once again,India is on the crossroad, there was a time during 60s when India was regarded as coming superpower while many other countries like South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand were regarded basket case, fifty years down the line case is upside down. The reason- set of policy choices adopted by them and by India differed crucially and so did the outcome. Now again, international agencies, think tanks, intellectuals are talking the same thing or in other words time has taken a full circle and once again opportunities are knocking the doors, policy choices of today will be an outcome of tomorrow.
The greatest opportunity before India is its demographic dividend combined with the arrival of knowledge based economies. The key to capture this opportunity is the revitalization of India’s education sector in general and higher education in particular.
The current status of higher education in India is grossly inadequate; the enrollment ratio in higher education is dismal 6% which is one of the lowest in the world, comparing with the USA where it is 25% to 30% there is huge gap. On other parameters, only 400$ per year per student is the amount of public expenditure in India while comparable amount in USA is over $9500 and in china $2728. Although systematically, public spending on education has gone up but still it is less than 1% of GDP in India, while it is in much higher proportion of GDP in other countries.
The growth of higher education in India has been phenomenal. Starting with 1950- 51, there were only 263,000 students in all disciplines in 750 colleges affiliated to 30 universities. This has grown by 2005 to 11 million students in 17,000 Degree colleges affiliated to 230 universities and non-affiliated university-level institutions. In addition, there are about 10 million students in over 6500 in vocational institutions. The enrolment is growing at the rate of 5.1 per cent per year. However, of the Degree students only 5 per cent are enrolled into engineering courses, while an overall 20 per cent in sciences.
There are few important features of higher education in India
· Highly bureaucratized system with multiple controls and regulations exercised by Central and State Governments, statutory bodies (UGC, AICTE and others), university administration and local management.
· System is heavily subsidized by the Government. Up to 90per cent of the operating costs are paid for by the state. The efficiency of fund utilization is very poor due to internal rigidities.
· Salary and compensation for teaching staff is poor and, therefore, higher education institutions are unable to attract and retain qualified and trained teachers. Besides unattractive compensation packages, recruitment procedure is lengthy and working environment not conducive to retention. As a result, a substantial proportion of high ranking students who could fill up such assignments prefer to work elsewhere or go abroad.
· Most institutions offer outdated programmes with inflexible structures and content. While course content has been updated and restructured over time in the world’s best institutions, Indian university curricula have lagged behind.
· Multiple regulators and overlapping of regulatory work
· No consensus on entry of foreign universities
The major challenges can be summarized as follow that has gripped the higher education sector
The Government’s dilemma is well known. On one hand India has a huge population of uneducated children and the Constitution provides for free and compulsory education upto the age of 14. On the other hand, the growth of the knowledge sector along with BPO is sending a new signal to the economy. The experiment of India in developing its institutions of higher learning has paid off. While growth in South East Asia, starting with Japan, then the Asian Tigers and now China, is export led in nature with cheap manufacturing products leading the fray.
India’s present growth is led by service sector, which has had a boost due to the ICT revolution. However, this is a skill-intensive sector and India is now moving up the value chain, which calls for greater R&D efforts and requires knowledge workers as opposed to manual workers. A new strategy for meeting this challenge needs to be evolved with complete policy commitment on the part of the government. The knowledge sector boom unfortunately, can only reach the initial benefit to the educated, who are generally better off and, therefore, does not impact on the poor directly. The manual labourer who can qualify for a factory job is excluded from this growth process.
This new window of service sector export led growth in India is not an opportunity that
can be frittered away. Similar to export of manufacturing, which requires an infrastructure of roads, electricity and dedicated manual labour, service sector export requires a steady supply of highly skilled manpower which can only be supported by a robust Higher Education System along with an internet infrastructure that is both deep as well as broad. Seen from this perspective, the business of providing appropriate higher education opportunities is not just the concern of the Ministry of Education, but all other ministries with operations in related areas such as, the Ministries ofCommerce, IT, Communications, Health, Science & Technology, Finance etc.
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