Current State of Higher Education in India:Issues & Challenges, Amity University Gwalior

In India, university education system is in the state of frustrate and disrepair. Due to low quality education, the students’ enrollments in technical education are abysmally low in almost seventy percentages of the districts of India. In India, almost sixty six percentages of total universities and ninety percentages of technical colleges are rated as below average on quality parameters. There are so many institutes and university are facing acute problem of admission, placement, good faculty and are near to close down.

In India, Higher education system is suffering from several systemic deficiencies. As a result, these institutes and universities are continuously producing the graduates that are unemployable despite of emerging shortages of skilled manpower in an increasing number of sectors. The standard of quality education and academic research in higher education institutes and universities are low and continuous declining. There is, indeed, a multitude of interconnected problems that India faces in its higher education system; in a summary and particularly incisive diagnostic, one of the more thorough recent analyses of the situation describes both the scope and the seriousness of the challenge:

• The unwieldy affiliating system
• Inflexible academic structure
• Shortage of good academicians and researchers
• No policy or strategy for attracting good faculty, researchers, and students
• Uneven capacity across various subjects
• Eroding autonomy of academic institutions
• The low level of public funding
• Dysfunctional regulatory environment and low coverage of the accreditation system
• Absence of incentives for performing well in academic and research
• The quality and relevance of the curriculum in higher education with industry demand
• The role of assessment and evaluation in higher education
• The state of research both within and outside institutions of higher education.
• The High Level exploitations in private universities and institutes
• Non-uniformity and standard course structures, and non-updation of course structure on time
• Course contents are not designed as per the requirement of Industry
• Lacking of infrastructure and environment for Research and Development

The quantity/quality, regulation, privatization, staffing, and studying in abroad are the prominent factors for seeding critical issues in higher education system in India.

1. Excellence and expansion

It is evident that Department of Higher and Technical Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development of Government of India is facing major challenge in developing quality and quantity in education system in India.

2. Regulation and governance

The University Grants Commission (UGC) New Delhi is a statutory, regulatory authority of higher education in India.UGC is responsible for laying down the rules and regulations for the promotion and co-ordination of University education and for the determination and maintenance of standards of teaching, examination and research in Universities, and for the purpose of performing its functions. The current state of higher and technical education in India clearly shows that UGC is not doing its duty and responsibilities sincerely. The anxiety of society toward the higher and technical education has forced me to critically analyze the functionality of UGC and raised the voice of society in the form of some questions to UGC:

• Is the UGC doing its duty sincerely for which it was formed?
• Is UGC murdering the objectives, purposes for which it was constituted by parliament of government of India?
• Has the UGC empowered to only for making/laying down the rules and regulations not for their implementations?
• Is UGC closely monitoring the all university?
• Are all universities following the UGC norms on timely or not?
• If no, what actions have taken by UGC against university?
• Has UGC laid down the high quality standard, rules, and regulations for granting permission/recognition to any University and their strict implementation?
• Has UGC made any transparent system for recognition/ de-recognition?
• Why UGC is not making mandatory criteria for appointing/promoting candidates to Professor those who have at least 10 high quality research papers in SCI/SSCI/HSCI indexed nonpaid journals of high impact factors or having at least two/three patents?
• Is there any system that can honestly rate the university on the basis of quality of teaching and research, infrastructure, faculty and level of implementation of UGC rules and regulations?
• Does the all above mentioned activities not come in purview of UGC?
• Educationalist/ Academician/ Administrator who is responsible for this pathetic situation of higher and technical education in India?

3. The privatization of higher education

The private institutes and universities have entered into higher education system with an objective of enhancing the quality of education and research. These institutes attempted to respond to the massive demand of technocrats, budding researchers. It is a good step for expanding the horizons of higher and technical education in India but there is sky height exploitation of their employees, students, society in private university. Some private institutes are also declining the quality of teaching and research and also producing the large number of graduates that are unemployable despite of emerging shortages of skilled manpower in an increasing number of sectors.

4. Staffing higher education

There is a strong need to form the large pool of highly capable scholars from both private and public sectors to provide academic leadership in teaching and research. These scholars should be promoted for their research work publication in SCI indexed journals. This strategy will certainly increase the country and university ranking in research in the world through recording the institute existence in world ranking database of Thomson Reuters.

5. The study in abroad

It is notable that Indian scholars are continuously moving to European countries for earning higher and technical education. European countries are expanding and enhancing the pool of qualified Indians for excellence in teaching and research. MHRD, Government of India has to think why are Indian scholars moving to European countries for study?

This article presents the current state of higher education in India. It can be concluded that the university education system in India is in turbulent, aggravate and disrepair state. This article shows the real and critical stage of higher and technical education in India.

This article pointed out that moving boldly in the direction of an international competitive system of higher education and research will be gainful, and overcome the current issues and challenges of higher and technical education in India and will help us in recording our existence in Times Higher Education World University Rankings database of Thomson Reuters. This article may be useful for MHRD for devising the new policy and strategy for enhancing the higher and technical education in India.

DR. M K PACHARIYA