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Cover Story

INDIA’S TOP-RANKED PRIVATE eulogised universities — Nalanda
India’s ancient and much

and Taxila — were reportedly such
MULTIDISCIPLINARY UNIVERSITIES multi-disciplinary HEIs in which
students were free to study subjects
across disciplines of their choice.
Nevertheless post-independence
India’s new genre multidisciplinary universities India’s omniscient politicians and
benchmarked against the world’s best are a breath of fresh bureaucrats who controlled industry,
air with the potential to check, if not stop, the annual business, education and everything
else through Soviet-style five-year
migration of an estimated 8 lakh school and college-leavers plans, licensed a large number of
for higher education abroad public single discipline HEIs — IITs,
NITs, IIMs, AIIMS, engineering and
medical colleges and universities. As
a result, IITs teach engineering sub-
jects, IIMs business management,
medical colleges, medicine.
The few private sector HEIs
such as BITS-Pilani and Manipal
Academy of Higher Education were
restricted to teaching engineering
and medicine and allied subjects and
despite being granted ‘deemed uni-
versity’ status, were not permitted
to describe themselves as universi-
ties simpliciter. They were obliged
to always describe themselves as
‘deemed-to-be-universities’ on pain
of being derecognised.
Moreover, public and private
HEIs — colleges and universi-
ties — were encouraged to focus on
teaching. For research, the Central
government established 38 national
Indian university graduates: unemployability spectre laboratories and 39 outreach centres
under the aegis of a Soviet-inspired
ince the National Education In retrospect, one wonders why Council for Scientific & Industrial
Policy (NEP) 2020, based it took the neta-babu brotherhood Research (estb.1942) as “an insti-
on the Kasturirangan Com- which controls Indian higher educa- tutional arrangement to keep the
Smittee draft report, recom- tion with an iron hand, so long to fig- Science, Society and Industry on the
mended transformation of India’s ure out that by definition, a ‘univer- same page”. Unsurprisingly, CSIR
45,473 undergrad colleges and 1,168 sity’ is a higher education institution quickly metamorphosed into a giant
universities into multi-disciplinary providing advanced learning across bureaucratic organisation with a
higher education institutions (HEIs), a wide range of subjects and disci- well-established pecking order. Over
multi-disciplinary HEIs have become plines. The Oxford English dictionary the past 82 years, it hasn’t produced
the flavour of the season. It’s the defines a university as “a high-level any earth-shattering or game-chang-
good doctor’s — actually an outer educational institution in which stu- ing invention despite its head count
space scientist — contribution to dents study for degrees and academic having grown to 7,683.
India’s higher education system that research is done”. Yet perhaps the Against this backdrop of a
today every college principal and latter day Wikipedia definition is complete hash of higher education
university vice chancellor has drawn more accurate — “an institution of in post-independence India, it’s
up plans to transform the HEI under higher (or tertiary) education and also unsurprising that the country’s
her care into a multi-disciplinary research which awards degrees in 45,473 colleges and 1,168 universi-
institution. several academic disciplines”. ties are certifying millions of ‘tunnel

50 EDUCATIONWORLD MAY 2024