Higher Education Should Create Knowledge And Promote Criticality

Higher education is at a critical juncture in India. The widening gap between education and employability has been a persistent problem of the Indian higher education system for some time now.

- Saptarshi Deb

Despite numerous governmental initiatives, the unemployment crisis in India is far from being resolved.

According to the report titled ‘Issues and challenges before higher educational sector in India’ submitted by the Standing Committee on Human Resource Development headed by Dr. Satyanarayan Jatiya on February 2017, the bulk of the enrollment in higher education is handled by state universities and their affiliated colleges. These institutes operate on 35% of University Grants Commission (UGC) grants as the maximum amount of these grants flow into central universities. This serious discrepancy has been noted in the report and needs to be rectified.

The focus of the government is now entirely on skills that serve corporate interests. However, an important prerequisite of higher education is knowledge creation. Knowledge in the sense of a critical engagement with the world of ideas is fading from the focus of India’s education system and needs to be brought back to encourage criticality. Speaking to BE, Indraneel Dasgupta, Professor, Economic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, said, “Even our best institutions figure below the top 150 in almost all global rankings almost all the time. When it comes to a majority of academic staff publishing regularly in leading international journals in their respective research areas, the number is very less. An overwhelming majority of Ph.D theses produced in India never get published in respectable international journals.”