It is reported that the price tag for this expansion will be at least Rs 16,000 crore. The travesty is that the right to education bill is languishing and being further watered down for fiscal reasons. Strange is our conception of social justice. Higher education needs to expand and requires public investment. But it would have been prudent to first come up with a financing strategy, a rationalisation of fee structure, regulatory reform to allow new entrants into the system, making the setting up of universities easier, allowing quality foreign players to fill in crucial investment gaps and promote competition, and fundamentally alter the current perverse systems of accountability. With the current institutional architecture, with the scourge of identity politics already vitiating campuses, will we attract good talent into academic life? It is doubtful that quantity will turn into quality. The more likely outcome, to borrow another phrase of Hegel’s, is that we will experience a dumb, deedless expansion.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi