Sunday Posts

The new Indian government, which has come to power promising development, wants to be friendly to foreign investment. After all, this is what Mr Modi, the new Prime Minister, had done previously in his home state, Gujrat, and this is what he has projected to the young, aspiring nation. Already in power for most of an year, expectations around him and his government are now focused on a budget due later this month. It is reasonable to think that it would do a few things to simplify doing business in India - which is one of the most difficult countries to start and run a business in - and offer some sweeteners to businesses wanting to set up shop in India. The question is, however, whether such openness would hold for education. One can keep talking endlessly about the Foreign Education Providers Bill, which was there on the legislative agenda for more than 15 years now but never got passed. It is indeed unlikely, despite strong speculation on the contrary, that the Indian governme...

With India's new government in power, the outlook for foreign investment is optimistic. Whatever effect this new government has on India's domestic polity, economic revival is their key agenda, and foreign investment has been the incumbent Prime Minister's favourite talking point in his previous stint as the Chief Minister of the Indian state of Gujrat. It is, therefore, logical to expect a foreign investor-friendly investment. This is more so because the economic nationalists in the Administration believes China is past its prime and India's moment has truly arrived: They would be looking to take advantage of the clear mandate the government has got and open doors everywhere. Accordingly, there is nothing to be surprised about the government's proposal to open up Railways and Defence industries to Foreign Investment. These announcements show that the government is unafraid of controversy and taking full advantage of its mandate: Railways is indeed India's...

India is the world's most exciting Higher Education market. One may receive this with a tinge of skepticism, simply because one has heard this before. But it would be wrong to think that India was always the world's most exciting Higher Education market. That would have been China in the past, and America before that: India's moment is coming now. Part of it is simple demography: National Intelligence Council's Global Trends 2030 ( see here ) highlights some of the fundamentals. In terms of what it calls the Demographic Window of Opportunity - the years when the proportion of Children (0 - 15 years) is less than 30% and the proportion of the seniors (65 years and above) is less than 15% - India arrives now: Its DWO stretches from 2015 to 2050 (see page 24). This closes in Russia and the United States in 2015, and China, which remains a relatively youthful country, has only 10 years left (till 2025). The other exciting demographic opportunities may be much smaller ...

Now that BJP manifesto is out, it is interesting to read and compare the manifestos published by two leading parties on the issue of Higher Education. Admittedly, this is only a minor issue in this election. This election is, as I have written about before, more about the idea of India and how the republic will be shaped. Minds are focused on bigger issues of identity, and should be. Trying to deconstruct manifesto approaches on one issue or the other is surely inconsequential in the face of what's at stake. Besides, parties hardly keep manifesto promises, and BJP almost did not have a manifesto ('Modi is the manifesto', someone said in jest, but got it right). Besides, if Manifestos are inconsequential, Higher Education is inconsequential among other issues addressed in the manifestos. Indeed, there are bigger issues and clear themes that cut across these manifestos, and dare I say that there are clear ideological undertones. Congress seems to be saying 'yout...

India is Higher Education's El Dorado: Every university seem to want to get there, and no one knows how. The British Council's report on Transnational Higher Education puts things in perspective. India is firmly in amber territory in terms of friendliness to Transnational Education, it scores High in market attractiveness but low otherwise, because of the policy and regulatory confusion. It is one of those countries which everyone loves to talk about, but never does anything with. The Indian Government loves to play the game - it has been discussing a bill to allow Foreign Providers into the country for more than a decade now, but never got to the point of putting it forward to the Parliament. For the outside observers, this is just the way India works. The lethargy in governance is just too well known. The various International Directors at various western universities love this, as it always allows them a talking point in the meetings, a topic about which one can appear ...

The context is the apparent demise of the 'Foreign Education Providers' Bill' in India, an event causing much anguish among certain sections of International Higher Education community. It is difficult to mourn for this bill, as this was an useless piece of legislation in the first place. The bill was initially designed for the Top 500 universities in the world, and the purpose of the legislation was to allow these universities to set up campuses in India and teach students and not take any profits away ever from India. In short, the purpose of the bill was to make India's educational improvement a responsibility of the Top 500 universities in the world. Despite the bill being an exercise in futility, this could still be considered an important artifact in Higher Education policy: Its insistence on the requirement that the university applying under it has to be in the Top 500 list on Times Higher Education or Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, a provision that was droppe...

Some media reports emerged that the Indian Government has now quietly dropped the Foreign Education Provider Bill from its legislative agenda. This may not be surprising, given that this bill was around - in different forms - for more than 10 years now, but was never a priority; despite a late flourish during the first 100 days of the UPA government, this was never much talked about, debated or considered important enough. Despite the disappointments this will bring, this may actually be good news. The bill, as it stood, was deeply flawed. It was conceived with the justification of stemming the flow of Indian students to universities abroad, worth $4 Billion of expenses a year: However, such mercantilism is out of step with the global world, and would have ended in a failure anyway. Given this limited goal, the bill was highly protectionist, focused on limiting any outflow that may happen from the Foreign Education providers' activities in India, and left little financial ince...

In India, the Higher Ed talk is about big numbers: The policy makers talk of millions of graduates and hundreds of universities. The never-ending debate about Foreign Investment in Higher Education is centred around the issue of capacity creation and the assumption that it can't be done with capital available in India. However, Indian Higher Education is going through a quiet crisis, and this must be taken into perspective and in reframing the debate. Suddenly, capacity does not seem to be a problem: Over the last five years, every day on average, 10 new institutions seem to have been created and 5000 new students have been offered a Higher Ed place, reckons Pawan Agarwal. However, despite this expansion, the system is still facing a crisis, one of confidence. In fact, despite all the excited projections about student numbers, seats are going empty. If there is a lack of appetite for education investment in India at the time, it is not because of the lack of money but because ...

There is widespread dismay among the British universities this week that the Indian government chose to delay the Foreign Education Providers' Bill yet again, as it failed to gain traction among the Indian MPs ( see story ). The disappointment is understandable: Despite the lure of 'Myanmar, Kurdistan, Vietnam and Brazil' (which John Fielden of Chems Consulting identified as more interesting markets, quoted in the Times Higher Education story), India remains the biggest and most accessible market for British universities, where they enjoy relative superiority over their American and Australian competitors in terms of affinity and cultural connections. Indeed, squeezed under twin pressures of changing funding regimes and impractical visa regulations, most British universities have lost their business models and staring into the abyss: De-regulation in India would have brought some cheer and optimism in this gloomy climate, which proved not to be.  However, se...

India's higher education is fast approaching an inflection point, as demographic changes and increasing affluence alter the nature of demand for higher education. The 'new' students will be more discerning, demanding higher quality of educational experience, meaningful knowledge and not just a certificate, and global careers not just employability. The current structure of the sector, failing general education structure, narrow private sector offering and a few world class institutions, is not fit for purpose to handle this demand. New thinking is indeed needed to bring about the changes and create educational opportunities that this new, dynamic, global middle class needs. The Indian policy-makers, mostly products of elite institutions themselves (in many respect, India's ruling classes resemble France's), can anticipate the problems but are clueless about how to solve it. They are acutely aware that India must open its doors to foreign education institutions,...

India has a problem. Its many million middle class needs opportunities, so that they can make their lives better and get a share of the new prosperity. This should be easy: The Indian companies are going places and foreign companies are coming to India. In the world which is claimed to be flat, a world of opportunities have opened up to the Indian middle class. Only if they could get it. It should be easy, but it isn't. The problem is - India's higher education system is seriously out of date and out of depth. Its initial problem was that it did not have the capacity to serve the middle class. With the government opening up the market to private investment, however reluctantly, the capacity problem seems to have been solved for the moment. Suddenly, there are vacant seats in the management and technology schools. But this could be symptomatic of their poor quality, and not a case of supply outstripping demand. It is quite easy to see that indeed is the case. Only 2% of India...

The problem of Indian Higher Education does not come from the poverty of ideas, but the populism and vested interests that drive the policy-making. This plagued India's past, and just when it seemed to be emerging out of lumber, the same disease caught up with it again. Indeed, Higher Ed is good business and most politicians keep their money invested in it, but by continuing to protect their interests, the country risks missing out on its demographic dividend and getting itself on the slippery slope of missing a historical opportunity. India is Higher Education's most attractive market. It has all the ingredients of a Higher Education revolution of sorts: Millions of young people, growing economy, skill hungry employers and an education system not fit for purpose from the word go. Higher Ed in India, in particular, is a game of political privileges and cronyism; consequently, Indian institutions fail to make it to global top table and also fail to equip its 2.9 million graduate...

The modern universities were instrumental in building the modern nation state. Think Oxbridge and Britain, the Ivy League and the United States or the Ecoles and Modern France, and one gets the idea. The modern secular universities effectively took over learning from the Church, and promoted scientific research and nation-based citizenships instead. So, the universities and national identities remain tied by some sort of intellectual umbilical chord to this day. But that may all be changing. We are currently experiencing one of the severest economic crisis since the Second World War. Once in a lifetime recessions such as this, with the social pains it brings, act as inflection points for civilization, and brings new ideas and concepts on its wake. This recession is no exception. In years immediately preceding the recession, despite the great progress of technologies of globalisation, the human civilization was going the opposite direction intellectually: the reaffirmation of na...

The Foreign Education Providers bill has been approved by Indian Cabinet recently and will now be presented to the Parliament. Though it faces some stiff challenges in the Parliament, as two main opposition blocks, who do not seem to agree on anything else, are united in their opposition to the bill, the Indian media is already presenting this as a done deal. There is public support for the bill, partly because of the media support and partly because the government has sold this well. One can reasonably hope that such public sentiments will mellow down the opposition to the bill eventually, and the opposition parties will make sure that while they make the right noises of disapproval, they don't end up wrecking the initiative. It is interesting that the bill has been commonly referred to as Foreign Universities bill. The selling pitch of the government has been that this bill will bring top universities in the world to India, and will save the country a lot of foreign exchange whic...