Investigating and writing up the Manipal and Bangalore-based Manipal Education Group — India’s largest private sector provider of professional (medical, engineering, nursing, business management, pharmacy etc) education — has always been a great learning experience. Since this publication was modestly launched nine years ago, we have featured two cover stories on this education conglomerate, which has grown into India’s sole education multinational with colleges and institutions in Malaysia, Nepal, Dubai and Antigua (West Indies). And it’s especially commendable that MEG, which currently comprises 55 institutions of higher education including two universities with an aggregate enrolment of 167,000 students and 9,000 faculty, has grown and expanded in an unfriendly environment, hostile to private initiatives in education, particularly higher education.
Lumbered with ideological baggage rooted in Soviet socialist ideology which decrees that the commanding heights of the economy — including higher education — should be controlled by government, all governments at the Centre and in the states have consistently discouraged private initiatives in higher education which they equate with “commercialisation of education”. Indian officialdom seems blissfully unaware that private education providers, the Manipal Group institutions in particular, deliver globally benchmarked professional education at the lowest prices worldwide, and at lesser price than government medical and engineering colleges, if subsidies are excluded. It’s only the dogged determination of the top management of MEG, particularly of the late Dr. T.M.A. Pai (1898-1979), the visionary founder of the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (1942) and Kasturba Medical College, Manipal (1953) — who have frequently had to resort to the courts to enforce the fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution of India conferred upon all linguistic and religious minorities to establish and administer institutions of their choice — that has enabled the steady growth of MEG into the country’s largest professional education conglomerate.
Therefore when recently MEG announced its entry into K-12 school education, it generated considerable excitement within Indian academia and not least within middle class India, which suffers severe shortages of qualitatively acceptable schools for its children. Consequently in this first issue of the new fiscal year, we have beamed a searchlight on the Manipal Group’s carefully planned and strategised entry into K-12 education.
Official reluctance to let even proven academic institutions to get on with the job of educating the country’s youth is also highlighted in our special report feature of this issue of EducationWorld. Assistant editor Summiya Yasmeen examines the recently released R.C. Bhargava Committee’s report on ways and means to raise the country’s showpiece Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) to the next level by transforming them into research-driven ‘thought centres’, and discerns a plot to further circumscribe the already tenuous autonomy of these globally respected B-schools.
