To create level playing fields, in this issue we present EW India Higher Education Rankings 2020-21 ranking private autonomous, government autonomous and Top 100 non-autonomous colleges separately on five common parameters of collegiate excellence – Dilip Thakore Perhaps the greatest tragedy of post-independence India’s failed national development effort is that even the brightest and best of the country’s intellectuals are unable to fully absorb the proposition that high-quality education across the spectrum from pre-primary to PhD is the essential prerequisite of national prosperity. This is why despite using reams of newsprint to propagate their prescriptions for socio-economic progress and growth of the nation, the public intellectual who recommends top budget priority for education is a rara avis. Despite a mountain of historical evidence in the public domain testifying that the dominance of OECD nations in the global order is attributable to sustained investment in public and private education, India’s academy and public intellectuals at best bleat a weak chorus in support of top budgetary and resource allocation for educating the world’s youngest youth and child population of over 500 million. In the Union budget 2020-21 presented to Parliament and the people on February 1, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated a sum of Rs.99,312 crore for education — or Rs.122,312 crore if one adds the allocation made for ECCE (early childhood care and education) in the country’s 1.6 million anganwadis run by the Union ministry of women and child development. But this sum adds up to a mere 0.54 percent of GDP. If the provision made for public education by India’s 29 state governments and Union territories is added, it aggregates to Rs. 6.8 lakh crore, equivalent to a mere 3.1 percent of GDP. Against this the spend of 190 countries around the world averages 5 percent of GDP. Prudently, developed OECD countries routinely allocate 6-12 percent of GDP per year for public education. Last month in the annual post budget issue of EducationWorld, your editors presented a detailed schema/calculus outlining ways and means for the Union government to mobilise an additional Rs.6 lakh crore for investment in public education, and Rs.2 lakh crore in public primary health. In the unlikely event of this schema being accepted, the Central government’s outlay for education would increase to Rs.7.22 lakh crore, equivalent to 3.18 percent of GDP (Rs.227 lakh crore) and the outlay for public primary health to Rs.2.65 lakh crore (1.16 percent of GDP). Significantly, although EW’s additional resource mobilisation plan for public education and health was sent to over a dozen nationally renowned economists (and Niti Aayog, the Central government’s think tank) with an invitation for comment and critique, none of them has responded. Indifference towards public education is pervasive in Indian society where high productivity, the outcome of good education, seems to be a peripheral issue. Your editors are exceptions to this rule. Indeed the raison d’etre of this publication encapsulated in our mis-sion statement (“to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national…
