How India’s top-ranked institutions compare with Best in West

There’s rising anxiety within middle-class India whether the country’s top-ranked preschools, schools and best colleges and universities are preparing students adequately to compete in the dawning age of global hyper-competition. Dilip Thakore reports The high interest aroused by the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2012 (see EW September) nationwide, quickly followed by publication and dissemination of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings league tables 2012-13 in early autumn (September/October), in which the highest-ranked Indian ‘universities’ are the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, listed No. 212 and 227 respectively, has raised the question of how globally comparable are India’s top-ranked education institutions across the board — from preschool to Ph D. Contrary to the opinion advanced by Thomas Friedman — the globally syndicated columnist of The New York Times and author of the bestselling book, The World is Flat (2005) — that because of contemporary ICT (information and communication technologies) and the worldwide web (the internet), national boundaries have blurred, in reality, a new age of intense competitive nationalism has dawned. In this new era, the rapid crystallisation of a global marketplace for goods and services is paradoxically juxtaposed with the emergence of stiff competition between nation-states for land, labour and capital. And in this race for dwindling global resources, countries that lack highly skilled human capital will fall by the wayside and experience hunger, deprivation and poverty. Hence the massive upsurge of interest in parochial, national and global school and university rankings. The world over in every nation, aspirational middle-class parents, in particular, yearn to enrol their children in the best-rated nursery, primary, secondary and higher secondary schools, and best colleges and universities to prepare them to compete and prosper in the dawning age of global hyper-competition. In 21st century India too, there is rising anxiety within middle-class households about the quality of education being dispensed to children and youth across the teaching-learning continuum. This is evidenced not only by the annual scramble for admissions and subsequent long — often over-night — queues for interviews with principals of reputed primary-secondary schools but also by the 500,000 school-leavers who annually write IIT-JEE for one of the coveted 9,618 seats in the country’s 16 Indian Institutes of Technology, as also by the 214,000 college graduates who write CAT (common admission test) of the 13 Indian Institutes of Management which offer 3,500 seats per year. With only a few dozen of India’s 31,000 colleges and 611 universities able to provide globally benchmarked quality education, aspirational middle-class households are often driven to liquidating their assets (land, securities, jewellery etc) to enrol their children in expensive foreign universities. Currently, Indians constitute the largest student communities in the US, Britain, Australia and Canada. In 2010-11, the collective expenditure of the estimated 1.9 million Indian youth studying in foreign colleges and universities aggregated a humungous Rs.95,000 crore, equivalent to one-third of the annual outlay of government (Centre plus states) on education. Clearly, it’s better economics to raise education standards within India than expend…