The higher education sector, comprising tertiary and post-school learning in universities and other institutions, has witnessed acceleration in total enrolment coupled with rising ‘enrolment equity’ over the past eight years. As per All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021-22, total enrolment in higher education has increased to nearly 4.33 crore in FY22 from 4.14 crore in FY21 and 3.42 crore in FY15 (an increase of 26.5 per cent since FY15), said the Economic Survey 2023-24 tabled in Parliament today by the Union Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister, Smt Nirmala Sitharaman.

Rising equity in higher education

The Survey mentioned that the rise in enrolment in higher education has been driven by underprivileged sections such as SC, ST and OBC, with a faster growth in female enrolment across sections. Female enrolment in higher education increased to 2.07 crore in FY22 from 1.57 crore in FY15, i.e. a 31.6 per cent increase. The growing equity in higher education implies better employment opportunities for the hitherto backward sections.

Re-imagining lifelong learning through a digital prism

The Survey mentioned that India has 26.52 crore students in school, 4.33 crore in higher education and more than 11 crore learners in skilling institutions. The vast expanse of the educational landscape comprises 14.89 lakh schools, 1.50 lakh secondary schools, 1.42 lakh higher secondary schools, 1,168 Universities, 45,473 colleges, 12,002 standalone institutions, 94.8 lakh teachers in school education and 15.98 lakh teachers in higher education.

The National Credit Framework (NCrF), announced under National Education Policy 2020 in April 2023, forms the bulwark of the regulatory architecture underpinning life-long learning. Bolstering the regulatory architecture is an extensive array of digital solutions, such as digital public infrastructure (DPI), which act as force multipliers. Prime among India’s educational DPIs is APAAR, i.e. Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry, which serves as an electronic registry for institutions, students, and faculty by creating unique identities and lifelong academic credentials for each stakeholder in the education space. APAAR is supplemented by the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC), an online repository of academic credits that facilitates students’ mobility across Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) through a formal process of credit recognition, accumulation, transfer and redemption. Once an APAAR ID is created, HEIs map the credits a student earns to their ID, with all such credits stored in the ABC in demat form.

The twin solution of APAAR and ABC, by allowing real-time verification of identity and academic credentials, paves the way for several interesting use cases. These include the possibility of students pursuing credit courses from different institutions for a particular qualification (now a reality) or targeting scholarships/ internships/ educational loans using academic profiles. As of July 2024, 2037 HEIs have onboarded ABC, and 30.13 crore APAAR IDs have been created for students of higher education, school education and skill institutes.

Way forward in education

The Survey highlighted that as education is one of the most critical areas for India’s development, mission-mode and cost-effective implementation of well-designed and well-intentioned programmes is essential to improve the quality of education, especially primary education, without which further years of education add little value. To realise the same, unity of purpose and convergence of efforts across the centre, state, and local Governments is called for, as ‘public education’ is a concurrent list subject.

Increasing the cost-effectiveness of public spending on education requires spending on pedagogy and governance. This can include filling supervisory positions to monitor teaching quality, recognition of good and bad teacher performance, and hiring of local volunteers to ensure ‘teaching at the right level’ as textbook completion means little if children are way behind curricular standards.

India making headway in R&D

The Survey highlighted that India is making rapid progress in R&D, with nearly 1,00,000 patents granted in FY24, compared to less than 25,000 patent grants in FY20.

According to WIPO, India saw the highest growth (31.6 %) in patent filings in 2022. India has consistently improved its rank in the Global Innovation Index (GII) from 81st position in 2015 to 40^th in 2023, as per GII (2023).

On the human resource side, total Ph.D. enrolment in India has increased to 81.2 per cent in FY22 (2.13 lakh) from FY15 (1.17 lakh). The Gross Expenditure on R&D (GERD) in the country has been consistently increasing over the years and has more than doubled from ₹60,196.8 crore in FY11 to ₹ 127,381 crore in FY21 As a mark of India’s ascent in high-quality research, the country climbed up to 9th rank in the Nature’s Index 2023, overtaking Australia and Switzerland. India’s share of high-quality research articles (measured in terms of absolute numbers and not percentages) increased by 44 per cent in the past four years, i.e., from 1039.7 in 2019 to 1494.7 in 2023.

The Government has recently decided to increase the scholarships for students pursuing PhD and Post-Doctoral research. Further, India has launched its own National Research Foundation called ‘Anusandhan’ operationalised by the Department of Science and Technology (under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act, 2023 Act). This foundation will act as an apex body that aims to strengthen and promote the R&D ecosystem. In the interim budget of FY25, the Government also announced a corpus of Rs. 1 lakh crore for research and innovation in the country, adopting the slogan “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan, Jai Vigyan, Jai Anusandhan”.

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NB/ MV/AK