Universities under pressure

The times university reputation report is expectedly unflattering for Indian universities. Compared to the last report Indian universities have dropped significantly in their rankings and premier institutions like iit Mumbai have crashed out of the list and iisc and iit Delhi and Chennai have taken dip. We have a new entry from the Pvt universities into the list as shiksha O anusandhan from bhuvaneshwar Seen together with news on declining government grants and loan based support from HEFA the higher education financing agency. While premier institutions are forming nonprofit companies and tapping into their resourceful alumni base and creating endowment funds the mofussil universities have no such support. The Indian poor are simply incapable of paying for college even the middle class finds it unaffordable and are ready to pay only for professional courses. The rich are anyway opting abroad. At about 7 billion dollars a year it is our biggest non merchandise import. As we are moving into a knowledge economy this is not a happy scenario for us.