No Indian university has found a place even within the top 300 in the recently released Times Higher Education World Ranking 2020. Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Ropar ranks alongside the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, beating IIT’s Delhi and Bombay.
The top five slots have been taken over by Universities such as Oxford (Britain), California Institute of Technology (USA), University of Cambridge (Britain), Stanford University (USA) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) respectively.
From the Asian Continent, two Universities from the People’s Republic of China, Tsinghua University (23) and Peking University (24) and one from Singapore, the National University of Singapore (25) have found a place within the top 25.
What remedial measures can be taken to ensure the improvement in the performance of Indian Universities? Tridivesh Singh Maini, researcher and public policy professional has suggested three core points to ensure better performance of Indian Universities:
1. The private sector and corporate organizations need to enhance their participation in the Indian Higher Education system. With their resources, they can invest in providing good quality education. Though for a meaningful impact and balanced development of the nation, these entities can set up their universities in the lesser developed parts of the country such as North-Eastern India, Jammu and Kashmir and tier-2 cities.
2. It is of paramount importance to enhance investments in the Research and Development sector. With India spending less than 1% of its GDP on R and D, it cannot expect its universities to find a place amongst the global universities. Along with enhanced investment into R and D, a good quality framework and assessment standards need to be framed.
3. Emphasis on skill development is the need of the hour. The stakeholders have to move beyond churning out degrees and invest in skill development. According to a 2017 World Bank report, India is expected to lose 67% of its jobs to automation. In such a doomsday scenario, the skill development program will be the saviour.