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Introduction:
The buzzword across the globe for the 21st century is Innovation which is considered to be the primary driver of progress. Incentivising innovation and intellectual property creation is important for India’s future growth prospects. Ministry of Education’s innovation cell has recently released the third edition of Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements 2021. This ranking classifies participating institutions into two major categories; technical and non-technical. In the technical ranking IIT Madras has been recognised as the Most Innovative Educational Institute in India. This is the third time that IIT Madras has secured the first rank. IIT Bombay and IIT Delhi were placed at the second and third ranks respectively. Out of total of 3551 HEIs registered, 1438 institutions including all IITs, NITs, IISc, etc. participated in this exercise. For India to emerge as a global innovation hub, the youth of our country, especially in higher education institutions need to play a crucial role to create a sustainable innovation ecosystem.
Indian higher education system :
- India’s higher education system is the third largest in the world, next to the United States and China.
- Higher Education sector has witnessed a tremendous increase in the number of Universities/University level Institutions & Colleges since Independence.
- Some institutions of India, such as IITs, NITs, IIMs have been globally acclaimed for their standard of education.
- However Indian higher education is in need of radical reforms.
- India’s focus on expanding the higher education sector to provide access has led to a situation where research and scholarship have been neglected.
- Funding issues:
- The Central government’s slant toward premier institutions has continued ever since the Eleventh Five Year Plan where in spite of a nine-fold increase in Budget allocation State institutions have been left to fend for themselves with funding mainly directed towards starting more premier institutes.
- Investment by State governments has been also dwindling each year as higher education is a low-priority area. The University Grant Commission’s system of direct releases to State institutions which bypasses State governments also leads to their sense of alienation.
- There has been a demand to take spending on education to 6% of gross domestic product for decades.
- Low enrolment:-
- The gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education is 24.5 meaning out of every 100 youths eligible for higher education, less than 25 are pursuing tertiary education.
- Desired levels of research and internationalization of Indian campuses remain weak points
- It follows a largely linear model with very little focus on specialization. Both experts and academics feel Indian higher education is tilted towards social sciences.
- Only 1.7% colleges run PhD programmes and a mere 33% colleges run postgraduate-level programmes.
- Regulatory issues:-
- The country has a poor record with both the University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) being seen more as controllers of education than facilitators.
- As a regulator of India’s higher education, coordinator of vastly different kinds of institutions, and custodian of standards, the UGC had begun to look ill-equipped.
- Regulatory bodies with licensing powers hurt the autonomy of professional higher education, leading to serious imbalance in the diarchy they were under, and partitioning general from professional higher education in several crucial areas of knowledge.
- Privately set-up institutions in medicine, engineering, and other fields created the ground conditions in which strict regulation acquired justification. The power to license led to corruption.
- The existing model is based on deep and pervasive distrust among regulators over the possibility of universities doing things on their own, and doing it well. The current framework that require universities to be constantly regulated by laws, rules, regulations, guidelines and policies set by the government and the regulatory bodies have not produced the best results.
- Lack of autonomy:
- All aspects of academic life, including admission norms, syllabus design, and examination were controlled by the affiliating university.
- In colleges set up and run by the government, recruitment of faculty was the state government’s prerogative.
- When certain state governments stopped fresh recruitment altogether and moved over to the practice of hiring contractual or ad hoc teachers, no college could practise autonomy to alleviate its suffering.
- Autonomy to function through their own structures of governance first began to diminish in many provincial or state universities in the sphere of appointment of vice chancellors. State universities could not resist the imposition by those with political power of poorly qualified and unsuitable individuals as vice chancellors.
- The vacancy crisis broke the sense of professional community among teachers and their organisations. Even teacher quality was abysmal
- Ranking systems:-
- Additional autonomy granted on the basis of NAAC rating and status in NIRF begs questions about these systems of evaluation. They are neither authentic nor valid. The reason they lack authenticity lies in the processes through which they are derived.
- The NAAC is based on an inspectorial process. Its reliability suffers from both ends involved in any inspectorial system in our ethos.
- NIRF’s need arose from India’s poor performance in global ranking systems but the question is if Indian institutions of higher learning were found to be generally too poor to be noticed globally, how would they get any better if ranked among themselves
- Roots of Vulnerability
- Currently there is a dominant ideology of commercialisation of knowledge and teaching.
- Higher education is not leading to graduates entering the work sector as the education is not in sync with the needs of the companies.
Measures needed to improve innovation in universities :-
- Research cannot be improved merely by regulating universities, instead they need efforts to create enabling atmosphere for which it is imperative to grant more autonomy, better funding and new instruments to regulate work ethic.
- New initiatives like Hackathon, curriculum reform, anytime anywhere learning through SWAYAM, teacher training are all aimed at improving quality. These need to be effectively implemented.
- As India wants to transform its universities into world class institutions, it must safeguard the interests of young researchers and thousands of temporary faculty members by expediting the permanent appointments in a time-bound framework and transparent manner.
- Establish world-class multidisciplinary research universities
- Create a master plan for every state and union territory
- Each state must establish an integrated higher education master plan to provide an excellent education for all its residents.
- Attract the best and the brightest talent to be faculty members
- One of the fundamental changes India must institutionalize is a radically new compensation and incentive structure for faculty members. A flexibility to pay differential salaries based on market forces and merit must be part of this transformation.
Conclusion:
- Thus a complete revamp is needed to meet the present demand and address the future challenge that India is about to face.
- To reap the diverse culture demographic dividend and to maintain peace and social harmony among them quality education with values are the necessary area to focus.
- The higher education is facing many challenges as pointed
above, most the challenges are difficult but are not impossible to resolve. - Our goal to be a world power, the resolving and restructuring of higher education is must, then only we will be able to harness the human potential and resources of nation to the fullest and channelize it for the growth of the
- Youth is the most important asset for a country their future is the future of the Nation. So, the government must be compelled to provide basic education and skills.
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