Political will is required to grasp several thorny nettles and radically restructure India’s isolationist higher education system to improve the ranking of our universities in global league tables, says Amarendra Sahoo The London-based Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) which publishes its World University Rankings rating the world’s Top 1,000 universities, recently released its 2021 list. Only 21 Indian institutions are included in this authoritative, diligently compiled and globally respected league table of the world’s most respected higher education institutions (HEIs), against 24 last year. Of them only three feature among the global Top 200 — Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay ranked #172 followed by the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore (185) and IIT-Delhi (193). However, all three have lost rank compared to last year. The next respectably ranked Indian HEI is IIT-Madras at #275. Neighbouring China on the other hand has 84 universities featured in the 2021 QS Top 1000 league table with four ranked in the Top 50. This despite India hosting four of the oldest modern era universities — Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (estb. 1847), University of Mumbai (1857), University of Calcutta (1857) and University of Madras (1857). It’s somewhat chastening to learn that the globally top-ranked Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA was established in 1861. The reasons behind the poor academic standing of India’s HEIs and universities in particular are numerous ranging from chronic under-funding, excessive government control and lack of autonomy, over-subsidisation of tuition fees, to poor academy-industry interface and a conspicuous deficit of research culture. However, one of the major causes of the poor ranking of Indian higher education institutions in the QS (and Times Higher Education) annual league tables is that they have remained closed, insular organisations shut off from the global academic community. They have made little effort to collaborate and interface with academics and universities in other countries. In the QS 2021 rankings even India’s top-ranked HEIs are awarded rock-bottom scores under the parameter of internationalisation, i.e, ratio of international faculty and students. Unlike China which has invited acclaimed American universities including Yale, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Duke and New York universities and Nottingham University, UK, to establish full-fledged bricks-n-mortar campuses in that country, neither the Congress-led UPA-I and II governments (2004-2014) nor the incumbent BJP-led NDA government has yet permitted foreign universities to plant their flags on Indian soil. Nor has it allowed any meaningful collaboration between Indian and foreign universities. Although several private universities have signed academic exchanges and dual-degree programmes with second rung universities abroad, none of the Central and state government-run universities have been permitted to sign full-fledged collaboration agreements. That there is strong public demand for superior, high-quality education dispensed by foreign universities is in-controvertible. Every year, an estimated 600,000 school and college leavers from India travel abroad to study in top-ranked universities in the US, UK, Singapore and Australia despite their levying higher tuition fees— astronomical by Indian standards. Fortunately, even if belatedly, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 released on July 29 last year, takes…
