Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced on June 1 that 16 new central universities will be established and that every state of India will have ‘centres of excellence’. The PM believes that such centres of higher learning will act as role models for every other institution in every state and the quality of higher education will improve on the basis of leadership provided by central universities. Public policy makers have assumed that the existing central universities have succeeded in improving the quality of higher education and such a mechanism deserves to be replicated in 16 states, which are at present without such institutions. But have the existing central universities fulfilled these expectations?

The capital of the country, along with UP, has six central universities and it can be stated unequivocally that they do not stand on an equal footing as far as standards of education and research go. They are, in fact, not comparable with each other on any criterion of academic performance. Not just this. The existing central universities have a good number of ‘non-performing’ scholars. ‘Good performers’ are thus expected to co-exist with their incompetent colleagues.

The lack of funds cannot be an excuse for central universities not being able to attain high levels of academic excellence. The explanation for the prevalence of highly differential levels of academic performance among the universities, or within the same university, has to be found from within the university itself. First, the standards of a university depend on its teachers. None of the central universities has any evaluative criteria for the academic ranking of its faculty members or for identifying completely incompetent faculty members. Since universities do not have any internal mechanism of categorising faculty members as ‘performers’ and ‘non-performers, the net result is that every professor is treated as an equal, irrespective of performance and merit.

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