For the first time since independence a substantial number of the country’s 10 million higher secondary school-leavers annually have the option to access high-quality, globally comparable undergrad education in well-funded, well-administered private universities. Apart from doubling the rate of annual GDP growth which lifted an estimated 300 million citizens above the poverty line, one of the most socially beneficial outcomes of liberalisation and deregulation of the dirigiste Indian economy from pervasive licence-permit-quota raj in 1991 — a cause for which your editor raised the banner of revolt four decades ago as founding editor of Business India and Businessworld — is the sprouting of a large number of private universities countrywide. Evidently enthused by the 7 percent-plus annual rates of economic growth and rising business and industry confidence, a new genre of education entrepreneurs, aka edupreneurs, mobilised men, money and materials to promote several dozen globally benchmarked private universities modelled on America’s best Ivy league universities. Since then India’s new age private universities, especially liberal arts and humanities institutions — because private science, medical and engineering (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, BITS-Pilani, Manipal Academy of Higher Education) had been reluctantly permitted several decades ago — have transformed India’s higher education landscape. For the first time since independence, a substantial number of the country’s 10 million higher secondary school-leavers annually have the option to access high quality, globally comparable liberal arts and humanities undergrad education, supplemented with professional elective study programmes in well-funded, well-administered private varsities such as Ashoka, Amity, Jindal Global, Bennett and Krea, at a fraction of the price of studying abroad. This revolution in higher education is not restricted to liberal arts and humanities. High potential, globally benchmarked privately promoted and managed universities such as BML Munjal, Shiv Nadar and VIT universities, and Plaksha, Mohali, which will admit its first batch this year, are poised to rejuvenate engineering and technology education. Regular readers of this publication are no doubt aware that your editors are enthused by private initiatives in preschool to Ph D education. We believe that academically, administratively and financially autonomous institutions managed by academics and organisation management professionals are better equipped to deliver meaningful learning connected with industry and business requirements, than unaccountable generalist bureaucrats in the Central and state education ministries. Over the past seven decades the latter have reduced learning outcomes in government schools and higher ed institutions to rock bottom levels. We believe that the emergence of India’s new genre of well-funded and professionally managed universities not only offers the estimated 600,000 school and college leavers who fly to study abroad every year academically comparable choices at more affordable prices. They also set new standards and benchmarks for Central and state higher education institutions (HEIs) to emulate. In effect India’s new age private universities have generated a tide that lifts all boats. Against this backdrop of the rising popularity of private higher education institutions within the established and aspirational middle class, we commissioned Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb. 2000),…
