Why do India’s universities perform poorly?
There are several reasons why India’s universities perform poorly. These include poor funding, low research output, excessive politicization and bureaucratization and the low social status of the professoriate.
India’s poor performance in terms of world university rankings is also in part a failure to play the rankings game. Most Indian universities do not make relevant and updated information available on their web pages. Many institutions, even the better ones, do not bother to submit the required information to ranking organizations. It is quite unbelievable that most central universities, those funded directly by the federal government, are not even accredited by NAAC!
Furthermore, India’s higher education structure is organized in a manner that discourages the coming together of a critical mass of high-profile researchers across several disciplines in one place. While universities are the ideal sites for this purpose, they are unable to compete successfully for talent with the scores of old and new small, specialized research centers. In fact, most universities are far too politicized and there are many instances where they have actually chased away good people. Some of India’s most capable researchers prefer specialized research centers over larger, comprehensive institutions, leaving the latter with ‘lesser’ faculty members. In fact, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political scientist and commentator for the Indian Express, claims that most “independent” and “creative spaces” in the social sciences are outside the university system.
This is perhaps true for the sciences and other disciplines as well. India’s most prestigious academic institution for sciences is not a comprehensive university but the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).
All things considered, it is quite remarkable that there are pockets of excellence in India’s higher education sector (and the mission to Mars shows that) despite insufficient support from the government or the private sector. While funding on higher education has improved substantially over the past decade, India still spends less than one percent of its GDP on research and development. Private sector funding is a dismal 20 percent of the total.
In contrast, China spent nearly two percent of its GDP on research and its research spending has been increasing quite steadily.
