The State of Higher Education in India

 

The State of Higher Education in India *

Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru delivering an address to a special convocation of the University of Allahabad, December 13,1947, said: “A university stands for humanism, the tolerance, for reason, for progress, for the adventure of ideas and for the search for truth. It stands for the onward march of the human race towards even higher objectives. If the universities discharge their duty adequately, then it is well with the nation and the people. But if the temple of learning itself becomes a home of narrow bigotry and petty objectives, how then will the nation prosper or a people grow in stature?” This vision of a university is grossly missing today in our higher education institutions, run by the people subservient to the establishment.

I have been deeply concerned about the state of education in general and higher education in particular since the introduction of the National Education Policy (NEP) in 2020.  The entire education system is turned on its head.  I wrote some 25 articles, including the letters to the former UGC Chairman Jagadesh Kumar, the JNU Vice Chancellor Santi Shree Pandit and an open letter to the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi drawing their attention to the challenges facing the higher education. The articles are published on my Blog (https://nehrusideaofindia.blogspot.com). 

As per the UGC’s website, there were 57 central universities; 516 state universities, 547 private universities and 150 deemed to be universities in 2023, that is a total of 1270 universities. The Times of India Special Report, January 13,2026, says the number of universities has almost doubled in the last decade, increasing from 760 in 2014-15 to 1,338 in June 2025; and the total number of colleges increased from 38,498 to 52,081 during the same period. This education explosion has seriously compromised the quality and standard of higher education, making it more complex and incomprehensible, out of tune with the ground reality.

Some of the major challenges facing the higher education are: (a) Withdrawal of state funding and decline of public Institutions; (b) Increasing privatisation and commercialisation; (c) Centralization and communalization of curriculum; and (d) Loss of academic freedom and stunting intellectual growth.

Withdrawal of State Funding and Decline of Public Institutions

The NEP speaks of the five objectives: Access, Equity, Quality, Affordability and Accountability and of investing 6% of GDP in education as the public funding is ‘extremely critical for achieving the high quality and equitable public education system’.  However, the expenditure on higher education nosedived from 0.86% of GDP in 2010-11 to around 0.5% in 2019-20.  The Centre’s expenditure on higher education dropped from 0.33% of GDP to a mere 0.16%, and the allocation for higher education fell from 1.5% to 1% during the same period. In the fiscal year 1924-25, nearly Rs.7000 crore allocated to higher education in the budget remained unspent.

Because of the withdrawal of the state funding, there is a huge backlog of vacant posts. Nearly 50% of regular teaching posts in educational institutions are unfilled. Teachers are appointed on contract and clock hour basis. The aided institutions do not get NOC to fill the vacant posts. Consequently, the aided institutions are turning into unaided institutions. And with no security of service and teachers hired and fired, the teaching and learning is seriously impeded.  If more than 80 core poor people are depending on free ration, and the three-fourth, that is 75 per cent, of the people live with less than Rs.200 per day,  and one-third of the people earn less than Rs.100 a day, how can their children get even good basic education, leave alone secondary and higher education, if they do not have  access to aided institutions?.

There is huge educational divide – urban -rural, gender and digital - and higher education has become the privilege of the rich. It is ironic that the people who benefited by the aided institutions of the previous governments and are now occupying administrative positions in the institutions of higher education have become mute spectators and are presiding over dismantling of the aided institutions.  

It is the State funded public institutions that produced the Presidents of India- Radhakrishnan, Zakir Hussain, Shankar Dayal Sharma, Abdul Kalam and Pranab Mukherjee- and the noble laureate Amartya Sen- all teachers.  The JNU produced a noble Laureate Abhijit Banerjee. Today, it is nigh impossible to produce such eminent personalities.

Public universities are closed in multiple ways. What happened in last ten years is unprecedented. It is first time that large number of first-generation children are entering the university. This should have been the time to strengthen the public universities, to give more funds to universities, to appoint more teachers, to improve the infrastructure, and address the issues of inequality and discrimination. It is an historical opportunity. Higher education is the most important pipeline for transforming the inter-gender inequalities.  Instead, public higher education is being dismantled, perpetuating social inequalities in society.

In higher education, the government has introduced the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA). The universities are forced to seek loans, offered at market rates of interest, from the HEFA, which they are then obliged to repay from their own revenues. In the 364^th Report on the Demand for Grants,2025-26, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education found that between 78% and 100% of these loans are being repaid by the universities through students’ fees.

Increasing Privatisation and Commercialisation

The massive privatisation of education has a devastating effect. The privatisation is the result of the government withdrawing funding the HEIs. Consequently, education has become too costly due to exorbitant fees charged by private institutions, education becoming inaccessible and unaffordable to a vast majority of people; the objective of higher education to promote upward social mobility of the people at the bottom of social pyramid; and transform them into better human beings and empowered and responsible citizens is defeated. 

The industries are unable to generate jobs for the army of unemployed youth. And yet, what we see is industry-oriented education. This is deceptive since the industries have failed to generate jobs, around 83% of the educated youth are unemployed. In 2024, even the IIT Bombay had managed to place just 75% of its students through the campus recruitment. It gets worse when one considers the new IITs, NITs, universities and innumerable other institutions that have mushroomed, only about 30% of students of these institutions are found employable. The massive expansion of private and deemed universities poses fresh problems of poor infrastructure and non-availability of qualified faculty. So much hype and hullabaloo about these institutions where students spend lakhs of rupees, raising loans, getting into debt trap, and facing a bleak future.

Education is totally commercialized. It is the failure of educational institutions that explains the mushrooming of coaching centres in every nook and corner.  All India competitive examinations like NEET, JEE, CAT, CUET etc. are cracked by rich kids depending on coaching classes, leaving the poor students from rural and semi-urban background behind in the race. The parallel system of education weighs heavily in favour of the monied people. It doesn’t ensure level playing field for the weak and deprived so far as accessibility and affordability of quality education is concerned. And centralizing admissions through centralised entrance tests has forced students into the arms of the coaching industry. What is alarming is educational institutions are tying-up with coaching centres, outsourcing the teaching and the learning. Like the government, the education institutions too are abdicating their social responsibility, deviating from the very objective of education.

Centralization and Communalization of Curriculum

In the universities, we have seen the large-scale hiring of teachers from regime-friendly ideological background, no matter the comically poor quality of their teaching and scholarships. The leadership positions in key institutions – even in the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management that Pandit Nehru so evocatively described as the temples of modern India – have been reserved for pliant ideologues. 

The UGC Regulations 2025 remove the cap on contract teacher appointments. This is bound to usher in more intensive contractualization and casualization of regular teaching posts, leading to downgrading of service conditions for teachers and the dilution of the teaching-learning process in higher education institutions

A very disturbing feature of the Regulations is the appointment of Vice Chancellors.  All powers are now vested in Chancellors — Governors of States The state government has no role in the process of selection and appointment of Vice chancellors of universities, which are established by the Acts of the State Legislature. It is an attempt to capture the temples of learning.

The Vice Chancellor is appointed for a term of five years, but he is eligible for reappointment for another term. This will have stranglehold of the VC on the university system, considering the fact that these days the VCs are appointed on the basis of their loyalty to the ruling dispensation, and the governor is the sole authority in selecting and appointing such people as Vice Chancellors. 

What is more disturbing is that non-academics from industry without any teaching and academic administrative experience are eligible for appointment as Vice Chancellors. This could be used to appoint the ruling party loyalists from the industry, commercial and business interests overriding the academic interest.

In opposition ruled states, the governor acts as ‘the Viceroy of the central government’. And now there will be ‘two Viceroys, vetted for ideological purity’ – the chancellor and the vice chancellor – to administer universities.

Another disturbing trend is the communalization of curriculum.  The textbooks of the NCERT – the backbone of the school curriculum – have been revised with the intention of sanitizing Indian history. The Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination and the section on Mughal India, inter alia, have been dropped from the school curriculum.

The Mughal history and other inconvenient chapters of history are deleted from the university curriculum.  India has a glorious past, pride of its history and civilization. However, the UGC’s curriculum presents a history of only north India. It is strange the ancient history is presented as the history of Bharat. By bringing the terms like 'Aryan Age', 'Hindu Society', and 'Muslim Rulers', the curriculum undoes the work of generations of historians, demonstrating the ideological bias. Further, it treats the 'Hindu Society' and the 'Muslim Society' as discrete entities in the medieval period, and that these communities existed as separate nations. 

If we compare the UGC’s history curriculum with Pandit Nehru’s classic The Discovery of India, we realize many important periods of Indian history were chopped off, almost neglecting the medieval history, the history of Mughal Empire and the British India. The UGC’s Learning Outcome-based Curriculum Framework (LOCF) is determined to project into the past majoritarian and divisive conceptions of contemporary Indian politics.

Indian history is also a history of betrayal by its own rulers when the foreigners invaded India. Jayachandra betrayed Prithviraj Chavan   by joining hands with Muhammad Ghori -a mass murderer of Hindus - who invaded India several times and was defeated,  to defeat him finally at the battle of Tarai in 1192, paving the way for a long spell of  Rule by Muslim conquerors in India; it was the treachery of Mir Jafar in 1757 that made Robert Clive to defeat the Sultan of Bengal  Siraj-ud-Daulah at the battle of Plassey, reducing the mighty India to a British colony, leading to establishment of the British Raj in India for next two hundred years; and  it was the betrayal of local rulers in 1761 at the third battle of Panipat that the Marathas were defeated  by the  Afghan invader  Ahmed Shah Addali.

It is important that our youth study an unbiased and objective account of Indian history right from the ancient times to the present so that they learn positive lessons; as to how to save the country from repeating its past blunders and failures and help march towards attaining higher goals of humanity. To ignore the unpleasant and ignominious and inconvenient historical periods, and glorifying the invented and skewed history is to do disservice not only to the present generation, but also to posterity.

Loss of academic freedom and stunting intellectual growth.

The educational institutions of higher learning have lost academic autonomy, incapacitated to innovate and discover new frontiers of knowledge.  And teachers do not enjoy academic freedom of thought and expression, freedom to teach and communicate ideas without fear of being targeted for punitive action.  Critical thinking is the core of academic freedom both for teachers and students, that is the right to question and reflect on their own knowledge and information presented to them

In academic seminars and conferences, there is no free exchange of views and ideas and participants are told not to speak on issues that antagonize the political establishment.  And conforming to the system and blindly accepting what authorities decide is a sign of serfdom and negation of human evolution.  The university system is increasingly devalued in favour of administrative centralization and political control.

We read how the dissenting opinions were crushed in varsities - public universities such as Central University Hyderabad, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, Aligarh Muslim University, Jamia Milia Islamia, Jadavpur University, Visa Bharati, and private universities like Ashoka University and Symbiosis International University and the IITs. The intolerance of academic dissent and the fear of reprisal have made our higher education institutions incapable of promoting healthy academic culture and intellectual stimulus.

It is unthinkable that while the right-wing students’ outfit ABVP resorts to pre-censorship of speakers, wielding enormous power, and exercises ‘unprecedented veto power’ in our colleges and universities, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta says, the academic community surrenders meekly its autonomy.

*A shortened version of the keynote address delivered at the plenary session of the 28^th National Conference of the Association of Indian College Principals, Ekta Nagar, Gujarat, February 15, 2026.