India cannot afford low quality education

Even the best educational institutions in India lag their peers even in the emerging economies, as per the inaugural Times Higher Education BRICS and Emerging Economies Rankings 2014. The lacklustre rankings reveal, yet again, that Indian universities fail, for the most part, to offer world-class education, training and research-based knowledge creation. And that, without sustained policy reform right across the board in the education sector and prompt follow-through action, we would face growing threats of losing out and under-performing in the increasingly knowledge-driven global economy.

Chinese institutes utterly dominate the rankings, occupying four of the top 10 slots and 23 of the top 100. Indian institutions manage to figure in 10 of the top 100, but this is surely poor consolation given the mediocre rankings of the rest. What is also glaring is that none of the premier institutes top the India rankings. Chandigarh’s Panjab University leads the Indian tally, thanks reportedly to a better research citation record almost certainly due to a few ‘star’ alumni. The unfortunate reality is that India’s much vaunted premier institutes of technology, science and management perform well below par when it comes to research and new knowledge generation.

The number of IITs and IIMs has gone up of late. But quality at the base of the pyramid of student intake remains abysmal, and quality peters out fast as you go up the pyramid, too. These shortcomings must be corrected of course, and sooner rather than later, but in parallel we need much faster diffusion of best practices and standards across the system. It is vital that we inculcate a multidisciplinary approach in both education and research and vigorously boost linkages between industry and academe to shore up the quality of education.