First published:Friday, 18 August 2006

On the one hand, India's higher education system is widely acclaimed.

With Indian managers and consultants crowding investment banks, Indian computer scientists sighted in Silicon Valley with the abundance of wildebeests in an African safari and IIT-trained engineers not only working all over the world but appearing in Dilbert cartoons, there seems to be good reason for this.

Yet, over these last two months that I spent in India I came across repeated warnings from prominent personalities associated with Indian academe.

For instance, the scientist CNR Rao, the sociologist Andre Beteille and, most recently in a lecture in Calcutta, Mr Narayana Murthy of Infosys, who is also chairman of the board of directors of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, have all warned about India's faltering higher education system.

How do we reconcile these diverse points of view?

Moribund universities

As soon as one ferrets through some of the statistics of higher education, the answer becomes evident. 

India's production of professionals is phenomenal. With over 300 universities and 15,600 colleges spewing out 2.5 million graduates each year, in terms of the volume of production India trails behind only the US and recently China.

Each year India produces 350,000 engineers, twice the number produced by the US.

The IIT's are indeed world-class training institutes, as are the IIMs; and in recent years the new law schools are also beginning to produce first-rate lawyers. 

What is, however, equally true is that, in terms of research and the purely academic disciplines, such as mathematics, physics and literature, India is beginning to trail in comparison not just to other countries but its own past performance.

The Indian universities, once alive with the hum of intellectual activity, are increasingly moribund. 

This is worrying.

The benefits of good professional training are for all to see. What is less visible but, in the long run, just as important are the academic disciplines, like mathematics and the arts, which are meant to be taught and nurtured in the universities.

Tradition bound

These shape a citizenry's mind, fertilise a nation's intellect and provide the milieu out of which emerge the engineer, the lawyer and the computer technician. If India is to be a global economic powerhouse it is essential to nurture this pure knowledge sector.

A recent evaluation of universities and research institutes all over the world, conducted by a Shanghai university, has not a single Indian university in the world's top 300 - China has six.

The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, comes in somewhere in the top 400 and IIT, Kharagpur, makes an appearance after that. 

Given that India was once home to frontline research - Ronald Ross, CV Raman and Satyen Bose easily come to mind - and even a few decades ago the Delhi School of Economics, with Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati doing cutting-edge research, was routinely compared to the best departments in the world, how have we come to this pass? 

It may at first seem hard to imagine what the answer could be, since our universities function pretty much the way they did in their heydays.

But therein lies the answer.

The organisation of international academe has changed, whereas the Indian university has remained tradition-bound.

There are many things that need to be done.

We need today the kind of initiative that led to the founding of the IITs and to remove the bureaucratic stumbling blocks for the infusion of private funding into the universities.

Pockets of excellence

Minimally, we need to break away from the mindset of having one uniform standard for all.

When India had a few universities treating them all alike, with the same travel and research funding, same salary and the same autonomy (or lack thereof) was fine. But in today's India to tie all universities to the same level of support and rules is to commit them all to mediocrity.

With universities in research-active nations, including China, switching over to the "star system" - where for leading academics salaries and research funding are allowed to rise to match productivity - there is no choice for India.

Our government has to allow pockets of excellence to emerge and to allow them to bid for the best researchers.

Most current academics will tell you that the salary was of little consequence in their choice of career.

I think they are right. But to survey only the ones who have chosen to be academics is to miss out on people who are sensitive to salary and therefore did not choose to be academics.

To attract some of the best minds to fundamental research, especially with top corporate salaries on the rise, we have to permit research funding to match a scholar's productivity.

A professor at a top research institute told how they recently hired a talented PhD, who was earning a big salary in a leading IT company and was giving that up to earn the standard 14,000 rupees ($305) per month for a starting academic.

This is roughly what a senior call centre worker earns.

The dedication of this particular person, like that of many current academics, is remarkable; but to rely entirely on such dedicated people to build a dynamic knowledge sector is to court failure.

 Dr. Kaushik Basu, Professor of Economics and Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University

This article first appeared on the BBC News Column published in Friday, 18 August 2006.