Promoted by go-getting education entrepreneurs, a new genre of multi-disciplinary private universities which benchmark themselves against the best worldwide, offers the prospect of delivering excellent teaching, research and knowledge creation opportunities Post-independence India’s higher education sector comprising 53,000 undergrad colleges and 1,338 universities with an aggregate enrolment of 44.6 million youth, has proved a huge disappointment. How come not a single global game-changer product/ service on the impact scale of the internet, personal computer, smartphone, robot, jet engine or advanced, fuel-efficient automobile, has emerged from the shady bowers of Indian academia where millions of presumably the country’s most learned scholars, professors and researchers are engaged in daily cerebration and knowledge creation? An answer that readily comes to mind is that for over half a century after independence, higher education remained a government monopoly. And under the inorganic socialist ideology that was imprinted upon the nation, it became a levelling down…