Controversy over Quality of Indian Universities

The Governor of Odisha State in India has expressed his concern over the poor quality of Indian Universities. His remarks came at the opening of the annual meeting of the Association of Indian Universities at KIIT University Bhubaneswar and have been widely reported in the Indian media. He said, “Despite an ever-growing number of varsities, quality education is still a dream. We have over 650 universities, 16 National Institutes of Technology and 30 lakh [100,000] colleges across the country. But, we have sacrificed quality in our mad scramble for quantity.”
This is just the latest in a series of complaints and arguments about the deficiencies of  higher education in India and its neighbours, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Such complaints have been voiced for three or four decades but recently the issue has intensified because of the failure of any Indian university to make it into  the top 200 of the three best known international rankings, QS, Times Higher Education and the Academic Ranking of World Universities produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Only one Indian institution reached the top 500 of the Shanghai rankings while a handful were found at the lower levels of the world rankings. More...