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Higher Education in India. Dr.Sangeeta Angom Manasi Thapliyal. Introduction. India is a land of great vastness, diversity and history(ies) dating back to several millennia.
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Higher Education in India Dr.Sangeeta Angom Manasi Thapliyal
Introduction • India is a land of great vastness, diversity and history(ies) dating back to several millennia. • With a land spanning 3,287,263 square kilometers occupying 2.4% of total area of world makes it the seventh largest country. • India has a population of 1.1 billion which is 16% of the world’s population • Home to over fifteen hundred different languages and dialects, and to almost all the major religions of the world, having variety in cultural expressions • India is a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic, with twenty-eight states and seven centrally administered union territories • India has a diverse economy encompassing traditional village farming, modern agriculture, handicrafts, wide range of modern industries and a number of service industries
The Legacy(?) • The Indian subcontinent was, in ancient and medieval period, home to great institutions of learning such as Nalanda, Taxila and Vikramshila, which attracted and hosted scholars from across the world. • Towards the medieval times, education continued to be largely rooted in religion and deeply linked to the ways of living and livelihood of people. Indigenous systems of teaching, in context of particular communities or groups, continued with variations across the region. • Under the British rule, education was elitist, catering to only the socially advantaged sections of society, largely institutionalised to meet the administrative requirements of the imperialist rule in India. • The foundation of modern higher education was laid down by the British colonial regime in the mid-19th century.
Higher Education in Contemporary India • Higher education is the joint responsibility of the Central and the State governments, both help to fund it. Universities have to be established by Act of parliament or State legislature. • Most of the universities are teaching and research institutions. There are also entities called as affiliated colleges, constituent colleges, autonomous colleges. Most of the colleges provide undergraduate education, very few undertake graduate teaching and research • Universities are of Unitary, Affiliating and combination of both unitary and affiliating. • Four types of universities in India viz. Central, State, Deemed and Private universities. • Large number of vocational training institutions, polytechnics, private teaching shops affiliated to state universities, dot the landscape alongside Institutes of National Importance, IITs, IIMs, ISERs etc.
State and Regulatory Bodies • Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) • State Government • University Grants Commission (UGC): UGC is responsible for the coordination, determination and maintenance of standards of teaching, examination and research in Universities and higher education institutions. It also has a major role in university finance. • For professional education, guidelines come from the relevant all-India agencies such as the Medical Council, the Bar Council, the All India Council for Technical Education and the National Council for Teachers education, etc.
Quality Assessment in Higher Education There are three levels at which the issue of quality is dealt with. • At the national level, University Grants Commission is responsible for the co-ordination and maintenance of standards of higher education. • At the institutional level, colleges and the university departments make attempts to deliver quality education. There is an arrangement for the performance evaluation of teachers in the institutions. • At the provincial level, the State Government needs to monitored the quality through the process of accountability of the university to the State Govt. • It is the responsibility of affiliating university to assure the quality of education in colleges and post-graduate departments of the university. • For various technical and professional disciplines various Professional Councils have been entrusted with the responsibility to maintain standards of higher education.
Quality Assessment in Higher Education • National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) was established in 1994 as the leading body for quality assurance and accreditation of higher education institutions in order to introduce transparency and provide information to students and other groups as to the quality of HE institutions in India. • The Indian Quality Assurance System, unlike the United States, is essentially unitary and centralized in character. • NAAC had by 2007 completed accreditation of only 140 out of the 378 universities and 3492 out of the 14000 colleges. Accreditation is neither compulsory nor tied to the system of funding by UGC. The demand for accreditation is very low and questions are often raised on the feasibility and efficiency of a centralised body in accrediting a diverse set of institutions.
The private universities and the private deemed universities are self financing and in majority of cases are not dependent on UGC for funding. State monitoring of these institutions has not so far taken on a clear shape and there is largely an unfettered growth in private sector with great asymmetries. • 11th Plan has proposed the introduction of a mandatory accreditation system for all educational institutions, creation of multiple rating agencies with a body to rate these rating agencies and department-wise ratings in addition to institutional ratings. In this regard government is proposing a law for mandatory assessment and accreditation in higher education through an independent regulatory authority.
Evident Issues and Challenges • Extremely low GER in higher/tertiary education • Regional imbalances skewed in favour of big cities. • Abysmal quality of higher/tertiary education in large number of institutions • Issues of providing relevant education • Cross Border Education: Issues Concerning Quality, Regulations, Mutual Recognition • Privatization and Commercialization • Higher Education in the context of Sustainable Development • Research in the context of Knowledge Economy • Issues relating to quality of Doctoral Research
What is being done? Proposed expansion in access to higher education through increased institutional capacity • Increased enrolment upto 15% in 2012 from 10% in 2006. 5% net increase in enrolment rate is equivalent to an estimated increase in the number of students from 14million in 2007 to 21 million in 2012 with net increase by 7 million. • All together about 1464 new institutions are to be set up, including 30 central universities and strengthening the intake capacity of existing educational institutions • It is also being hoped that massification and increase in GER would be achieved by having about 40 percent of GER in the Distance Education mode. The obvious pitfalls of this strategy are yet to be addressed in the dominant discourse.
Major Policy Initiatives New Initiatives taken up by Ministry of Human Resource Development for enhancing quality in Higher Education in India which relate to • Bills on Checking malpractices in private institutions. • Educational Tribunal Bill • The bill on Accreditation • The Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and operation) Various Commissions and Committees for developing a policy direction for Higher Education in the country set up by the Government of India in past few years. • National Knowledge Commission • YashPal Committee • National Commission on Higher Education and Research
Concerns and Dilemmas • Among the most critical of these being: the unmanageably large size of the system; too rapid and relentless pace of massification of HE; the paucity of state resources to sustain this growth by themselves without a comprehensive reassessment of rationale of various existing state subsidies to HEIs; a ‘half baked policy ‘and lack of serious engagement with the presence and dynamics of private sector in HE, the challenge to keep pace with the advance of knowledge and technology in the world and to provide at the same time, knowledge and technology relevant and appropriate to the country as a developing society; the contradictions involved in implementing the policy of reservations; political pressure; and finally State control through an insensitive, inflexible bureaucracy(Chitnis, 1995; Mehta, 2000,2004, 2006) • The Gap between what the system provides and what the Country needs – It does not address the sectors of the economy that are not yet industrialized or not even on the threshold of technological advance . The underlying assumption seemingly has been that the needs of this sector will automatically be served by focusing on fairly advanced and sophisticated professional and technical education (Chitnis1995). This assumption, largely aligned to the challenges posed by the latecoming of India to the industrialization process and subsequent need for a technologically trained workforce in independent India recuperating from multidimensionally debilitating colonial rule, has proved to be in the long run damaging. • The dilemma of talking about internationalizing higher education is that it raises concerns about the possible stifling of domestic capabilities in the higher education systems of developing world and may discriminate against any focus on the apparently non profitable terrain of study of indigenous knowledge (accompanying modernization of traditional occupations). (Nayyar 2007and Chitnis 2002) • Within the existing mainstream system, the following remarks capture to a substantial extent the sentiments of a large section of Indian population aspiring for access to a system of Higher education that will be consequential to the possibilities of a ‘productive’ life in society and the economy: “The state system has for decades perpetrated an education fraud on millions of students. By admitting that university degrees are not worth much and therefore even full time BA and BSc students be allowed to pursue a "vocational" degree simultaneously, the UGC has acknowledged what a fraud Indian higher education is, especially for 70 per cent of the students enrolled in basic social sciences, sciences courses across the country. And more than 100,000 of our best students every year are voting by their feet and leaving, often paying a packet to do so.” (Mehta, 2004, The Education Wars, The Hindu)
Story of Indian HE management has been a classic case of State as a regulator becoming a problem greater than the solution it proposes to offer. Tradition of confusing accountability with control – It can be reasonably observed that this thrust of regulatory regime in India has served to diminish rather than increase the supply of education (Mehta 2006). The intensive centralized control exercised by UGC over the years has fallen prey to this fallacy and Indian HE has had to pay a huge price for this oversight. Current deliberations and proposed legislative acts on replacing (in fact wishing away) UGC with National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) are a recognition of the non feasibility of a leviathan bureaucratic organization like UGC (as a central grant giving body, an entry regulator, curriculum designer, and accreditation, all rolled into one) in the transforming higher education scenario of India. How bureaucratic the new proposed body itself would become or would avoid to become is yet to be seen and worked out. • Issue of creating possibilities of empowerment and creating choices for students as opposed to controlling and micromanaging institutional processes (like admissions, fee structures etc.) through arbitrary and largely electoral politics motivated REGULATIONS confronts the effectiveness of trajectory of Higher education reforms on the anvil. • Need for a complex and diversified higher education system and articulation of alternative ways of addressing the social equity concerns and politics of access. Higher/Tertiary educayion cannot also develop on an adhoc trajectory(which seems to be the case at present) without a clear articulation of expectations and real time assessments of the needs required to support massification as well as demands of a transition economy. (Altbach 2009,p.42-The Giants Awake- Higher education Systems in India and China; also Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapoor 2004,p.3, Indian Higher Education reform: From half baked socialism to half baked capitalism)
