QUEST FOR A LEGACY

With a comprehensive and credible methodology, India Today Group-MDRA survey brings to you India’s best institutes of higher learning

In this soccer season, most Indians are rueing the fact that a country of 1.3 billion people cannot produce 11 men to play in the football world cup. But that’s not the only field India lags in globally. The state of university education is another one. In ancient times, universities such as Nalanda and Taxila made India a centre of higher learning. Though there were many factors leading to a disruption of that historical legacy, the hard truth today is: of the 850 Indian universities, none features among the top 20 in any global ranking. The only solace is that 24 and 42 Indian universities found place among the top 1,000 universities of the world in the QS and the Times Higher Education ranking, respectively. The recently released QS Ranking, 2019, has placed three of our higher education institutions among the top 200 of the world.

But instead of despairing, the stakeholders should strive towards the collective goal of creating a competitive environment, one which can inspire Indian universities to break into the top 100 and eventually secure positions among the top 20. The India Today GroupMDRA survey of India’s best universities has been a step in that direction.

In its fifth year, the survey has not only expanded its universe but also introduced a more robust process of scrutiny (see methodology). To create a level playing field, universities were divided into four categories— general, technical, medical and law. Those universities which offer courses in multiple streams were considered under general category. Only the postgraduate courses offered by a university were evaluated for the ranking.

The rigour applied in the examination of the per

formance of the universities have made the India Today university rankings the most credible and exhaustive survey in the country. “The india today survey has earned its name because it’s done with credibility, transparency and with definite criteria,” says Union HRD minister Prakash Javadekar.

This year, we also invited some celebrated alumni of the top universities to write about their alma mater and the changes they have gone through over the years. They were unanimous in their concern about the decline in the quality of teachers in the universities, mainly due to the politicisation of university appointments and caste and regionbased selection processes. As a result, universities have been making news not for academic excellence, but for the wrong reasons.

But more worrisome than poor appointments is the serious shortage of teachers. In January this year, Delhi University, one of the best in the country, reported a 48 per cent shortage in teachers—of the 1,706 sanctioned positions, 805 were vacant. Since then, the university has appointed nearly 150 teachers. And Delhi University is not an isolated case. In all central universities, 33 per cent of teaching positions have not been filled up. In the central universities set up after 2009, 48 per cent teaching posts are vacant.

The situation is the same in state and private universities. To overcome the shortage, the universities have resorted to hiring ad hoc or temporary teachers. Government universities do that because state governments repeatedly ignore pleas to sanction appointments while private universities have adopted this as a costcutting strategy as ad hoc teachers have to be paid less. This has seriously affected the quality of education.

In a recent column, Furqan Qamar, secretarygeneral, Association of Indian Universities, made an interesting analysis of the teacherstudent ratio in Indian and international universities. The universities which secure top positions in global rankings, on an average, enrol around 18,000

students each compared to an average of 11,000 students in top Indian universities. However, global top universities boast an average strength of 1,800 qualified faculty as against less than 600 in top Indian universities.

A major factor in Indian universities not being among the global best is their poor performance in research and innovation. The Economic Survey, 2018, shows how India’s R&D spend as a percentage of GDP has been stagnant at 0.6-0.7 per cent in the past two decades. Taking note of this, the Union government has introduced several schemes and monetary assistance to promote fundamental research in higher educational institutions (see Prakash Javadekar interview).

In a recent public interaction, noted economist Kaushik Basu argued that it’s not advisable to see all universities through the same prism and that the government must select a few of them to build as research institutes of global repute. “You can’t run a country with 700 top-class universities. You will have to be prepared that 680 of those universities will be teaching shops, reasonably good, solid teaching. Twenty others will be research universities. People doing cuttingedge research, you give them space, research funding and support. I think India will take off then,” he said.

The Centre will soon announce the list of 20 institutes of eminence that have been selected for this. That will partly take care of Basu’s suggestion. The next step will be to make the rest of the universities world-class “teaching shops”, at the very least.