Higher Education at the Cross-Roads of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

By Dr. (Miss) A. S. DESAI

Summary

Delivered as the 33rd A. D. Shroff Memorial Lecture under the auspices of the Forum of Free Enterprise in Mumbai on 7 December 1998, Dr. (Miss) A. S. Desai’s address frames Indian higher education as a system standing between a twentieth century preoccupied with material resources and a twenty-first century built on knowledge and information. Speaking as Chairperson of the University Grants Commission, she argues that India can ill afford the complacency of believing the country cannot bear the costs of an expanded university system — on the contrary, the country cannot afford NOT to invest in it.

The lecture surveys the quantitative growth of the system since Independence — from a handful of universities at 1947 to 228 universities and roughly 9,703 colleges by 1997-98 — and judges the expansion to have been ‘poorly planned’: one college established every day and one university every three to four months, but only 6 per cent of the 17-23 age cohort enrolled, well behind Malaysia, Thailand or Singapore. Desai then examines access and equity (the under-representation of women, marginal farmers, casual labour, displaced and disabled groups), quality (the way ‘massification’ at lower levels feeds unequal preparation into higher education, with first-generation learners particularly disadvantaged), and relevance (the need to couple humanities, social sciences, sciences and commerce with field experience, problem-based specialisations, distance-learning credits and ICAR-tied rural courses).

The second half of the rendered pages turns to the impact of globalization on university research — WTO, intellectual property regimes, and the need for indigenous R&D — and opens a discussion of funding. Citing the UNESCO World Declaration on Higher Education for the Twenty-First Century (Paris, October 1998) and the Delors report, Desai defends public funding as essential, noting that Plan allocations to the Department of Education have collapsed from 25 per cent in the IVth Plan to 8 per cent in the VIIIth, leaving universities starved for infrastructure, equipment and library materials.

Key points

• India has built the second-largest university system in the world — 228 universities and ~9,703 colleges by 1997-98 — yet only 6 per cent of the 17-23 age group is enrolled in higher education, lagging Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.

• The expansion has been ‘poorly planned’: one college is established roughly every day and one university every three or four months, with growth disconnected from local need or course-type.

• Desai inverts the conventional fiscal anxiety — India cannot afford NOT to invest in higher education if it is to nurture leadership and professionals for the twenty-first century.

• Access remains skewed: women are only one-third of enrolment, and marginal farmers, casual labour, migrant families, displaced groups and the disabled are largely excluded from tertiary education.

• The ‘massification’ of school education without quality inputs has produced first-generation learners poorly prepared in language, mathematics and science; the merit debate is meaningless when socio-economic factors determine preparation.

• Curricula must move beyond narrow disciplinary specialisation toward ‘cafeteria-style’ problem-based options, with field-based experience, hands-on training in industry, and mixed distance/conventional credit transfer.

• Globalization, WTO, and intellectual property regimes oblige Indian universities to build indigenous R&D and to educate researchers on IPR — ‘to publish is to perish unless the intellectual property rights are defended’.

• Plan funding for education has declined from 25 per cent in the IVth Plan to 8 per cent in the VIIIth, leaving infrastructure deteriorated; the UNESCO 1998 World Declaration is invoked to defend the essential role of public support.

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