OVER 60 NEW UNIVERSITIES IN 15 YEARS

West Bengal has seen the number of universities rise sharply over the past 15 years. Most new institutions are state public or private.

- Pritha Roy Choudhury

Over the past decade-and-a-half, West Bengal has added 62 new institutions of higher education.

More than half of these-37-are universities and Institutions of National Importance (INI) for general and technical education, set up between 2008 and 2022. The rest are medical colleges, affiliated to the West Bengal University of Health Sciences (WBUHS). These include the centrally-funded ESIC Medical College in Joka, Kolkata.

The 37 include 22 public universities and 12 private ones. Nine of them started operating during the Covid-19 pandemic, over 2020-22, and for the initial period, taught online. Most of them switched over to offline classes in 2022 but are confronted with fresh challenges with teacher recruitment and lack of infrastructure.

The types of institutions to come up run the gamut from the highly-specialised research centre, National Institute of Biomedical Genomics at Kalyani, to the Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Kalyani for technical education; over a dozen new medical colleges, including the centrally-funded All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Kalyani; and numerous universities, some of which are upgraded colleges; some for women and some, set up to address local needs.

Born during Covid