The three phases of Indian higher education

India has had a long tradition of higher education since ancient times. Nalanda, Vikramshila, Takshashila and Vallabhi were some of the important and well-known institutions, attracting scholars from all over Asia and influencing religious and political discussions at their time. However, these institutions went into decline as the kingdoms that patronised them disappeared, and the Indian scholastic tradition turned inwards in the wake of invasion and political change. The modern higher education system in India, which originated during the middle of the 19th century, drew little from the tradition of these ancient Indian universities, and was built by the colonial administration for its own skills requirements. The 'colonial' phase One could trace the origins of the modern higher education system in India, in the founding of the civic universities established by the British Colonial Administration in 1857 in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. These universities, which granted degrees and carried out scholarly work, had several technical and medical colleges affiliated to them. While these institutions produced path-breaking research in tropical diseases (Ronald Ross famously discovered the malaria parasite through his work at PG Medical School in Calcutta and Osmania Medical College in Hyderabad) and natural sciences, their primary function was to produce civil administrators and lawyers, following Thomas Babington Macaulay's (1800 -1859) formula of “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (Macaulay, 1835). The Indian graduates these institutions produced helped run the British Raj not just in India, but also further afield in South Africa and South-East Asia. However, there was more than one kind of higher education in pre-independence India. The alternative to colonial education came from the 'private' institutions, set up with specific socio-cultural objectives. Sir Syed Ahmed set up MadrasatulUloomMusalmanan-e-Hind in Aligarh in 1875 (which would become Aligarh Muslim University in 1920), to train Muslim students in science and prepare them for government jobs and university education abroad. Bengali landlords and philanthropists set up the National University of Bengal (later to become Jadavpur University) in Calcutta in 1905 to challenge the 'education for subjugation' offered by the state sponsored Calcutta University. This was also the objective of PanditMadan Mohan Malaviya, who founded Benaras Hindu University in 1916. Using the Nobel Prize money he received, Rabindranath Tagore started 'ViswaBharati' in Bolpur near Calcutta in 1923 (later to become ViswaBharati University in 1951), challenging the predominant Western idea of training for jobs. Noted industrialist and banker Sir Annamalai Chettiar endowed Sri Meenakshi College in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, to promote Sanskrit and Tamil learning, in 1920, which would be given university status ('Annamalai University') in 1927. These 'private' institutions within British Indian territory stood alongside a number of remarkable universities and institutions endowed by local princes, such as Baroda College of Science set up in 1881 (later, Maharaja Sayajirao University) and Osmania Medical College in Hyderabad, set up in 1846. The 'nation building' phase Indian higher education at the time of independence, therefore, was diverse, though a primarily state-sponsored affair. The primacy of the state was further consolidated after independence, as most of the private and princely institutions were taken over by the State. The objective for state intervention was to set up an elaborate system of higher education for 'nation building'. However, education was a 'joint subject' in the Indian constitution, primarily making it a responsibility of the constituent states, rather than the central government based in New Delhi. The central government, in fact, had a limited role to play in higher education, and even with the establishment of University Grants Commission in 1956, the universities in India did not mandatorily require a central government approval before setting up, nor could the central government de-recognise any degree. However, the central government did actively set up a number of highly selective Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), Indian Institute of Management (IIMs), and All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), apart from funding a handful of high prestige research institutions and central universities. The Indian higher education system, consequently, developed unevenly -with a few highly selective, well-funded central institutions, supplemented by a large number of State Universities, institutions and colleges, with widely varying quality, funding, levels of academic freedom and priorities, largely reflecting the economic development and political dynamics of the respective states. This created a “tiny at the top” system, as education researcher Phil Altbach (2006) called it. Even in the new millennium, India spent only 0.37 per cent of its GDP on post-secondary education. Only countries like Japan and South Korea, where a majority of students attend unsubsidised private universities, spent as little as India in relative terms on higher education, contends Altbach. On the other hand, United States, a much richer country, spent 1.41 per cent of its GDP on post-secondary education; the comparable figure for the UK was 1.07 per cent. Even China spent 0.50 per cent of its much larger GDP on higher education (Altbach, 2006). The complete state control coupled with meagre resources led to a system with some pockets of excellence, such as the IITs. Arguably, such a system was destined to become a marker of social prestige rather than contributing meaningfully in nation-building and prosperity. Unsurprisingly, many IIT students left India after the completion of their studies, with more than 40,000 settling in the US alone (to put this number in perspective, the entire IIT system in India produced 2,274 undergraduates in 2002). However, the resource constraints made even the top Indian institutions fairly mediocre by international standards. The institutions outside the top tier, funded mostly by the governments of the states, were bereft of even the basic physical and intellectual facilities, creating an education system, which Sunil Khilnani and Devesh Kapur summarise as “poor facilities, abysmal teaching, no accountability... a caricatural education” (Quoted in Altbach, 2006). The limited places available in higher education, a direct outcome of state control, led to rapid popularity of distance learning and open learning qualifications, once these become available in India. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (est. 1985) became one of the world's largest open university systems by student numbers (with more than 3.5 million students in 2010); others, Andhra Pradesh Open University (est. 1982, renamed B.R. Ambedkar Open University in 1994), Kota Open University (est. 1987), Nalanda Open University (est. 1987), VardhamanMahaveer Open University (est. 1987), Y. Chavan Maharastra Open University (1989), Bhoj Open University (est. 1991), Karnataka State Open University (est. 1996), Netaji Subhas Open University (1997), U.P. RajarshiTandon Open University (est. 1999), became popular within the particular state boundaries they were established, offering inexpensive degree and diploma programmes (Latchem and Jung, 2010). This was complemented by the growth of distance learning programmes from established universities, like Annamalai University, which offers more than 500 undergraduate and postgraduate courses through Distance Learning. However, despite its popularity, the quality and relevance of open and distance learning programmes remained suspect, though this did not impede its explosive growth. Also, the gap in state-funded institutions to provide an education in line with available employment opportunities, created the space for private, for-profit education activities, particularly information technology education. Since the 1990s, private education in IT became commonplace in India. Two of the for-profit, publicly listed, education companies, NIIT Limited and Aptech Limited, successfully created nationwide franchise chains creating 'classrooms on the main street' even in the remotest parts of the country. These institutions awarded their own diplomas without any formal recognition, and many students attended these institutions alongside college: getting a degree was considered a social necessity, while the IT training was seen to be necessary for a job. To gain legitimacy, NIIT, Aptech and other private institutions pursued large scale branding campaigns projecting their 'national' presence and maintained dedicated 'industry collaboration' teams, with the responsibility of continuously interacting with a network of employers (Tooley, 2001). The expansion of these chains became self-fulfilling. The more they expanded, the more demand for expansion it created: at its peak, these companies together would account for more than 2,000 outlets, more than a million active students and more than a thousand employers in the network. These institutions were highly profitable and even prestigious, despite being non-selective and offering only diploma programmes; they were differentiated because of their 'national image', sophisticated management practices and 'brand' (documented in Piramal and Ghosal, 2002), which stood in stark contrast to the poorly endowed local colleges. Similar trends were also visible in financial education, in the wake of the expansion of India's stock markets, and later in areas such as Aviation and Hospitality, as the respective sectors expanded. The 'human capital' phase For half a century after Independence, Indian education was marked by a “tiny at the top” state-funded system primarily linked to social prestige. A university degree was often sought not for knowledge or even for a job or career, but better marriage. Private sector post-secondary education was designed to cater to industry requirements. A shift of focus was perceptible in India's National Policy of Education in 1986, which put primacy on 'empowerment' rather than 'enlightenment'. However, it took at least another decade to be translated into viable policy shifts in higher education, leading to rapid expansion, which played out variably among the different Indian states. At the time of writing this report, India has the largest number of higher education institutions in the world-universities and about 33,000 colleges. With nearly 21.8 million students (up from 13 million only five years ago), the Indian higher education system is the second-largest in the world (after China). Apart from 40 central universities, there is a network of nearly 300 specialised science and technology institutions, including more than 200 laboratories and 1,914 polytechnics. There are 15 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), 13 Indian Institutes of Management (IIM), 30 National Institutes of Technology (NIT) and 24 Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), 3,000 colleges of engineering, technology and architecture, 2,100 medical colleges, 3,400 teacher training colleges and nearly 3,000 other professional and technical institutions in areas such as agriculture, law, management, computer applications and information technology. Apart from students at these institutions, there are 4.2 million students registered in the country's Open University systems (Agarwal, 2013). The pace of growth has been hectic. Pawan Agarwal, an adviser on education to India's Planning Commission, estimates that 10 colleges have opened and 5,000 new students have been offered a place, on average, every day for the last five years. The central universities and institutions now accommodate 250,000 more students than they did in 2007; the enrollment at state level institutions and private universities have gone up by 2.4 million and 5.3 million respectively (Agarwal, 2013). During the eleventh Five Year Plan (2007-2012), the government launched a scheme for massive further expansion, which includes establishing 30 central universities, 14 world class universities, 374 undergraduate college, seven IIMs, eight IITs, 20 IIITs, 10 NITs, five Indian Institutes of Science, Education and Research (IISERs), two schools of Planning and Architecture, 1,000 colleges of engineering and technology, 700 polytechnics, 50 research centres with the stated objective to make India a 'higher education hub' in the region and beyond. Capacity expansion of this scale, particularly in the number of institutions, has created issues quite unique to Indian higher education. The average size of a higher education institution in India is only around 600 students. This is significantly low compared to US and Europe (3,000-4,000 students on average) and China (8,000-9,000 students on average). Given that many older colleges are much larger, this points to a very high level of fragmentation in the sector. There are some universities with only a few hundred students, making them unsustainable from the start (Agarwal, 2003).