What ails Indian higher education: Government’s licence-permit raj

Source: The post is based on an article “What ails Indian higher education: Government’s licence-permit raj” published in The Indian Express on 26^th September 2022.

Syllabus: GS 2 – Issues relating to development and management of Social Sector/Services relating to education

News: The public institutions have managed to provide quality education to the growing nationals but there are many problems associated with them.

How did Higher Educational Institutions change?

Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) have changed a lot from before. HEIs were mostly public institutions till 2003. Today, around 70 percent of the students studying higher education enroll themselves in private HEIs, due to the implementation of Mandal Commission report.

What are the problems associated with HEIs?

Vacant posts: Around 30 per cent posts were vacant in central universities and 40 per cent posts were vacant only for professors in December 2021.

There is a worse condition in the state universities. For example, 62 per cent posts were vacant in Odisha and two universities had no teachers at all. Around 25 per cent of college posts in Delhi were totally vacant in December 2021.

Appointment: The appointment of faculties goes through a long chain from financial, bureaucratic or judicial hurdles.

Further, temporary and ad hoc professors are burdened with a full-time routine on a fixed salary which is far below normal salary scales. Furthermore, there are regular breaks from their work.

Budget: The discontinuance of Five-Year Plans deprived public universities of their secured development grants.

The budget for central universities rose by 6.6 per cent in the year 2022, which is nominal if adjusted for inflation. While the condition of State HEIs funding is worse.

Originally, the state government used to pay for salaries and maintenance for the universities while central government used to pay for development through UGC.

Today, UGC is not doing the required task as funding schemes are mostly suspended.

RUSA funds: The Education Ministry administers the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA). The RUSA funds were not sufficient. It left the universities with incomplete projects and unemployed staff.

Institute of Eminence (IoE): The Institute of Eminence (IoE) status was awarded to Jadavpur and Anna universities. The IoE tag entitles public HEIs to Rs 1,000 crore. But due to various bureaucratic hurdles the award has not yet been given.

Freedom of operation: There are also another channels for resource mobilisation that can be taken by public universities but this requires freedom of operation. But the Centre and state governments are not ready to give this freedom.

It is necessary to give universities freedom of operations as can be seen from the Jadavpur university. It helped the university to get IoE award as well as University with Potential for Excellence award.