India-Australia relations: Education as the tipping point

India-Australia relations: Education as the tipping point

Building on the momentum (गति) of Prime Minister Modi’s 2014 visit to Australia, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is currently on his maiden visit to India. Accompanying (साथ में) the Prime Minister is Australia’s Education Minister, Senator Simon Birmingham, and Vice Chancellors from Australia’s highest ranked universities, the Group of Eight. It should therefore come as no surprise that education is high on the agenda of this important bilateral visit. One of the significant challenges that India faces is in higher education. Within the next three years, India will have the largest tertiary (तृतीयक) age population in the world and would have outpaced China. 

While India has one of the largest number of higher education institutions in the world, quality issues, such as, poor infrastructure, archaic pedagogy and lack of quality faculty have adversely impacted learning outcomes and employability.

The Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education in India was only 23.6% in 2014-15, in comparison to countries like Australia which stood at 86.6%. The government is targeting raising this to 30% by 2020. Should this happen, university spots for an additional 14 million students would need to be found and would consequently require the establishment of 800 new universities and 40,000 new colleges over the next three years! Quality would, most certainly, suffer as businessmen, inexperienced in the education field, scramble to benefit from the demand-supply mismatch and establish substandard institutions.