But while the committee’s mandate excluded consideration of more sensible policies of affirmative action, some had still hoped that it might leverage this opportunity to recommend fundamental reforms in higher education. But far from initiating those changes, its purely statistical approach to the issue will exacerbate the problems, not solve them. To begin with, it is high time we acknowledged that the size of institutions here is a real obstacle to their quality. IITs and IIMs admit barely a few thousand, but they are fundamentally designed this way. One of the committee members asked that if MIT admits 5000 students, why can’t each IIT? But this analogy is dubious because MIT is more like a university and has the entire gamut of programmes a university offers. The real Achilles heel is the universities. Universities like Delhi, Mumbai and Osmania already have over 1,50,000 students. They cannot respond to developments in knowledge simply because their structure has to be created through negotiation with thousands of teachers and pedagogic techniques do not cater to individuality and excellence but to homogenisation and standardised exams. It is absolutely amazing that we think that we can expand institutional capacity by 30 per cent without first adding hundreds of new institutions. Do we want to invest all new resources into expanding current disciplinary matrixes? Shouldn’t expansion mean reconfiguring knowledge systems rather than blindly expanding encrusted disciplines? Rather than think of a new architecture for universities which makes them more nimble, the committee has been formulaic in its approach. Expanding current institutions is like making immovable giants even more immobile.

... contd.