Bangalore: Union HRD Minister Dr. Pallam Raju on Monday came down heavily on all the state universities of the country, saying they have failed to achieve their desired goals, and the quality of education imparted in these universities is very low. He also batted for more private funding in the higher education sector.
Raju was delivering the keynote address at the all-India conference of higher education ministers on Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA), the initiative to reform higher education in the country.
"State universities and their affiliated colleges, which count for more than 90% of the enrolment, suffer from severe fund constraints and poor governance, leading to poor quality education. Our Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) is just 19.4%. GERs of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, girls, and Other Backward Classes are far lower.
The same is the case of urban and rural students," he said. He said that the quality of infrastructure and teaching in state universities is far below the acceptable level. Most of these universities depend on the affiliation fee to run the show. As a result, universities have become just administrative bodies as they have to look at examination and admission related issues pertaining to the affiliated colleges.
He said the affiliation system restricts the autonomy of affiliated colleges as they can't introduce any creative, innovative, independent learning/teaching/ R&D scheme. “There is a need to have a relook at the issue," he said.
At the state level, there is a lack of vision and planning and overall there is a “crying need for a holistic approach." "Under the RUSA, the centre is planning to cover 309 state universities and about 8,500 colleges. Funding pattern will be 65: 35 between state and centre,” the minister added.
The chief guest, higher education secretary in the HRD ministry, Ashok Thakur, also took a dig at recent trends in the higher education sector. "Don't look at the private universities. Look at our own colleges. Colleges have history. In South India, many colleges are running for the last hundred years. But many private universities were started without any prior experience in the academic filed," he said.
"Upgrading the colleges, providing more facilities to colleges and converting them into autonomous institutes and universities are some of the targets of the RUSA project,” he added. Thakur said the Centre plans to create 278 new universities and 388 colleges and some of these colleges will be motivated to become universities.
He said at present more than 300 colleges are affiliated to each university which means they are busy looking at administrative issues which leaves little time for research and actually imparting quality education.
"We want to reduce it to an average of about 100 (colleges per university)," Thakur said.
