Higher Education and Economic Development - Perspective and Prospects

Abstract

India stands at a critical point on its path to be among the fastest growing economies of the world. The nation however is faced with paradoxes. India needs to leverage its vast demographic potential by educating and training over 130 million people in the age group of 18-23 years with skills and capabilities relevant to the demands of a modern knowledge based economy. Further, there remains an urgent need to reform the vast and unwieldy legacy higher education system that seems to have lost much of its relevance in today’s technologically advanced and connected world. The education infrastructure in the country is inadequate to support our ambitious targets of increased enrolment, while it faces challenges of quality and relevance to the job market and cannot provide universal access to training and education. The Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2012–17) of the statutory body responsible for governing higher education in India opens with: ‘Higher education in India is passing through a phase of unprecedented expansion, marked by an explosion in the volume of students, a substantial expansion in the number of institutions and a quantum jump in the level of public funding’. In this context the present paper makes an attempt to examine the various challenges of Higher Education in India that need to be addressed based upon the analysis of primary data obtained in survey. HEIs have a commitment to the development of a knowledge based society in its mission to move towards faster economic development.