pouring good money into a largely
dysfunctional system cannot be expected to produce the desired changes, for the sources of
dysfunction lie not only in the lack of resources but also in a range of reform dilemmas that
have become an inherent feature of Indian higher education. These dilemmas have their origins
in both the historical constitution and the contemporary organizational practices in Indian
higher education. As we have already noted, previous attempts at reform have not enjoyed great
success in India, and this has not been solely due to the lack of resources but also to a deep-seated
organizational culture resistant to reform.
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This being so, unless issues of organizational culture are addressed, it is likely that the current
attempts at reform, too, will similarly become embroiled in a politics shaped by a range of complex
dilemmas that have proved intractable in the past. The notion of dilemma implies difficult
choices within a context in which a particular course of action designed to alleviate or solve
certain problems may also bring about consequences that are undesirable. These dilemmas, it
should be noted, have historical origins, and are located within policy configurations linked to
various political and organizational structures. This raises the question of the extent to which
these configurations should in fact be disturbed; there is a risk that the consequences might
undermine the very intents of the reform during the processes of implementation. It is for this
reason that traditions are invariably defended, sometimes in vigorous ways but more often through
organizational inertia. So, for example, in the case of Indian higher education, a policy choice in
relation to greater autonomy for institutions runs the risk of creating a system characterized by even
greater organizational incoherence. Similarly, the decision to pursue a vigorous regime of affirmative
action creates conditions in which academic excellence is potentially compromised.
Policy and Practice
Many of the dilemmas of reform in Indian higher education are centered on issues of governance.
As noted already, the Indian system of higher education has experienced a massive expansion over
the past two decades, but this has happened in a rather chaotic and unplanned manner. As Agarwal
(2009: 29) has pointed out, ‘in an effort to meet rising aspirations and to make higher education
socially inclusive, there has been a sudden and dramatic increase in the number of institutions
without a proportionate increase in material and intellectual resources’. As a result most students
experience curriculum and pedagogy that is outmoded, and which is taught by faculty who are
poorly prepared, lack motivation, are mostly disinterested in research and do not possess the kind of
professional attitudes necessary for implementing any program of reform.
Attempts by the central government to coordinate reform initiatives have also met a great deal of
resistance from the state educational bureaucracies, as well as from the universities and colleges
themselves. Indian federalism has a complex structure, which worked reasonably well during the
first two decades after independence, but is now increasingly characterised by highly contentious
politics. State governments have become increasingly protective of their regional identity and
political power. Within the structure of this competitive federalism, the authority of the UGC has
declined, with no other agency emerging that can develop, coordinate and steer the processes of
reform down to the local level.
However, even if it is possible to negotiate programs of reform across central and state governments,
an understanding of the reforms seldom reaches the local institutional level. The structures of
policy communication in India are largely ineffective, with policy ideas remaining confined to
administrative leadership, often far removed from the level of professional practice. This suggests
that the capacity of the state to promote reform practice is limited. At the colleges in particular,
the curriculum arrives in a packaged form, and the students are prepared for examinations that
are set elsewhere. At the same time, Indian institutions, while they are proud of their autonomy,
rarely exercise this autonomy to debate policy ideas at the level of practice. There is furthermore no
marked tradition in Indian higher education of policy ideas emerging ‘from the bottom’, despite
its distinctive democratic political traditions. In India, university teacher unions enjoy a proud
tradition, but remain concerned largely with industrial conditions, and pay little attention to
academic issues.
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Autonomy and Control
The system of affiliated colleges, around which the Indian system of higher education is built,
has often been described as a curse. The distinguished scholar and educational leader, Professor
Kulandai Swami (2006), argues, for example, that the affiliating system is ‘outmoded, anachronistic,
and acts as a real curse on the Indian higher education system’. It holds back any genuine attempt at
reform and renewal. It ensures that reforms are inevitably symbolic and piecemeal, leaving most of
the system unaffected.
The system of affiliated colleges emerged in the second half of the 19th century, in the image of
the colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, which prepared students to sit for examinations set by the
University. In an era when very few students attended higher education, this enabled a networked
system to be established quickly around a small number of universities, such as Madras, Bombay
and Calcutta (Swami 2006). The universities had very few students of their own, but had the tasks of
developing the curriculum for affiliated colleges, overseeing teaching quality, and assessing student
performance.
For a small elite system, this approach might have worked perfectly, but in the era of massification,
its contradictions have become all too obvious. At the time of independence in 1947, there were
fewer than 500 affiliated colleges. Their number has now increased to almost 20,000, with the ratio
of colleges to each university going through the roof. For example, Andhra University has over 400
affiliated colleges, Osmania University around 400, and University of Madras a little under 200.
Accounting for nearly 90 percent of the total enrolment, colleges constitute the bulk of Indian higher
education, with over 9 million students enrolled in various programs under the aegis of the nearly 130
universities that have affiliating powers.
According to Swami (2006), this system has disastrous consequences for college teachers and students
alike. For teachers, little professional autonomy exists for developing their own curriculum, setting
their own examination questions and grading the answers submitted. They teach subjects allotted to
them for the syllabus prescribed by an authority elsewhere. They seldom get a sense of participation in
the academic and administrative affairs of the system. With a few notable exceptions, the system turns
the colleges into narrowly focused tutorial institutions, and teachers into tutors with no clear career
path and no sense of professionalism. It also turns the faculty at the universities into mere examiners,
with little opportunity to conduct research, preoccupied as they often become with oversight tasks.
Most students, especially those enrolled in tiny affiliated colleges, do not have access to adequate library
and other educational facilities. Their teachers are often poorly trained and unmotivated, with little
enthusiasm either for their disciplines or for teaching. Most colleges, even those that are subsidised
by the central or state governments, largely exist for profit, and are often run by ex-politicians and
entrepreneurs who have little knowledge or interest in higher education. With a system in which a
small number of universities are given the responsibility of quality oversight, considerable potential
exists for corruption, as is indeed is reported regularly in the media. Of course these concerns are not
new. In 1966, the Education Commission of India introduced a system of autonomous colleges, and in
1986, the National Education Policy supported a freer and more creative association of universities and
colleges. Neither of these policy initiatives can be said to have succeeded, with very few colleges taking
up the option of becoming autonomous. Indeed, if anything, the situation seems to have worsened,
with a number of universities in technical and professional areas being given the authority to affiliate
new colleges which have little autonomy to experiment with relevant and innovative curriculum or
pedagogy.
Many in India would like to abolish the system of affiliated colleges, but this is easier said than done.
To begin with, deeply entrenched economic and political interests would make this impossible.
But, more importantly, without a system of affiliated colleges, India would not be able to absorb the
massive increase in the demand for higher education. The universities would simply not be able to
cope with the demand. Since the system of affiliated colleges has provided the growing middle class
in India access to higher education, it has become a central plank in India’s capacity to implement the
principles of meritocracy. Furthermore, there are not enough qualified teachers in India to carry out
the full tasks of a university academic. The dilemma facing Indian higher education is therefore not
how to abolish the system of affiliated colleges, but how to better manage it.
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Public and Private
Over the past two decades, as earlier noted, the level of demand for higher education in India has
increased well above the Government’s capacity to finance. As a result, private higher education has
flourished, with a boom in commercially oriented for-profit colleges. There has always been a private
sector in Indian higher education, but the institutions which enjoyed government support were
largely run by various religious groups and were not motivated primarily by the pursuit of profit.
More recently however, identifying lucrative opportunities, various entrepreneurs, businessmen
and politicians have established institutions through family trusts, or by taking advantage of other
favorable taxation conditions. The state authorities have encouraged this growth not only to meet
the growing demand but also to introduce what is assumed to be a greater degree of institutional
diversity in the system.
Yet a level of complexity that is seldom noted by the observers of Indian private colleges is that they
are invariably linked to public universities as affiliated colleges, which means that many of them
are often little more than small tutorial colleges, requiring a very low level of investment to get
started. A very complex symbiotic relationship thus exists between the public and privates sectors
of Indian higher education, raising a number of issues for the regulatory framework under which
private colleges operate. Given their dependent relationship to public institutions they cannot be
allowed to work totally under free market mechanisms - a degree of state control appears necessary.
The dilemma that the state has is the extent to which, and how, it should steer the market, without
turning private colleges into quasi-public institutions. Furthermore, a perennial dilemma facing
Indian authorities is how to reconcile the policy imperative of institutional diversity on the one hand
and quality assurance on the other.
There is a widespread concern in India that a large majority of private institutions are engaged
in various corrupt practices that consumer laws are often unable to capture. The Indian media
regularly reports cases of corruption surrounding exorbitant capitation fees, manipulation of
admission processes, illicit payments for accreditation and bribes paid to the employees of the public
universities to which the colleges are affiliated. Even when the tuition fee is regulated, variations
are enormous. Many private institutions ill-treat their faculty with unacceptable employment
conditions (Agarwal 2009). At the same time, most college owners are reluctant to invest in the
resources and facilities needed for tertiary education, such as an adequate library, preferring to
maximise their profits. The State thus faces the dilemma of how to regulate higher education,
without becoming too intrusive, and remaining sensitive to the principles of diversity to which it is
also committed. Traditionally, the state agencies, such as the UGC, have been expected to provide
guidelines to regulate the system, but it is now widely believed that these agencies have been unable
to develop institutional mechanisms for effective market coordination (Kapu & Mehta 2004). The
NKC has suggested an entirely new regulatory structure, though it is not clear how such an agency
might reconcile the competing demands of autonomy and control in a system that is increasingly
tilted towards liberalization, deregulation and privatization.
Of course, not all private colleges are affiliated with universities – some have greater autonomy to
develop their own programs, award their own qualifications, and can be relied upon to respond
appropriately and honestly to the changing requirements of the labor market. Examples of such
institutions may be found around the country. The Manipal Academy of Higher Education, for
example, has given boost to educational opportunities in the region where none had existed.
From the point of the view of these colleges, a regulatory regime that inhibits their autonomy is
clearly undesirable, especially if they are making the appropriate levels of investment in modern
infrastructure and the professional development of the faculty. However, a problem with these
institutions is that they have so far provided little evidence of pedagogic innovation, and have
pursued little in the way of even inexpensive basic research. Many for-profit colleges, on the other
hand, have taken advantage of the policy ambiguity surrounding the regulatory framework, and
have offered unaccredited training in vocational areas such as Information Technology, Industrial
Design, Tourism and Hospitality, and Media and Journalism, leaving many students and their
parents exposed to financial misconduct.
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Policy ambiguity has also inhibited the entry of quality foreign providers into the Indian market.
For many years, most foreign institutions have operated jointly with Indian partners, outside the
framework of the national regulatory framework. The United Kingdom is the most active in the
Indian market, followed by the United States, Australia and Canada (Power and Bhalla 2006).
Much of the interest has been shown by second tier foreign institutions, more interested in student
recruitment through twinning arrangements than with any deeper academic relationship involving
both teaching and research. Recently, a new bill to regulate foreign institutions has been introduced
in the Indian Parliament. Although it proposes conditions that are very strict, the bill has been
hotly debated within the Indian polity, with fears expressed about the principles of social justice
and potential damage to national culture and indigenous cultural traditions. Interest by elite foreign
institutions in providing education in India has so far been disappointingly low, with greater interest
shown in partnerships that are still just focused on teaching and not involving joint programs of
academic development and research.
Equity and Excellence
In India, the push towards privatization, as expressed in the Indian government’s support for the
development of private institutions, both for-profit and non-profit, and for the entry of foreign
players into the market, appears to have two main motivations: to diversify the system and to
provide greater access to higher education. Private institutions enroll students who would not
otherwise be in higher education. From the point of view of the government, they bring additional
revenue into the system, and often operate at much lower costs per student, even after allowing
for the fact that their tuition is supplemented by government subsidies. It is assumed that private
institutions bring in greater institutional diversity into the system through innovation and
experimentation not only through reform in finance and management but also in instructional
approaches. It is also believed that the private sector is much more responsive to the changing needs
of the labor market, and that it is better able to address skills shortages and offer courses in fast
growing areas of employment such as information technology, business administration, financial
services, tourism and hospitality.
However it is hard to find evidence for such claims in India. On the contrary, there is greater
evidence that most private institutions are rather reluctant to experiment with new areas of study
and instructional approaches. Indeed most offer courses of low quality. They have fewer staff and
most of their teachers are employed on a casual, part-time basis. Costly fields of study are eschewed,
as indeed is any attempt at faculty professional development. Most owners of for-profit colleges
shy away from investing in even essential infrastructure and facilities. It is however true that they
do provide educational access to many students who are academically unable to gain entry into
the public institutions, especially in the high demand professional disciplines. As Levy (2008) has
pointed out, private institutions in India provide second choice access for those who perform poorly
in the highly competitive entry tests. These students are often ill-prepared to undertake a rigorous
program of studies.
This variation in quality raises the question of the extent to which greater access to higher education
alone can in fact promote educational opportunity and social equity. There is little doubt that
over the past few decades, India has greatly expanded access to higher education for all sections
of the Indian community. Enrolment has gone up from about 100,000 in 1947 to over 11 million
now, and the enrolment ratio from 1 per cent in 1950 to about 10 per cent in 2007 (Agarwal 2009:
40). This growth has been achieved partly through the emergence of private institutions and also
through government policies of affirmative action that have addressed gender inequality, regional
imbalances, and other patterns of disparity caused by India’s caste system and by socio-economic
disadvantage. Many barriers to access have been removed through scholarship schemes, relaxation
of academic standards, and what in India is referred to as ‘a quota-based reservation system’,
through which a certain proportion of places in public higher education are allocated to students
from each of the various categories of social disadvantage. In this way, the State has tried to correct
historical wrongs and injustices.
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However, the dilemma surrounding affirmative action is that while it might promote some measure
of equity, it is a very costly exercise, resulting in loss of organizational efficiency, and arguably also
a focus on excellence. It is impossible to do away with the influence of family background. The
students from families with academic traditions inevitably have the kind of support at home and
in their communities that is often essential for success in higher education. Students from poorer
backgrounds often lack such support, and therefore struggle to cope with the demands of academic
work. What this suggests is that while simple access is a necessary condition for educational
participation, it is not sufficient to ensure educational success and fairer social outcomes. For fairer
outcomes, issues of instructional approach and student support structures need to be addressed,
something most institutions, and in particular private colleges, have failed to do in India. Equity
is a complex notion, and even harder to put into practice. It demands attention to all aspects of
educational provision, so that students from disadvantaged backgrounds are not only admitted but
also retained, and that issues of equity of employment opportunities at the successful completion of
study are also addressed.
Research and Teaching
Debates about instructional approach, student support structures and employment outcomes are
largely absent in most institutions of higher education in India. By and large, a tradition of critical
reflection on their teaching, and how their instruction is differently experienced by students
of varied backgrounds, has not yet been established among higher education faculty in India.
Teachers are given little opportunity or support to consider the academic difficulties students might
encounter, and how pedagogic approaches might be better aligned to their diverse needs. This is
not an individual matter but a structural one, for the functions of teaching and research are sharply
contrasted within the structure of Indian higher education. Faculty who are employed as teachers
do not view research as important to them personally or professionally, even if educational research
might have a great deal to say about their approaches to teaching. Most institutions too view
themselves as being concerned with teaching alone. This sharp dichotomy has not served the cause
of equity well, for it has not introduced a tradition of debate informed by evidence and research into
Indian higher education.
Nor has it created an organizational culture of research that applies to all institutions of higher
learning, not just to those specifically mandated to conduct research. Indeed, for a country that is
now reliant for its continuing economic success on knowledge-based industries, and therefore on
research and development, its research performance in globally comparative terms is remarkably
poor. Investment in research and development in India is barely 1 percent of the gross domestic
product, compared to 1.75 percent in China (Bettelle 2007). The number of active researchers for
each million people in India is a very low 119, compared to over 4,605 in the United States and 708
in China. In the areas of publication and citations, India’s performance is poor, with barely 1 per
cent of the global output. Indian universities also perform very poorly in research training, with
just 9,000 PhDs in Science and technology graduating in 2008. And the quality of most PhD theses,
especially in the social sciences, is widely regarded as unacceptable.
Problems surrounding the coordination of research efforts in India have also been widely noted.
Much of India’s R &D is conducted by transnational corporations and at specialist governmentsponsored research centres, and not at the universities where research training is mostly provided.
Parthasarathi (2005) has pointed out that research in India suffers from a ‘two box disease’ wherein
universities and the government R & D laboratory system work in isolation of each other, further
institutionalising the dichotomy between research and teaching. Key researchers in these centres
have little opportunity to contribute to the development of a new generation of researchers and
a research culture at the universities. Not surprisingly, therefore, there is a serious and growing
concern in India about the quality of doctoral education in India. As Agarwal (2009: 279) argues,
academic research in India is ‘severely under-resourced.’ Moreover, he points out, there are
insufficient linkages between researchers and with society at large’. Indian research suffers ‘from
cronyism and academic in-breeding that prevents cross-fertilization of ideas and is an impediment
for good science’.
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In recent years, numerous attempts have been made to tackle these problems. The UGC’s Special
Assistance Program for research has been greatly expanded, providing more realistic amounts
of funds to selected well established academic fields in specific programs. There are also moves
to establish a system of performance measures around indicators such as degree completion,
publication counts and quality. Various attempts are also being made to set research priorities, and
encourage the sharing of infrastructure through partnerships with corporations and universities
abroad. India is also investing heavily in internet connectivity in an effort to improve access to
global information resources. As important as these initiatives are, they do not address the problem
of attitudinal changes that are needed in India to recognise the importance of research for meeting
India’s aspirations in the global knowledge economy. Shifts are required in the common conceptions
about the nature of research and how it might be done in different types of higher education
institutions, from small colleges to leading research universities. Curriculum priorities need to
be set against evidence about the changing demands of the labour market, while instructional
innovation needs to be initiated and supported by research conducted at the level of professional
practice.
Conclusion
In this paper, we have argued that, faced with a growing policy anxiety in India about the risks it
confronts of losing its advantage in the fiercely competitive global knowledge economy unless its
universities are re-engineered, the Indian Government has at last unleashed a series of reforms
to its system of higher education. It has begun to view these reforms as inextricably linked to the
requirements of the global economy and the shifting architecture of global higher education.
The Government has therefore greatly increased its level of investment in higher education, and has
also begun to loosen some of the bureaucratic rigidities in the system, giving universities greater
organizational autonomy. As overdue and welcome as these initiatives are, we have argued that while
additional resources are clearly necessary to reform Indian higher education, they are not sufficient.
This is so because the problems of the Indian system of higher education are deep, and relate to a
range of dilemmas arising out of the historical constitution of Indian higher education, and to the
organizational traditions and cultural attitudes about its nature and functions in society. We have
suggested that unless these dilemmas are squarely addressed, the Indian system of higher education
will continue to struggle, producing isolated pockets of academic excellence but leaving the nation
as a whole poorly served.
Note
This Working Paper is based on research funded by the Australia India Institute, whose support is
gratefully acknowledged. Another version of this paper will appear as: Rizvi, F., (2012) ‘Dilemmas
of Reform in Indian Higher Education’ in Adamson, B., Nixon, J. and Su, F. (eds) The Reorientation
of Higher Education: Beyond Compliance and Defiance, New York and Hong Kong: Springer and
Comparative Education Research Centre (CERC) of The University of Hong Kong.
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Footnotes
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-28/india-may-reach-growth-goal-for-year-even-after-tighteningmukherjee-says.html
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2
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Tracking_the_growth_of_Indias_middle_class_2032
3
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12593755
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/health/08global.html
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http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_34/b3948421.htm
ht t p://w w w.t he au s t r a l i a n .c om . au / bu si ne s s/ne w s/i nd i a-g lo omy- de s pite -s t rong-g row t h /s tor ye6frg90x-1226031227434
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7
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/deannelson/100021409/the-smelly-truth-of-indias-incredible-growth/
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Professor Fazal Rizvi
Melbourne Graduate School of Education
Fazal Rizvi is a Professor in Education at the University of Melbourne, having joined the University
in 2010 from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, where he established and directed
its online Masters program in Global Studies in Education. He had previously held academic
and administrative appointments at a number of universities in Australia, including as Pro Vice
Chancellor (International) at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and as the founding
Director of the Monash Centre for Research in International Education.
Dr Radhika Gorur
Melbourne Graduate School of Education
Radhika Gorur is a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Born and brought up in India,
she has also lived and worked in Nigeria, Oman and Australia. She has a Master’s degree from
Michigan State University and a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Her research has focused
broadly on education policy and evidence based policy, and more generally on how policy ideas
evolve, circulate and stabilise. Her current research focuses on Indian higher education and on
issues relating to equity in education.
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