Private varsities catalysing sea change in Higher Education

A spate of new genre private universities enabled by state government legislation and led by brilliant academics with excellent project management and leadership skills are generating overdue stir within the shady bowers of Indian academia, writes Dilip Thakore IN THE LATEST (NOVEMBER) WORLD Univer­sity Rankings (WUR) 2023 of the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE), the authoritative rating/evaluation agencies of higher educa­tion institutions worldwide, India’s most re­puted universities which top domestic league tables, including the Union education min­istry’s NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework), the annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings (EWIHER), India Today rankings, among others, are ranked way down near bottom. In the QS WUR, only three Indian universities — the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (IISc, estb.1909); Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B, estb.1958) and Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi (IIT-D, estb.1961) are ranked among the Top 200 worldwide in that order with IISc ranked #155. In the THE global league table which gives greater weightage to research and citations, IISc is awarded a ranking of 251-300 (institutions ranked below the Top 200 are not awarded a precise rank) followed by the JSS Academy of Higher Education & Research, Mysuru and Shoolini University of Biotechnology & Management, Solan (Himachal Pradesh) awarded 351-400 ranking. On the other hand, China’s Peking University is ranked #12 and Tsinghua University #14 by QS with eight Chinese universities ranked among the QS global Top 200. In the THE WUR league table 11 Chinese universities are ranked in the Top 200. Moreover several South-east Asian univer­sities including Seoul National, Yonsei, Korea Academy of Science & Technology and five others are ranked among the THE Top 200 as are four in Japan. In the QS WUR 2023, eight South Korean universities are ranked among the Top 200 cf. India’s three and ten in Japan. Even Malaysia, a late-comer in higher education, has four universities in the QS Top 200 league table. Against this, it’s pertinent to note that the Indian Institute of Science was established in 1909, and the Bombay, Madras and Calcutta universities admit­ted their first batches in 1857. Clearly, successive governments in New Delhi and state capitals — all the Indian universities listed above are public, i.e, government administered institutions of higher learning — have blown the early movers advantage that India had in higher education. This dismal conclusion is supported by the depressing fact that India’s academy has not pro­duced a science/technology Nobel Prize winner since Sir C.V. Raman conducting research in Calcutta University was awarded the physics Nobel in 1930 for research studies in the phenomenon of light scattering. The only other Indian to be awarded a Nobel Prize for studies conducted in India is Rabindranath Tagore for literature in 1913. The failure of India’s public universities to cash their early movers advantage is also testified by the grim reality that not a single major world-beating invention — com­puter, Internet, cell phone, jet aeroplanes, motor car etc — has emerged from the country’s universities whose number has risen to 1,072.…