Why Does India have few world class institutes?

This is the question that still haunts every Indian. Inspite of the fact is that Indian graduates are undoubtedly the most sought after graduates (especially IT sector) post 1991 when Silicon Valley, Wall Street and many other financial centers were rocked by Indian graduates with their fine excellence which put the Indian institutes like IITs on the world map. Many US Presidents like George Bush, Clinton and Obama have complemented Indian educational institutes for their nation’s growth. Even popular comics strip Dilbert features Asok, an Indian prodigy from IIT with mysterious powers that he learnt in his college. This is a reason why most of international universities are today forming tie-ups with India universities. However all this respect and recognition is not evident in the world rankings for Universities and colleges. So what are the reasons behind this and what are the remedial solutions to that?

The fact is that Indian colleges don’t fit into most of the parameters set up by international standards. One of the major problems with Indian institutes is that because of their stringent system most of the administrative powers and rights of a college lies under the Government leaving the college authorities with very little autonomous powers. This particularly restricts college administration in taking the decisions that will help in development of the institute. Also Indian colleges fail in terms of the recruiting the faculty with degrees from foreign institutes as well our political system does not allow the non-Indian nationals to take admission in most of the colleges. But the most important and restrictive parameter that works against Indian colleges Is that most of the colleges in India are driven by the ideology of functioning as a teaching led and not a research led institute and hence because of that very few research papers are published annually which works as a disadvantage to the institutes on global platform. It’s only a strong academic curriculum, good placements and excellent students’ IQ index which has given our colleges some respectable ranking.

However if we really want our colleges to be of international standards then we have to improve on some of these key issues. However the pressure has to come from the students, media to force concerned authorities to take necessary steps. Although some changes have taken already but there is still a huge scope of improvement yet.

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