India is a rapidly changing country in which inclusive, high-quality education is of utmost importance for its future prosperity. The country is currently in a youth bulge phase. It has the largest youth population in the world—a veritable army of 600 million young people under the age of 25.

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Challenges facing Indian higher education:

• Gross Enrolment Rate issues:
• India’s higher education system, does not have the capacity to achieve enrolment ratios anywhere close to those of other middle-income economies.
• The country’s tertiary gross enrolment rate is growing fast, but remains more than 20 percentage points below that of China or Brazil, despite the creation of large numbers of higher education institutions (HEIs) in recent years.

• Brain-Drain:
• Educational attainment in present-day India is also not directly correlated to employment prospects—a fact that raises doubts about the quality and relevance of Indian education.
• Such bottlenecks have caused a large-scale outflow of labour migrants and international students from India.
• The number of Indian students enrolled in degree programs abroad has grown almost fivefold since 1998, while hundreds of thousands of labour migrants leave the country each year.
• Many of these migrants are low-skilled workers, but there is also a pronounced brain drain of skilled professionals of 950,000 Indian scientists and engineers lived in the U.S. alone in 2013 (a steep increase of 85 percent since 2003).

• Regulation:
• High control and low on support and facilitation
• UGC has been accused of biased granting of funds
• Undermining independence of autonomous universities
• UGC’s flawed method of determining recruitment and career advancement of faculty: Academic Performance Indicator (API).

• Indian Talent Pool of IIT’s:
• The Indian Institutes of Technology are synonymous with excellence and the national academic frontier.
• But, the IITs’ ability to live up to these expectations in terms of research output and the quality of education is contingent on its faculty. However, of late, the shortage of faculty members in the IITs has been under the spotlight.
• It was reported recently that there are just 40 foreign teachers at all of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) that is just 1% of the total faculty of 5,400 — despite the government’s goal to attract 20% international faculty at higher education institutions such as the IITs.

• Scales of salary:
• Indian academic salaries are not globally competitive, even taking into account variations in living costs.
• In the U.S., senior academics at research universities typically earn around Rs.8,970,000 and up annually, and those at top universities can earn Rs.13,800,000 or more.
• The average salary for a full-time academic is Rs.5,037,000, with those in high demand fields in the sciences, business and others earning significantly more.
• China, which is also actively luring top international faculty to its research universities, is offering salaries of Rs.6,900,000 or more along with additional research funding.
• International faculty cannot be offered long-term appointments in Indian public institutions. A five-year contract is all that is available. Thus, there is little job security.

• Private colleges and Deemed Universities:
• Arbitrary nature of fees; “capitation fees”
• Admissions manipulated- Management quotas
• Ill equipped to organize courses
• De facto management—the trustees of the sponsoring societies or trusts

Measures needed to improve status of Indian Universities:

• The best Indian universities would require a kind of “cultural revolution” to join the ranks of global world-class universities and to be able to lure top faculty.
• It is virtually impossible for India to attract large numbers of international professors of high standing and ability without dramatic changes in many aspects of the existing governance structure in higher education. Dramatically enhanced funding would also be required.
• The Ministry of Human Resource Development should be working closely with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs to have a road map that incentivises CSR funding to be made available for universities.
• There need to be an immediate move to attract more candidates, such as the faculty recruitment drive in the US, and monetary incentives like the Young Faculty Incentive Fellowship Scheme.
• Parallel development in infrastructure is necessary to accommodate the research needs of incoming faculty.
• The structural and practical realities of Indian universities make them generally unattractive to academic talent from abroad, this must be rectified at the earliest.
• The key motivation for hiring foreign faculty must be to improve international competitiveness and secure positions in global rankings, which in turn would also attract more motivated students.
• Attracting foreign nationals, Indians who studied at prestigious foreign universities by offering higher salaries and other benefits.
• The moral and motivation of the academics have to be maintained. Not only attract the quality but also retain the quality of teachers. For this, the recruitment and the promotion policy have to be looked into. Recruitment policy on merit, kind of promotion on merit and in intervals would retain good teachers.

Conclusion:

If universities become centre of fresh knowledge production then things change. Complete freedom of thought in direction and ideas is need of the hour. There is a prevailing culture that knowledge is finite and job of student is to master pre-existing knowledge. This has a limiting problem in educational culture which needs to be challenged.