Our Universities

OUR UNIVERSITIES,” Deepak Nayyar, former vice chancellor of Delhi University (DU), says to me, “are no longer ivory towers. They were meant to remain above politics but are instead at the very center of it.”

It is true that our universities are now at the heart of a grim and fractious political scrabble that has pushed our most prominent deans and academicians into exchanging terse, public one-on-ones with our politicians. The path to this state of affairs has been a long way down. Early on, India’s educational institutions were at the center of our most positive iconography—our universities were a source of great pride, which gave Indians, as Nehru declared, “a franker look and a straighter back.” But forty years on, India entered the 1990s in the midst of massive protests against the Mandal Commission recommendations for caste reservations in colleges. Since then the debates in higher education have only become more virulent and now surround every aspect of university policy. Over the last decade and a half, the arguments here have been hijacked by questions on the ownership and control of our colleges, and seat reservations for backward castes among students and in faculty appointments. Watching these protests over the role and control of universities, one commentator and academic famously remarked, “It’s not democracy, but democrazy.”¹

There are two big questions that lie at the center of this crisis around our universities: How much should universities reflect the agenda of the government? And to what extent should it focus on social justice and equal access—an institution that in its selection processes is at its heart, after all, an undemocratic one?

The high level of rancor and disagreement on these questions has allowed our universities to continue the slow collapse that began in the 1970s. The former vice chancellor of Delhi University Upendra Baxi described the unfolding tragedy when he wrote that our universities are in their “death throes.”² Our higher education system has become inert and incapable of adapting to a rapidly evolving economy, and even its best central institutes—arguably Nehru’s most enduring legacy to India—are in danger. Their weaknesses have become particularly critical with the rise of the knowledge economy, and as India’s legions of youngsters enter institutions that seem less and less capable of giving them what they need.

A persistent legacy

The year that the first three universities came up in India, 1857, carries a particular note of hubris for the colonial empire. The British never suspected, when they established universities in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras the same year that they were going about stamping out the army rebellion so thoroughly, that they were setting themselves up for a far more intense, widespread protest against their rule. It is in these institutes that India’s political awakening began and it is here that India’s educated absorbed the ideas of freedom and democracy, inspiring them to eventually lead the struggle against colonial rule.

The focus in these first universities was on creating a small pool of aristocratic, English-educated Indian workers for the civil services and strengthening the foundation of British rule. But institutions often have a way of thwarting the aims of their founders. Sir Henry Maine, vice chancellor of the University of Calcutta, remarked in 1866, “The founders of the University of Calcutta thought to create an aristocratic institution; and in spite of themselves, they created a popular one.”³ And these universities were immensely popular. The demand for British-style college education grew by leaps and bounds, since it was a ticket to a job in a country where jobs were hard to come by. People crowded into the liberal arts courses to absorb English, Greek and Latin, all for a possible career as a government bureaucrat in British India’s revenue and judicial departments, with its attendant promises of security and petty power.⁴

The British press largely dismissed this emerging new class of Indian bureaucrats—one journalist wrote in 1875, “The pliable, plastic, receptive Baboo of Bengal eagerly avails himself of this [university] system . . . partly from a servile wish to please the Sahib logue, and partly from a desire to obtain a Government appointment.”⁵ But these British degrees were also creating a new class of bhadralok, educated Indians, who lay outside the clutches of the traditional caste system and were evangelists for Western ideas of equality and liberty. By 1889 the British were aware of this growing force of educated Indians opposing British policies. Initially legislators such as Sir Antony MacDonnell tried to play down the problem, labeling India’s Congress party as nothing more than “a preserve of lawyers and schoolteachers”—a small, educated minority with little influence in their attempts to foment unhappiness against colonial rule.

Of course, it turned out to be a little more than that.

On the flip side, these universities had an overwhelming tilt toward preparing students for government jobs, and most of the degrees the colleges awarded were in the arts. Faced with studying subjects that they could not relate to, such as European languages and British law, students focused mainly on “swotting”—cramming to absorb as much as possible, while understanding little. One Calcutta tutor noted that by the 1880s an entire industry had mushroomed to cater to the crammers, with the “extraordinary prevalence of ‘keys’ . . . meretricious aids to a degree, sold by every bookseller and advertised by every post.”⁶

Another unhappy consequence of this narrow focus on graduate-bureaucrats was that science and technology were put on the back burner, hurting both innovation and new ideas in the long run. Some British administrators did recognize this problem, and governors such as Lord Curzon discussed the need to “rescue the . . . university from its corrosive narrowness.” ⁷ But while policy papers on reforming universities came out by the sheaf, the British government did little to change the existing focus. There were a few efforts by Indians as well to counter the status quo and establish more competencies in science—the industrialist Jamsetji Tata, for instance, envisioned a unique institution for scientific research and study and set up the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), which by 1911 began its first courses in Bangalore. Mostly, however, these belated efforts tacked on science institutions and departments to the existing university systems, creating separate and segregated cultures of the sciences and the arts—which still persist.

Perhaps the most egregious problem was the singular focus on building universities—elementary and secondary schools were largely ignored. Instead of building from the bottom up, from elementary schools to the venerable universities, reaching upward brick by brick, the British had chosen to erect an edifice that amounted to university arches perched on stilts. The British India district magistrate A. O. Hume (who founded India’s Congress party) summarized the effects of this when he wrote with some disappointment that “Indian education, like French liberty . . . has been more of a show than a reality. In our haste for results we have . . . tried the great Indian trick of developing in a single hour, the shoot, the plant, the flower and fruit and found alas! That we at least were no conjurors.”⁸

But instead of reforming the system we were left with, we have chosen to hold it even closer to us, resisting change in any form. Our university policy has long failed to add up to a coherent approach, but our governments have been reluctant to redo the math.

Tinkering with policies

“We are a country propelled forward by crisis,” one minister tells me. “We make tough policy changes only when faced with emergencies.” As a consequence, in issues where it has taken a relatively long time for the danger signs to hit, bad ideas were left standing long past their sell-by dates.

This has been the unfortunate fate of our university policies, where an ineffective system has frozen into place, unchanged in imperial India for want of enthusiasm, and in independent India for want of political will. “The desire I see among people today to study beyond high school,” S. Sadagopan, director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, tells me, “is quite massive and unprecedented. But it’s a whole other story when we look at the quality of higher education available. Our capacities and capabilities are falling fast.”

Our first governments had a unique opportunity to implement some changes—Nehru, for instance, was excited about the role universities could play in India’s economic rise and was willing to invest in and promote new, better institutions. There was also broad agreement within the government that the center in particular would have to spend on and oversee the growth of universities, and the education minister, Maulana Azad, urged “central guidance, if not central control” for India’s colleges.

Nehru framed his vision for India’s institutes in soaring rhetoric, one in which India’s colleges would be the catalyst that would transform the country from a backwater of superstition and old practices. In fact India’s new higher education institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) were weighted with symbolism and the need for the young nation to prove itself. The site for the first IIT, IIT Kharagpur, was the Hijli jail where two Indian dissidents had been killed by the British. Nehru referred to the IIT itself as a fine “monument”—so wrapped up were these institutes in the symbolism of our past.

But despite such ceremony and intent, there was no clear-eyed focus on education policy. In 1944 the British had formulated an educational policy for independent India under the leadership of Sir John Sargent. Called the Post-War Plan of Educational Development in India, it envisioned higher education for one out of every fifteen students that completed secondary school, and vocational or technical education for the rest. While the Indian government rejected this approach, with good reason, as “needlessly conservative,” fifteen years had to pass before it rustled up an alternative, national policy on education. Eventually, the Kothari Commission report—which was published in 1966 and ran into 615 pages—drew out an agenda for the government and recommended creating five or six major universities in India that would be global centers of excellence. These recommendations formed the basis of the 1968 National Policy on Education.

The government had several stumbles in its efforts to define a good policy and regulatory framework for its universities. While India focused on new institutions around technology and science, there was little progress on university reforms and the overhaul of the old systems of affiliation and regulation. Pressure from interest groups and drawn-out negotiations with university administrators muddled proposed legislation and regulatory standards for colleges. For instance, in the 1950s the minister Humayun Kabir introduced a major regulatory bill for universities, which among other things gave India’s central government sole authority for university recognition. But Kabir quickly found himself in the midst of a heated argument around the bill’s provisions—vice chancellors overwhelmingly did not want much regulation or new standards. Kabir felt like “a culprit in the dock”⁹ during these conferences, targeted by groups whose vehemence against the bill was clear and unsubtle.

As a result neither the government nor the University Grants Commission (UGC) gained effective authority over our institutes. The bill Kabir had pushed had contained two provisions: the first stating that no university could be established without the approval of the UGC and the ministry of education and the second giving the UGC the authority to derecognize any degree. But in the heat of the debates both these provisions were fought off. “The academicians in our universities,” Pratap Bhanu Mehta tells me, “have fought against any regulation with real teeth. They’ve demanded protections and job safeguards of the worst sort—the kind without accountability.” The eventual legislation was as a result weak and ineffective—universities could choose to forgo recognition from the center as well as the UGC—and the UGC was reduced to a regulatory body standing helplessly by as India’s public university system crumbled.

“An immobile colossus”

“The decline of our institutes has happened quite literally before my eyes,” Dr. Nayyar tells me with some feeling. “It’s been painful to watch.” I can empathize. Both Dr. Nayyar and I have cherished our years as students in Indian colleges—he was a graduate from St. Stephen’s and the Delhi School of Economics (DSE) and I had studied at IIT and roamed around the vibrant DU campus, participating in its raucous intercollegiate debates and quizzes. We were lucky that during our time the rot had not yet set in. In fact Dr. Nayyar notes that when he arrived at Oxford for his doctorate from the DSE, the Indian institute was so reputed that the economist John Hicks asked him why he was at Oxford at all. Our standards since then have been in free fall—while the DSE remains respectable, one cannot possibly imagine comparing it with Oxford today.

Our growth in higher education hides more than it shows. There has been a rapid expansion of Indian institutes since 1947, from 20 universities and 636 colleges to 214 universities, 38 additional deemed universities and 9,703 colleges today. But it is an empty victory. “An immobile colossus . . . insensitive, unresponsive and absorbed so completely in trying to preserve its structural form that it does not have the time to consider its own larger purpose,” was what S. C. Dube wrote, as he mercilessly summed up the state of India’s universities in the government’s 1985 State of Higher Education report. Others were even more cutting in their assessment—one vice chancellor recently suggested that more than half the expanding network of Indian colleges were “intellectual and social slums.”¹⁰

The degeneration of our universities has paralleled the state’s collapse. These institutes have long been abjectly dependent on government funding, and a decline in governance and state funding from the mid-1960s onward led to their slow fossilization—with money hard to come by, departments and labs in disrepair, faculty with little incentive to do research, a gathering of dust on everything, layer after layer.

The dependence of these institutes on the state’s graciousness to remain solvent has especially had a corrupting effect. More than anything else, these institutions seem to have lost their revolutionary role, the mantle of independent thinking and change they wore so easily before independence. “Our universities,” one college dean tells me, “have been handed over to political ideology.” Dr. Nayyar says, “Our deans and administrators now hang on the spoken word of our politicians, and student unions and teachers beat to their drum. It’s so entrenched that asserting independence in appointments and day-to-day decisions turns you into a radical, a rebel in the system.”

Our bunkered institutions

During my visits to my alma mater in the late 1990s, what struck me most about the campus was its general sense of disrepair. By then, it was two decades since I had graduated and I was nostalgic for the place where I had spent some of the best years of my life. But on my return, I was shocked by what I saw. The IIT Bombay campus is nestled between the Powai and Virar lakes, and has always been green and beautiful, but the buildings themselves were depressingly dilapidated, and it looked nothing like what it was: one of India’s top educational institutions. I resolved then to reengage with the institute and do anything possible to restore it. As an alumnus who had unexpectedly got lucky in the IT boom, I funded various initiatives, including the renovation of my old Hostel 8, the setting up of an IT school and a new IT incubation lab. IIT being a residential campus, the number of students that the institute could admit was constrained by the number of hostel rooms, and there had been no significant addition to the hostel capacity in decades. So the IIT management and I decided to cofund two new hostels that would add one thousand rooms, an increase of 30 percent. These hostels were built in record time—in less than two years—thanks to Dr. Ashok Misra, the dynamic director of IIT Bombay.

But to my utter surprise, the IIT management soon got a letter from the ministry of human resources development (HRD) under Murli Manohar Joshi inquiring why such a “lavish” hostel had been built, and whether the college had followed due process. And a few years later when the state of Gujarat offered IIT Bombay both land and money to build an extended campus, the HRD ministry under Arjun Singh inexplicably withheld permission for several months. Several other initiatives aimed at increasing the capacity of the IITs were also criticized and delayed.

Even as these institutes languish under the “HRD raj,” Patna, the capital of Bihar, is seeing rare and booming growth in a related industry—coaching classes to train students for admission exams to the top universities. Among the most famous coaching institutes in the city is the Ramanujan School of Mathematics, run by the mathematician Anand Kumar. Every year thousands of students come to this school for coaching, and thirty of the best and the brightest are selected into the “Super 30” and put through a punishing eight-month coaching session to prepare them for the IIT entrance exam. As Anand Kumar says, these students “sleep, talk, walk and eat IIT” during this time. The boot camp appears to pay off—in 2007 a record twenty-eight of the Super 30 made it to the IITs.

This is a microcosm of the state of our universities. On the one hand we have our top institutes asphyxiated under regulations that are often as puzzling as they are suffocating. On the other we see a process of selection where more and more aspirants compete for a handful of seats at our best colleges, and for that shrinking chance of grabbing a place in the small patch of light and promise that these institutes offer.

HOW DID WE come from the early euphoria around education to this dismal state of affairs? It is true that the first few governments invested significant amounts in these institutes—even in the midst of India’s financial crisis, Nehru managed to build the IITs with the help of German, British, Russian and U.S. funding. But the government’s emphasis on “accessibility” meant that it was reluctant to charge the fees required to cover education costs. The aversion toward charging fees made state investments into our institutes a source of guaranteed deficits for the government, not exactly an attractive incentive for them to pour money into colleges.

To make matters worse, the routes through which these institutes could earn their own income—such as research—were cut off. The government was tunneling research work into institutions such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the Defense Research and Development Organization, Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd and the Bhabha Atomic Research Center, in sharp contrast to policies in countries such as the United States, where research funds from public agencies such as the National Science Foundation typically go to both research institutions and universities. The result was that research in academia—the university’s soul—atrophied. Cutting-edge research not only attracts financing but also brings in both talented students and faculty, encourages innovation and new ideas, and keeps the academic atmosphere from choking in rarefied theory.

It was in the 1970s that the big decline began. As the government concerns shifted to famine, exchange pressures and simply keeping its head above water as the Indian economy ran into rough weather in these years, public investment into our institutes also began to dry up. These decades set the pattern for Indian policy as far as long-term issues such as education were concerned. Investments in higher education as a percentage of GDP fell from 7.4 percent in the first five-year plan to 2.7 percent in 1980. At the same time, student fees at institutes like the IITs remain unchanged from what the Sarcar Committee had recommended in 1950,¹¹ even as the inflation in the ensuing years made the real value of these fees one-fiftieth of the original amount.^cq

The thinning budgets of the universities could cover little more than salary expenses, sidelining new infrastructure, course reviews and research. The state in the meantime explicitly frowned on competition among institutes, by prohibiting new institutes from setting up close to existing ones. Policies that cut out merit in everything from pay scales to university budgets resulted in underpaid faculty, a large shortfall of teachers and a lackluster administration. As André Béteille notes, this approach has turned our universities into mere “ABC factories,” degree-giving institutions whose primary focus is not education but conducting examinations. Allowing affiliates to universities allows these colleges to get away with substandard teaching and infrastructure. “I call it the McDonald’s model of education,” Sadagopan says, “but without the quality control.”

Our universities may be driving home the truth of that old adage of the road to hell being paved with good intentions: the socialist leanings of the Indian government were wholly unsuited to our universities, and it was a fundamental clash of ideals. In their best incarnation, universities emphasize the pursuit of new knowledge and nonpartisan thought, and for this they need independence, high, transparent standards and the best of human capital. But in India, the government has undermined funding, independence and the larger role of universities as knowledge creators. And the dominance of the state in the sector has come to mean interference rather than guidance, and politics rather than policy.

Our choices for change

“The eleventh plan,” Montek Singh Ahluwalia tells me, “is more strongly aimed at education than ever before.” Manmohan Singh has triumphantly promoted this fact—he has called the plan a “national education plan,” in which for the first time India is shoveling money, lots of it, into both schools and colleges. Nineteen percent of the budget is allocated for education, quite a ramp-up from the 7.7 percent in the previous plan, and expenditure on higher education is, for the first time in decades, set to go over 1 percent of GDP.

This new enthusiasm is a long overdue acknowledgment of the immense value human capital holds in India’s changing economy. Manmohan Singh often quotes Churchill when he talks about the need for better universities—particularly his remark that “the empires of the future are going to be the empires of the mind”—and he has an academic’s fondness and understanding of education’s place in the economy. But one thing is also clear: the state has made a choice between fixing the system and providing resources. The plan’s approach has chosen to tackle the universities’ money crisis, but the government is silent on the weaknesses that have warped our institutes, and for which money is little more than an ineffectual Band-Aid.

It is not that the Indian government has been unaware of the degradation of the university. The state set up reform committees as early as the 1960s, but the response was slow and reluctant. The 1962 Committee of Standards, for instance, took three years to file its report, by which time the government had changed and the recommendations were never implemented.

In 1985 the Rajiv Gandhi government suggested an overhaul of our universities in a 119-page document titled “Challenge of Education”—a report that minced no words in criticizing the dismal state of India’s universities. Again, there was no action.¹² Even now, there continues to be no dearth of good ideas. Most recently, the National Knowledge Commission made recommendations on improving the independence and transparency of regulators as well as on addressing the challenge of creating enough quality universities to meet the vast demand.

But politically the reform suggestions were, and are, a fist-size pill to swallow. Governments have to handle institutes that have long been in the grip of pugnacious interest groups, from the politicians and controlling trusts to the faculty and the student leaders. As the planning adviser J. P. Naik noted, the existing power structure now “will do its damnedest to see that no radical reconstruction of education . . . takes place.”¹³

Therefore, each time commissions have proposed reform, the spine of the state has been tested and proved wanting. So as one analyst recently remarked, reforms in the sector have amounted to “a Niagara Falls of reports on educational policy issues and a Sahara of action.”

“The resistance among college administrations and the government to changing anything has been pervasive,” says Dr. Sam Pitroda, head of the National Knowledge Commission. Our universities as a result have become islands untouched by the fast-changing economy that surrounds them. Their weaknesses have deeply undermined people’s access to the skills and knowledge they need to take advantage of the jobs in a growing and rapidly changing market.

Despite the legions of our colleges, it is now a rare Indian university that makes it to the top four hundred in the world. As a result, when Indian graduates are held up to the glare of global competition and new standards, many are found wanting—one study deemed that 75 percent of our graduates were unemployable for the work they were ostensibly trained to do.

These failures are most conspicuous in our vocational education system. The estimated seven thousand vocational schools are nearly all in the public sector—the private sector has not entered here because it is not lucrative enough, unlike engineering and medicine. As a consequence, while industrial jobs have become more knowledge- and skill-intensive, vocational institutions have not responded. The relative supply of workers with vocational skills in India has actually come down since the 1990s, and many workers when asked about pursuing such education give a shrug of a response: “it’s of no use.”

The failures of the vocational sector have compounded the challenges of the rest of our education system, since many students who could have built a lucrative career here instead choose substandard graduation or engineering courses, getting degrees of little value and with little chance of employment. One labor market study estimates that 90 percent of employment opportunities in India require some vocational skills, but there is a huge mismatch in the labor available—90 percent of our college and school graduates have only “bookish” knowledge. It eventually becomes difficult for such graduates to take up what they come to see as low-prestige employment. “Many of them will outright refuse a blue-collar job,” Manish Sabharwal tells me. “Even if they can’t get white-collar jobs and the alternative offers them more money, they see it as beneath them.”

But even as many of our colleges have become little more than cardboard cutouts, our politicians and academicians shy away from these difficult realities. We remain stuck with superficialities, arguing over the paint of the tower turrets while the castle crumbles: our public debate on our institutes is focused on two issues, privatization and reservations.

Indian ministers have been unrelenting in their opposition to a law allowing the entry of “profit” into our universities, and the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration has favored a law that would ban “commercialization” in the sector. But even a short inspection of the nature of private investment in higher education, especially preindependence, belies the claim that private investment enables either “commercialization” or “commodification.” The Tatas, for instance, were responsible for a number of venerable institutions focused on the fundamental sciences—besides the Indian Institute of Science, they also set up and funded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1936 and 1945, respectively. The family behind the DCM established the Lady Shri Ram (LSR) College and the Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC), which are now among Delhi University’s top institutes. Similarly, the financier Dr. Rajah Sir Annamalai Chettiar^cr helped establish the Annamalai University in Tamil Nadu, first by setting up the main college and then funding the Madras government in the 1920s in their efforts to expand the university. The laws permitting minority private institutions also cleared the way for well-respected and privately funded universities such as the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) and the Banaras Hindu University (BHU). Churches across India also established colleges that rate among India’s top institutes, including St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, the Christian Medical College in Vellore, St. Stephen’s College in Delhi and Xavier Labor Relations Institute (XLRI) in Jamshedpur. And institutes like the Hindu College—funded by Delhi’s Chandni Chowk businessmen, who had made their fortunes in the Indian bazaar and the trading square—remain among the best early examples of the private sector role contributing to our universities. Since Indian philanthropists and entrepreneurs have set up what are now among India’s most prestigious institutes, there is no reason why they would not do it again, if we make it easy for top-class institutions to come up.^cs Foreign universities will also flock to India if they feel there is a level playing field for such institutes in the country.

India should be welcoming such private participation to address its challenges both in quality and in quantity. As the National Knowledge Commission had pointed out, if we are to move up from an enrollment rate of 15 percent in higher education by 2015, we need at least 1,500 universities as against the 350 we now have. But the government’s budget for the eight new IITs and seven new IIMs alone exceeds Rs 25 billion. The expenditure that we need is clearly not something the state alone can, or should, take on. A vibrant market here creates, in addition, a varied set of institutes that move past our standard-bearer degrees and provide students with opportunities to use their talents in emerging market niches, from animation to anthropology. Other once-reluctant governments have recognized this—the Chinese government has already taken an about-turn from its Cultural Revolution-era hostility toward universities, and it is setting up more than a hundred “IITLIKE” engineering institutes across the country to address the demands of its burgeoning economy. Since the 1990s China has also given its colleges greater autonomy in everything from admissions and finances to course content, and allowed foreign universities to erect campuses in the country.

But in India, the political tap dance that has guaranteed both an apathetic state and restrictions against private education has brought us to a very Indian state of affairs: de facto privatization, where plenty of private colleges have cropped up across the country and where several state legislatures have passed their own bills in their favor. Private investment in the sector has surged to five times that of public investment over the last decade. In fact bad policies dominate in our state universities, without the government being pressured for change, mainly because much of the middle class are voting with their feet and moving away from these institutions into private colleges. People are jockeying for seats either in India’s elite central institutions such as the IITs—which have remained, not for want of effort on the part of certain legislators, somewhat above the political fray—or in the rising number of private institutes that have mushroomed across the country. The promise of white-collar jobs in the 1990s across Indian industry has especially driven the dramatic expansion of private engineering colleges and business schools in the last decade and a half.

In fact it is primarily the expansion of these private-sector colleges that supported the growth of the IT industry. The industry emerged mainly in the states that had allowed private engineering colleges before 1992—Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu—and more than 80 percent of the new capacity in engineering graduates over the last twenty-five years has been created by private institutes.¹⁴

Another factor that took the pressure off public higher education is that even as students opted for private colleges, the elite in India found foreign education accessible, especially with the country’s postliberalization riches.^ct As a consequence, India today has the largest number of students abroad—nearly 200,000—who are subsidizing universities in host countries through their fees.

However, the weak regulatory environment has encouraged private investment mainly from people looking to make a fast buck rather than provide effective education. Such creeping, unregulated privatization is dominated by religious groups and politicians exploiting loopholes in the law—hardly the recommended strategy for the market to participate in our universities. In fact somewhere around two thirds of these institutes are deemed below par, and less than a third qualify for recognition by the UGC. Professor Sadagopan recounts an anecdote of a “truck carrying books from college to college to fill empty shelves prior to a state inspection of college libraries”; there is a real danger of this soon becoming the norm rather than the exception. Reality is now worse than a Vijay Tendulkar^cu satire, as the opponents of laws favoring private education have created the very conditions they fear most—“exploitative,” “for-profit” private education.

The sheer wrongheadedness of such an approach—where bad regulation has created a runaway private sector, even as the government hinders the day-to-day running of state colleges—was recently in full view in Chhattisgarh, where the pendulum on university regulation swung to one extreme and then the other. The 2002 Chhattisgarh Private Sector Universities Act (a badly written piece of legislation that was Swiss-cheese-like in its loopholes) created a wave of more than a hundred new private universities across the state, some of which were “operating out of corner stores and run-down apartments.”¹⁵ When the Supreme Court struck the act down, it also swung the other extreme and recommended that each new university in the state had to be created through a separate law, specifically authorizing it. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta notes, the ruling was like demanding that “every business have an individual law authorizing it to operate.”

Some government role in higher education is inevitable and necessary. This is obvious even in the United States, which arguably has the world’s most vibrant and successful network of private universities. American state universities and community colleges are subsidized by the federal and state governments. Effective regulation must focus less on the window dressing—private versus public ownership—and more on achieving a balance that gives universities the independence to take critical decisions on hiring, pay scales, fees, student selection, course content and infrastructure. At the same time, an empowered, independent regulator must focus on monitoring the quality of institutional output such as patents, papers published and the employability of graduating students. And most important, such a regulator must be allowed to rate and derecognize institutions on the basis of these criteria. At the National Knowledge Commission, we had made some recommendations for such regulation that included eliminating the regulatory roles of the confusing array of statutory bodies such as the UGC and the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and establishing in their place a “super regulator” in the form of a single, independent regulatory authority for higher education. Such a body would bring about uniform standards and a transparent system of regulation, recognition and quality control. This would also make way for national-level assessment tests and scores that would carry weight in any university anywhere in India.

Such an emphasis on quantity and quality—with more private universities, foreign investment as well as smart regulation—would bring with it a fresh jolt of new ideas and investment, and a much needed shake-up to what is now a very complacent sector. These steps are also critical to end the politics of scarcity in our universities and the painful, hyper-Darwinian selection process that now exists, which has encouraged the “Kota mind-set” of cramming—and created a coaching industry worth Rs 10 billion annually.

The steps to increase the quantity of good colleges would go a long way in expanding access beyond the tiny sliver of our population—12 percent—that now attends college. Such a large-scale, short-term expansion has been done before: when the United States was faced with a million demobilized soldiers in the 1950s and 1960s after the world war, it rapidly improved access to colleges by offering cheap financing options for students and allowing the private sector to expand into universities across the country.

The democratic sense of our universities

In June 2008, St. Stephen’s College, one of India’s most reputed institutes, announced that it would reserve 50 percent of its seats for Christian students. The news channel NDTV invited Ramachandra Guha, a former Stephanian, to a panel to give his opinion on the decision, and I watched as his remarks opposing the quota were shouted down by an academic who said that “minorities deserve protections, and minority colleges are the right institutions to do it.”^cv Ram pointed out that the Christians eligible for the 50 percent quota make up around 2 percent of the Indian population, and the quota decisively downgraded merit in admissions, setting the cutoff high school score for Christian students at 60 percent in a college that typically demanded well over 90 percent. More depressing, an institute famous for its diverse alumni, Christian or otherwise—Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Amitav Ghosh, Kaushik Basu—is now encouraging a policy that segregates religious groups within a secular society.

The movement toward such policies is now pervasive. Instead of debating the difficult but necessary reforms we need to improve access, expansion and quality in our universities, Indian politicians have stuck to the issue of reservations. In 2006 a constitutional amendment sanctified caste-based reservations in private universities, and a new law increased reservations in central institutions to include more caste groups. Nehru had trusted our universities with the ability to cleanse India of its “feudal pathologies,” thanks to their influence through ideas that were both “secular and scientific.” But with reservation the opposite is taking place—our universities are being shaped by the worst of India’s factionalism and feudal ideas. Our biggest arguments are now over the share of different castes and communities in seats and hiring.

“Reservation has probably set us back several years in our ability to carry out the reforms we need to,” Sam tells me. It has become a means of evading the questions of falling quality and low access by demanding community-based access to the few good institutions that remain. It has also preempted effective approaches where we could combine merit and financial aid effectively while expanding access to quality education. Needs-blind admissions—where a student’s financial status is not looked at until after the admission is made, but no student would have to forgo education due to financial constraints—has not received the same attention as reservations, and neither have affirmative action policies that take into account both skills and background.

The reservations approach has embedded itself to the point that it now seems impossible to drive a stake into its heart. For many resigned observers, the hugely popular support for reservation is in line with the general politicization of higher education. The 1986 National Policy on Education had virtually conceded defeat while remarking that all basic policy decisions in education had become “political in their essence.” But by breaking down this wall between politics and our universities, we are killing the reformist capability of our colleges.

Though the various competing visions for our institutes seem bent on destroying each other, there is common ground among them—particularly in their need to ensure relevance, quantity and access. The reservation debate feeds on the major weakness in India’s higher education: the lack of access to quality schools. Arjun Singh’s recommendations for OBC reservations in central institutions was spark to dry tinder, igniting protests across the country, particularly because half of all the highly coveted seats in India’s top colleges were now “reserved,” making admissions even harder to come by for the “general category” students. Only when the Moily committee recommended an increase in the total number of seats, so that capacities in the general category remained unchanged, did much of the anger die down.

Our universities are now among the last remaining holdouts of the top-down state, where the government’s word passes down the ranks, and is carried out by its bureaucrats. This sector may also be the hardest for the government to let go of, considering the central role universities are seen to play in shaping a country’s ideas, and the power that reservation has in whipping up electorates into a frenzy. But the market economy is nevertheless pushing relentlessly against old systems, urging them toward reform, and penalizing policies that fail. The question remains, however, whether we can enable reform fast enough to leverage the opportunities we now have both domestically and globally.

Reform requires key, controversial steps: we need to move toward a model of light regulation, where we have an independent regulator distanced from government. The oversight of educational institutions must be transparent and allow new institutions to enter easily. An open system that welcomes private investment both from India and from abroad is essential to create institutions with ambitions to be world-class.

Investments without reforms will do nothing to counter the distortions that we see today. Entrepreneurs building institutes will continue to come up with combinations of nonprofit and for-profit organizations to evade regulation and taxes. The landscape will fragment into a highly regulated and a totally unregulated sector. The politics that are insidious to the sector will discourage those who want to set up top-quality colleges. The rich will send their children abroad to study. In the face of a lack of choice and capacity the battle over reservations and the bunker mentality of preparatory schools for admissions to top colleges will continue. And the students will remain caught in the middle of this harrowing mess.

The effect of reform here is likely to be electrifying. Universities are powerful centers for dissent and change. The Kothari Commission report had called them “the organs of civilization”—across countries, they have been the major source of new ideas, both economic and political. The most fundamental notions of secular identity and liberty had their roots in Europe’s universities, and the most prominent technological advances and innovations of the last few decades have come from the tight cluster of colleges in the United States, Europe and increasingly East Asia. In India, during the years of colonial rule, our universities had fulfilled precisely this role. As André Béteille has written, these universities were “among the first open and secular institutions in a society that was governed largely by the rules of kinship, caste and religion.”¹⁶ They were the first places where thousands of Indians began to question and resist unfairness both in domestic tradition and in imperial policy.

Unshackling these institutions from the hold of the state and interest groups means that our universities, rather than being weathervanes for our political opinions and debates, can become important shapers of political opinion in themselves. This is especially true as we now move into uncharted territory in our environment, energy, health and pension challenges, and as we attempt to leverage technology more effectively for growth. Reforms in higher education cannot be bargained away—they form the bedrock for a vibrant economy, the place from where we can, given the chance, build powerful and sustainable new ideas for our future.