Although the country boasts 37,000 colleges and 735 universities, the fundamental problem of post-independence India’s higher education system is excessive Central and state government control UNSURPRISINGLY ALL THE accumulated sins of omission and commission of the past six decades in preschool, primary and secondary education have risen to an ugly froth in India’s higher education system. Although the country boasts 37,000 undergraduate colleges and 735 universities with some of them established over 150 years ago, not even one is ranked among the Top 200 in the World University Rankings league tables published annually by the highly-respected London-based rating agency Quacquarelli Symonds, Times Higher Education (THE) or even of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University. India’s top-ranked institution of higher education in THE World University Rankings 2013-14 is a surprise Panjab University ranked #226-250. For a nation long accustomed to supinely accepting Western superiority in industry, agriculture, manufacturing, education and health, the rock-bottom ranking of Indian varsities would not rankle as much if several Asian universities in China and South Korea were not ranked among the Top 100, despite India boasting a substantially larger number of universities and institutions of higher education in 1947. Injured pride and sentiment aside, the damaging outcome of accumulated neglect and abuse of preschool-12 education is that a substantial majority of the country’s graduates are insufficiently prepared for the world of work. According to a devastating McKinsey World Institute-NASSCOM study (2005), 75 percent of India’s 350,000 engineering graduates and 85 percent of arts, science and commerce graduates are unfit for employment in multinational companies which insist upon minimum standards. A more recent report by Aspiring Minds, a Gurgaon-based recruitment company that assessed the employability of over 60,000 bachelor’s degree holders countrywide, and published an Employability Report on Indian Graduates (2013), 47 percent of arts, science and commerce graduates certified by Indian universities are unemployable. “For an analyst’s role, close to 84 percent graduates were found to lack the right levels of cognitive ability. 90 percent of graduates did not have the required proficiency in English communication. The employability of graduates varies from 2.59 percent in functional roles such as accounting to 15.88 percent in sales-related roles and 21.37 percent for roles in the business process outsourcing sector. A significant proportion of graduates, nearly 47 percent, were found not employable in any sector, given their insufficient English language and cognitive skills,” says the report in a damning indictment of collegiate education in India. The fundamental problem of post-independence India’s higher education system is excessive Central and state government control. All the country’s 735 universities are subject to the supervisory jurisdiction of the Delhi-based University Grants Commission (UGC, estb. 1956) which was established to heavily subsidise and supervise the operations of the country’s 42 Central government varsities. But over a period of time, UGC has extended its jurisdiction to accredit and approve all institutions, and academic programmes offered by the country’s arts, science and commerce colleges. Likewise, the study programmes of 7,500 engineering colleges and 4,300 B-schools among other…
