Elite Institutions, Dismal Development: Poverty of Indian Higher Education

Abstract

“Elite Institutions, Dismal Development” shows how an undemocratic thrust on elite higher education institutions has led to a dismal state of higher education and development. In the last 25 years, since India has experienced reasonable economic growth, the purchasing power and size of the middle class have grown. At the same time, the primary health indicators and the basic education indicators of the country have remained poor, in many instances much worse than a far poorer economy, that of neighboring Bangladesh. While India is always talked about in the Indian and global press as an important emerging economy, the ground realities of living condition of majority Indians remain abysmally poor. India plans smart cities while its child mortality rates are higher than that of most of its neighbors. India’s software industry boasts of providing a wide range of services to global clients while roads in its major cities remain potholed and clogged with traffic; it sends machines into space and its biggest financial hub of Mumbai gets paralyzed with rains every monsoon. The state of dismal development can be found in the higher education sector as well. Policymakers continually talk about “the crisis” in Indian education; this chapter points out that the crisis gets louder by the day. The system has flaws, can the flaws be remedied and a better system put in place? The answer to the flaws lies in what the author calls a mentality of caste and a continuation of a system put in place during the colonial era. This chapter shows how an architecture and geography of injustice plagues Indian higher education. Both in the way how university world has been fashioned and especially in the case of disciplines and conceptualization of knowledge, Indian higher education has remained almost frozen at 1947. The author argues that in order to create a robust higher education world, India has to unshackle itself from the mentality of caste and archaic conceptualizations of disciplines. Though the author sees the flaws of colonial structures, he argues that we need to move out of the binary of colonial/national. Educational freedom which leads to a new ordering of disciplines and of higher education holds the key to a just, equitable, dynamic, and sustainable growth in India. A complete conceptual overhaul of Indian higher education alone can lead to a developed India.