During the Interim Union Budget 2024-25 in the month of Feb 2024, we mentioned how the anticipations and expectations are high in the Education sector and among the Higher Education Institution (HEI)s.
However, that being an interim Budget 2024 and as the country was going for elections in a few months time, there wasn’t much to cheer for then.
Startup India’s expectation from Budget 2024
Now, with a stable Government, it is expected that the Union Budget shall boost allocation of Funds for education in Infrastructure, research facilities and learning resources which helps in creating world class institutes and Universities.
Netizens have already started speculations and even comparative analysis with countries like China.
Here’s what Prof. Ram Gopal Verma, Group Vice-Chancellor, BITS Pilani Campuses. Former Director, IIT Delhi (2016-21) mentioned in X –
“What China spends on just two of its universities Tsinghua and Peking is the entire higher education budget of India.”
What China spends on just two of its universities Tsinghua and Peking is the entire higher education budget of India. You can check that from their webpages. I did it some time ago. https://t.co/9bwQzsUakJ
— V. Ramgopal Rao, Ph.D. (@ramgopal_rao) July 16, 2024
According to Prof. HARIVANSH CHATURVEDI, Director General, IILM Delhi, Former Director, BIMTECH, Alternate President – EPSI, Prof. Author & Speaker on Higher Education, “If we have to make our economy globally competitive and make India a developed nation by 2047, we have no option left but to increase spending on education up to 6% of GDP out of which 2% should be spent on higher education. For making our country happy & prosperous, SPEND 6% OF GDP ON EDUCATION! Can we make some beginning from the Union Budget 2024!”
Prof. Manu Awasthi, faculty at Ashoka University, while making an attempt to understand the amount of funding at one of the top universities of China, Tsinghua University vis-a-vis top ranked University of India – Indian Institute of Science (IISc) may have discovered a huge gap.
According to Prof. Awasthi, “Generally, the top performing institutions are the best funded ones. At least according to the levels of funding in the country under consideration. I am going by the data available on Wikipedia which might not be completely correct, but allows us to get ballpark numbers.
Compared to IISc, Tsinghua has: 6.8x the faculty and 5.75x PhD students.
Tsinghua also has a USD 6B endowment. I don’t think IISc has one. And even if it does, it will be very, very small (to the extent that the government rules allow)
In addition, Tsinghua graduates 10s of thousands of UGs and PGs every year, which IISc doesn’t, but let’s leave that aside for a moment. This didn’t happen overnight. It took a long time (decades), a lot of effort, and a lot of money to make this happen. The country decided that it is in their long term interests to fund research and universities within the country. They got the best people to work in these places, gave them the facilities they needed — funding, spaces, equipment, incentives to get research going. And they kept doing it for a long, long time without expecting to see returns right away. I personally know of cases where top universities in China made such good offers to excellent candidates that no sane person could reject them.
And the results are there for everyone to see. BTW, Tsinghua is just one example. There are many such universities in China that have similar levels of funding and research output.
Our top institutions do the best they can. But, at the end of day, they are shackled by the lack of vision and commitment of successive governments to develop the country as a research powerhouse. And then there are myriad bureaucratic rules on top of that make it even more difficult.”
While the thought provoking post garnered attention and comments with more data and satire, one comment by @varshul_cw summed it up pretty well, as it provided a concise picture of the situation by presenting key data of the two leading institutes mentioned in the original post, which effectively summarized the crying need if the HEIs in India.
Source : https://exaly.com/institutions
Dr. Lakshman Kumar, Director, Vishwa Vishwani Institute of Systems and Management, lists down few actionables :
- Should align with NEP 2020 – research endeavors, skill enhancement initiatives to achieve NEP objectives, additional financial support is required to invest in cutting-edge technologies and attract top-notch faculty.
- Increase in budgetary allocation for education, from 2.9% to at least to 6 to 7% of the GDP, is crucial for the policy to deliver its full potential and attain national objectives.
- Government’s efforts in implementing skill development programs have set the stage for positive change. However, there is a need to strengthen industry-academia collaboration, by serving up a board
With hope and anticipation, we look forward to a future where the ideals of “Expectations vs. Reality” are met, leading to a brighter, stronger nation characterized by widespread quality education leading to overall development.
Stay tuned for Post Budget analysis.
