T
he Honorable Finance Minister
recently announced the Annual
Budget for India wherein higher
education was allocated Rs 38,317.01
crores for the year. To put that into
context, a single private university in the
United States - Harvard University - had a
budget of Rs 34,500 crores.
While the draft new education policy
is truly revolutionary for the entire eco-
system, it fails to address one of the
most critical points that enables long
term institutional building, which is how
to generate, incentivise, and govern
investments into higher education,
domestically and from around the world.
Successive governments have been
terrified to touch this subject as they
wonder if they would get an electoral
backlash. Some are also worried that
they will lose control of a critical sector
that should be a pillar of the nation.
Thus, even the revolutionary draft new
education policy touches on the need
for this but quickly shies away from any
recommendations or solutions.
For institutions (both public and private)
to grow and thrive in the long run, they need
a commercial and structural regulatory
system that allows them an incredible
amount of flexibility with accountability
only to their own stakeholders. While there
has been an incredible push to modernise
the education regulatory aspects including
brilliant initiatives by the University Grants
Commission (UGC) and All India Council
for Technical Education (AICTE), the non-
education aspects of the system have held
back the ability of institutions to grow.
The elephant in the room has always
been a notion of a nanny state interference,
combined with a communistic governance
attitude, and layered with continuous tax
terrorism that haunts the daily affairs of
an institution. It prevents its growth due
to restrictions on education and business
model and suffocates an institution’s ability
to create strategic linkages with industry,
stakeholders, and possible investors and
donors.
The notion of “commercialisation” of
education is pasted on any activity that may
be actually essential for an institution to
thrive. This is true not only in the domestic
context but often even internationally.
Whether it is the creation of long-term
endowments with aggressive investment
strategies, intellectual property creation
and commercialisation, incubation centresthat provide venture capital and stock
opportunities, investing in striking and
enabling foreign deals and campuses,
building out of alumni infrastructure, or
even simply advertising the benefits of
the university to a larger population to
increase student diversity.
All of these activities are considered
standard for any global institution and
while they are encouraged by education
regulators in India, they are severely
restricted by other departments, policies
and laws of the government. It is biting to
see large corporates, trusts and individuals
in India donating large amounts of money
to universities abroad but unable to do so in
India due to a poor framework.
The visionary Government of India
today understands this well and they also
realise that public coffers do not have
the strength and ability to support the
education system as it should.
The need, therefore, along with the new
draft education policy is to ensure that the
rest of the laws applicable to universities
and higher-education institutions are
changed and reformed.
It is not a matter of the creation of
physical infrastructure - India already
has an oversupply of higher-education
seats - rather it is the creation of a higher
education system and framework that
is consistent with the needs of the 21st
Century and is congruent with the actions
education leaders need to take to drive
their institutions forward.
India has always proven that it can ac-
complish great things even on a shoestring
budget but institutions need the freedom
and flexibilities to operate and to choose
what they spend on.In order to attract investment and
donations into the sector, the government
needs to provide the ability for institutions
to customise themselves to the desires and
ambitions of their stakeholders, no matter
how strange, commercial, and unnerving
they may seem and not the straight-
jacketed vision of what education should
be dictated by a few sitting in closed offices
in Delhi. People are willing to donate and
invest in their beliefs but they need to see
those being delivered by institutions.
Archaic land and leasing laws,
broken down adversarial tax terrorism
systems, restrictions on the creation of
endowments, forced governance models
and regulations, restrictions on foreign
scholarship, inability to fully participate
in the economy, and being unable to plug
into a global infrastructure and system
further severely restrict institutions.
Even those institutions which have
the funding and vision are forced to put
money into “government acceptable”
expenditures which at the margin do
not have the impact needed or match
the desires of the stakeholders. The
investments and expenditures, particularly
with partnerships a university would want
to do, are disallowed or frowned upon and
then left aside.
It is also the reason why so many non-
formal higher education companies have
formed in India and despite being declared
illegal by the UGC and the government
continue to operate many of them even
providing a high quality of education. The
general population which admires these
institutions as household names would be
shocked to learn of their illegal nature.
If India is to truly create world-class
universities and colleges, it needs to thus,
not only reform its education policy from
the ground up (which it is trying) but also
reform its other departments that impact
education from the ground up.
There is no reason why India cannot
have a globally accepted, benchmarked,
and competitive higher education sector.
But, it needs to allow for a large number of
investors, donors and other stakeholders to
enter and pursue a vision that they believe
in and allow them to operate that vision
on a daily basis with full academic and
monetary flexibility.
Only then will the education budgets,
performance, and rankings of higher
education in India start to match that of the
rest of the world.A New DeAl for INDIAN UNIversItIes
Beyond Education Regulation:
Mr. Aditya Berlia
Co-Founder and Pro Chancellor,
Apeejay Stya University90 OutlOOk 29 July 2019