The professed loyalty of Arjun Singh to the Gandhi family is largely a private affair. However, resolving the challenges of higher education is not. The grim facts relating to higher education have been brought out in the detailed recommendations of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) and summed up in their letter to the Prime Minister on November 29, 2006. The opportunities for higher education in terms of the number of places in universities are simply not adequate for our needs. What is equally worrying is that the quality of higher education in many of our universities is less than acceptable.

Let me confine my comments to some critical issues.

First, expansion. NKC has recommended that the higher education system needs a massive expansion of opportunities by providing additional 1,500 new universities for enabling India to achieve a gross enrolment ratio of at least 15 per cent by 2015. This would no doubt entail Government funding of at least 1.5 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) out of the total proposed 6 per cent of the GDP for education. It also visualised that the fee structure can be progressively enhanced to meet not the current meager 2 per cent but say 20 per cent of the total expenditure by the universities. The UGC must also change their funding norms, which can facilitate this process.

As far as expansion of higher education is concerned, the budgetary commitments are inadequate, and no concerted effort seems to have been made to diversify the sources of financing that can complement the increase in public expenditure.

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