Scale shouldn't be an excuse

I was in India for a week and I heard one word repeated over and over again: Scale! 

India is trying to do something unique. It is trying to create a prosperous society with a huge scale. This isn't about a small proportion of a small population of a small European nation becoming rich: This is about hundreds of millions of people being pulled out of deprivation and empowered to shape their own lives. The ambition is staggering.

My engagement, I should admit, is only with higher education. I am not as familiar with the workings of the other sectors of the economy. And Indian higher education is, in many ways, peculiar: While the commercial activities of the country have been 'liberalised' and faced global competition and benchmarking, Indian higher education is still very protected. It has been privatised but through a license raj where politicians called the shots. Indian higher education is, therefore, a strange beast: It has the characteristics of the pre-90s Indian businesses and yet expected to move lockstep with Indian industry, which is competing globally.

Therefore, it is failing miserably. The lack of strategic thinking - for that matter, any sort of thinking - is evident. There is no policy to attract or nurture talent, research is only paid lip service and the students are given a raw deal. But everything happens in the name of Scale - the institutions claim not to be able to do any better because they have to do things at scale. 

The most absurd part of this logic is that the Indian higher education sector doesn't have the scale! An average Indian higher ed institution is one fifth the size of a comparable Chinese institution. Indian higher ed covers roughly one third of the people who could have gone to college. If anything, the poor service at the Indian higher ed should be blamed for the lack of scale, not because of it.

But this is only an excuse. The real reason for the poverty of Indian higher ed is the inherent social divisions and lack of empathy of the educated for the uneducated. In another country, lack of education of fellow citizens would be an embarrassment. In India, this is often the source of self-affirmation (I am better educated) and results in indifference (we can't educate so many people well).

I remember one conversation in Mumbai many years ago. I was told, by my host, to connect him with Western institutions for partnership. He lamented that these institutions don't understand India's scale (and therefore charge a high price). I suggested he should therefore partner with Chinese institutions, which do understand scale. Since then, the Chinese Higher Ed has doubled its capacity and significantly improved their global standing, whereas Indian higher ed sector has got only marginally bigger and many institutions are now facing crisis.

And thus it will be: Until the time they stop using scale as an excuse and start doing their job properly.