Why Harvard and Others Must be Allowed Into India

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2014-15 are just out, and once again, not a single Indian University features in the top 200 Universities of the world. You can be sure that the gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts will be heard in opinion columns and Presidential speeches for months to come.

Our first instinct is, inevitably, to be defensive: the dice are stacked against us. In a recent presentation by the Times Higher Education Survey team about the weightage given to various aspects in their rankings, they mentioned that 30% weightage each was given to research and citations (which are of course, of published research). Since India's universities are largely teaching institutions where little research is done, and research is done in small institutions where there is very little teaching, India starts off with 60% of the weighting against us -- an obvious disadvantage in the global university rankings.

Some argue that we must also be wary of such rankings. In an editorial opinion in The Hindu last year, two Professors, one of whom taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), argued against these rankings, commenting on their lack of insight into intangible features of an institution. They described JNU's unique system of deviation points devised to bring to the campus students from deprived communities and backward regions. The University makes an effort to bring these students at par with others while integrating them with the larger university culture, and making them prominent contributors to making the university a vibrant celebration of intellectual prowess. The article pointedly argued: under what scale or ranking can this unique system be evaluated?

While these rankings remain a matter of debate, we clearly need to create, across India, an ecosystem of research and teaching around related disciplines. If we can bring several such institutions to life, we could also be in position to attract the best minds from abroad to work in our laboratories and research think tanks and produce solutions which could answer the foremost questions of the world. The UPA's ambitious education bills were unfortunately a victim of the dysfunctionality of our Parliament: those in the Opposition who prefer disruption to debate have ensured that they have not even been discussed, let alone passed. One can only hope that now they are in power, the former Opposition will here too, as in so many areas, adopt the policies they had obstructed when we tried to pursue them. They could start with our "Universities for Research and Innovation Bill" if they wish!

Ironically, India has one of the largest higher education systems in the world and ranks second in terms of student enrolment, exhibiting a healthy growth in the number of institutions and enrolment over the six and a half decades since Independence. India now has 621 universities and 33,500 colleges, but only a few world-class institutions, including notably the globally-renowned Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) whose graduates have flourished in America's Silicon Valley. But these are still islands in a sea of mediocrity.

The need for education reform has never been clearer. India's spending on higher education is only 1.22% of GDP, which is quite low compared to US spending at 3.1% or, closer to home, South Korea's at 2.4% of GDP. The figure should be higher. So too should India's share in global research output, which is far too low at 3.5% for a country with 17% of the world's brains.

It doesn't need to be this way. Our higher education is over-regulated and under-governed, with the University Grants Commission (UGC), Medical Council of India (MCI) and All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) issuing one-size-fits-all directives to prospective universities about the size of their buildings, the number of classrooms and teachers, and what they are allowed to teach. Our regulatory institutions are stifling academic advancement rather than promoting it. And the MCI is a national scandal, stifling the creation of necessary capacity in medical education so that many talented young people are driven away while the nation clamours for medical attention.

But let's look beyond the rankings. They're a symptom of something far more important to diagnose: what ails our higher education. There are many maladies we could talk about, but the one we always gloss over is the basic one of capacity.  How do we create enough quality institutions to meet the demand?

The challenge of educating and training our vast population under the age of 25 is too great for the Government to meet with its own resources. It is for this reason that the last two decades have also seen the increasing participation of the private sector at all levels of our education system. To their credit, private sector institutions have responded with enthusiasm, and (especially in the field of technical and medical education) have made a significant contribution. But even they aren't enough to educate and prepare our youth for the 21st century.

Given the size and potential of our population, foreign universities are now showing a keen interest in creating institutions in India. But whereas countries in the Middle East, and China, are going out of their way to woo foreign universities to set up campuses in their countries, India's regulatory framework turns away the many academic suitors who have come calling in recent years. Harvard and Yale would have both been willing to open branches in India to offer quality education to Indian students, but have been obliged to stay away.

Those Indians who choose to study abroad easily get opportunities to do so - currently nearly 100,000 of them in the United States alone. We made a huge fuss about Indian students getting beaten up in Australia. They would not need to go abroad - nor their parents to spend an estimated $3 billion a year in sending them afar -- if we opened up the higher educational space in our country to institutions of international repute, and authorized the setting up of double the number of universities as we currently have.

There is no question that the need exists, the demand is huge, and that our growing and youthful population could easily fill several hundred new campuses. Nor is there a shortage of able and willing institutions ready to come into India. But many of these would not brook the interference of our unimaginative and over-directive UGC, made worse by the political diktats of the BJP government, which has taken a hatchet to what little autonomy our universities enjoyed.

And there's another problem: foreign universities would offer stiff competition to the vested interests, well-represented in our Parliament, who have made the higher education sector their chasse gardee, a closed source of largely illicit revenue flowing from a supposedly non-profit vocation. This is one of the reasons we have university places available to barely 15 percent of those who clamour for them. Meanwhile, ordinary Indians would scrape and save to buy their children the best possible education, but it's simply not available.

Over the next 20 years, India faces the challenge and opportunity of growing at a rate of 8% and more, with a youthful, productive working-age population that vastly outnumbers those available in the rest of an ageing world. A well-educated, highly-skilled workforce will be an essential prerequisite for driving this momentum. We know that the price of failure is too high: the Naxalite movement shows what might become of frustrated, under-educated and unemployed young men. We have to get it right; India's future depends on it. But that means taking far-seeing and courageous decisions. Is that too much to expect from our system?

(Dr Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 15 books, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections On the Nation in Our Time.)

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