How India’s top-ranked institutions compare with Best in West

There’s rising anxiety within middle class India whether the country’s top-ranked preschools, schools and best colleges and universities are preparing students adequately to compete in the dawning age of global hyper-competition. Dilip Thakore reports

The high interest aroused by the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2012 (see EW September) nationwide, quickly followed by publication and dissemination of the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings league tables 2012-13 in early autumn (September/October), in which the highest ranked Indian ‘universities’ are the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, listed No. 212 and 227 respectively, has raised the question of how globally comparable are India’s top-ranked education institutions across the board — from preschool to Ph D.

Contrary to the opinion advanced by Thomas Friedman — the globally syndicated columnist of The New York Times and author of the bestselling book, The World is Flat (2005) — that because of contemporary ICT (information and communication technologies) and the worldwide web (the internet), national boundaries have blurred, in reality a new age of intense competitive nationalism has dawned. In this new era, the rapid crystallisation of a global marketplace for goods and services is paradoxically juxtaposed with the emergence of stiff competition between nation states for land, labour and capital. And in this race for dwindling global resources, countries which lack highly skilled human capital will fall by the wayside and experience hunger, depri-vation and poverty.

Hence the massive upsurge of interest  in parochial, national and global school and university rankings. The world over in every nation, aspirational middle class parents in particular, yearn to enroll their children in the best rated nursery, primary, secondary and higher secon-dary schools, and best colleges and universities to prepare them to compete and prosper in the dawning age of global hyper-competition.

In 21st century India too, there is rising anxiety within middle class households about the quality of education being dispensed to children and youth across the teaching-learning continuum. This is evidenced not only by the annual scramble for admissions and subsequent long — often over-night — queues for interviews with principals of  reputed primary-secondary schools, but also by the 500,000 school-leavers who annually write IIT-JEE for one of the coveted 9,618 seats in the country’s 16 Indian Institutes of Technology, as also by the 214,000 college graduates who write CAT (common admission test) of the 13 Indian Institutes of Management which offer 3,500 seats per year.

With only a few dozen of India’s 31,000 colleges and 611 universities able to provide globally benchmarked quality education, aspirational middle class households are often driven to liquid-ating their assets (land, securities, jewellery etc) to enroll their children in expensive foreign universities. Currently Indians constitute the largest student communities in the US, Britain, Australia and Canada. In 2010-11, the collective expenditure of the estimated 1.9 million Indian youth studying in foreign colleges and universities aggregated a humungous Rs.95,000 crore, equivalent to one-third of the annual outlay of government (Centre plus states) on education.

Clearly, it’s better economics to raise education standards within India than  expend this enormous amount annually in foreign universities to make good the deficiencies of the country’s education system. Therefore for the past 13 years since the first issue of EducationWorld was somewhat timorously launched in an indifferent marketplace ignorant of the high socio-economic cost of sub-standard preschool, primary-secondary, collegiate, and university education, this publication which now reaches the farthest corners of the country, has served as a forum for discussion, debate and discovery of ways and means to raise Indian education to global stand-ards. In this issue which celebrates EducationWorld’s 13th anniversary, we assess the extent to which India’s top-ranked preschools, schools and instit-utions of higher education have become globally comparable and competitive.

How do India’s Best Preschools compare globally?

Despite a vast body of persuasive evidence emerging during the past three decades that early childhood education (ECE) is of vital importance because the most formative years for brain development in homo sapiens are 0-7, preschool education of India’s 130 million infants has remained an area of darkness. The great majority of children in this age group don’t receive any preschool education at all, and only an estimated 8 million attend 1.6 million anganwadis (lactating mother and child nutrition centres-cum-creches) established by the Central government countrywide.

Administered by the Union ministry of women and child welfare, the overwhelming majority of children registered in anganwadis are from the poorest rural and urban households, in need of minimal nutrition and day care crèche facilities. The Union budget 2012-13 allocated a mere Rs.15,850 crore for the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), which translates into just Rs.1,975 annually per child enroled in anganwadis.

The price that Indian society and the economy are paying — and will continue to pay — in terms of healthcare costs, widespread illiteracy and rock-bottom labour productivity because of post-independence India’s political class callously neglecting the early childhood education and care of its estimated 130 million vulnerable infant population, is huge. According to the Human Development Report published annually by the United Nations Development Programme, 46 percent of India’s children under-five suffer severe malnutrition and consequent brain damage and stunting. Yet despite EducationWorld, several NGOs and other pressure groups highlighting this massive waste of the country’s high-potential human resources ad nauseam, political leaders in New Delhi and state capitals — as also the influential middle class — have remained impervious to calls for revision of government spending priorities in favour of human resource — particularly child — development.

The silver lining of sustained government neglect of ECE is that  preschool education has not attracted the attention of the country’s infamous neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) kleptocracy, which with its own consp-icuous failure to manage the country’s 1.25 million government primary schools notwithstanding, has nonetheless imposed its notorious rents-farming licence-permit-quota regimen upon all private school and higher education initiatives. Consequently, an estimated 50,000 privately promoted ECE kinder-garten and nursery schools subscribing to canons of early childhood education pioneers such as Maria Montessori, Reggio Emelia, Rudolf Steiner, Jean Piaget among others, have mushroomed in urban India to cater to the education needs of the country’s 300 million-strong — and growing — middle class, particularly the well-educated upper middle class aware of the prime importance accorded to preschool educ-ation in advanced western countries.

Especially within the past decade, there’s been a burst of activity in India’s unregulated ECE sector with the promotion of globally benchmarked preschools (Eurokids, Kangaroo Kids) under the franchise model. Moreover, responding to public pressure, EducationWorld commissioned the first annual survey of India’s Most Admired Preschools in May 2010, and again in 2011, with the 2012 survey being conducted right now. Conterminously EducationWorld convened two ECE conferences in 2010 and 2011, at which globally-acknowledged early childhood educators from the US and Singapore were keynote speakers.

Swati Popat, director of the Podar Jumbo Kids chain of 120 preschools in western India and president of the Early Childhood Association (ECA, estb. 2010) which has a membership of 519 preschools countrywide, is satisfied with the growth and development of ECE in India in recent years. According to Popat, ECA is a member of the US-based World Forum Foundation (estb.1998), an association of over 5,000 ECE profess-ionals in 95 countries. As such and in her own right, she has visited and inspected preschools in Canada, Belfast, London, Hawaii, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and New Zealand.

“In terms of ambience, educational toys and innovative curriculums, India’s best preschools familiar with advanced ECE pedagogies such as High Scope, Reggio Emilia, Montessori, Rudolf Steiner and Vygotsky, compare with the best anywhere. However the lacuna in even our best preschools is poor teacher training, particularly in core theory grounding. As a result, often the curriculums of even excellent preschools are not developmentally appropriate. This is why ECA has recently become a member of NAEYC (National Associ-ation for the Education of Young Children), the world’s largest organi-sation working on behalf of early learners which accredits preschools, and prescribes developmentally appropriate curriculums,” says Popat.

Inadequately trained teachers is also identified as the infirmity of Indian preschool education by Kavita Sabharwal, promoter-director of four high-end (average tuition fee: Rs.12,000 per month) Neev preschools in Bang-alore with an aggregate enrolment of 500 children mentored by 90 teachers. “Tuition fees for early childhood education in even the most high-end preschools in India are not even 10 percent of the fees parents are ready and willing to pay in OECD countries. Consequently, preschool managements abroad are able to invest in superb infrastructure and hire top-ranked university graduates as teachers, paying industry-competitive salaries. In India, parents are not willing to pay the price of truly world class ECE. And even though a sliver of elite society may be willing to do so, charging tuition fees beyond a certain threshold hurts the cause of student diversity in class-rooms, and is therefore not advisable. While India’s tiny minority of best preschools successfully adapt global best practices for introducing children to literacy and numeracy, we are less successful in infusing self-esteem and the spirit of inquiry in very young children,” opines Sabharwal.

This honest assessment of the relatively under-developed status of Indian preschool education is sympat-hetically seconded by Dr. Elanna Yalow, an alumna of Stanford University and State University of New York, and currently the chief executive (early learning programmes) of the Singapore-based Knowledge Universe, the world’s largest private K-12 education company which owns and manages 1,740 preschools in the US, 216 in Britain and 41 in Singapore. Dr. Yalow is of the opinion that India is still in the early stages of developing a sustainable delivery model to ensure children enter  primary education with the basic skills needed for success in school. “The ECE system is completely unregulated with respect to supervision ratios, facility and equipment levels, teacher qualifications and training, etc, creating huge differences in quality,” she says.

Nevertheless Yalow, who was the keynote speaker at the country’s first Early Childhood Education Global Conference 2010 held in Mumbai, and has studied India’s nascent ECE sector,  believes a small — but highly inad-equate minority — of ECE pioneers “whose efforts need to be multiplied many times over”, have promoted globally benchmarked preschools. “There is no doubt there are a select number of ECE schools in India which offer rich and exceptional early learning experiences for young children, and the very best of them compare favourably with the quality expectations prevalent in other countries. Unfortunately they are the exception, rather than rule,” says Yalow.

For mysterious reasons, India’s omniscient Central planners and the Planning Commission have severely neglected early childhood education, despite the country grudgingly hosting the world’s largest population of under-5 children. Fortunately, a small number of private sector educators, have entered this critical space and have charted a path for the Central and state govern-ments to follow, to ensure the nation’s demographic dividend is fully harv-ested. But their efforts need to be replicated and scaled up with the urgent conversion of the country’s 1.6 million anganwadis into full-fledged preschools, committed to beginning the process of preparing India’s neglected infants for primary-secondary education.

EW RATING: India's Best preschools vs. Best in West -- 5/10

India’s Best Secondary Schools: jewels in a rusty crown   

Ex facie the only institutions within India’s education system which are globally comparable are its secondary and higher secondary schools — particularly vintage legacy boarding schools, and latterly new genre international schools affiliated with offshore examination boards such as the International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO), Geneva; Cambridge International Examinations (CIE), UK; The College Board and the Middle States Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, USA. For over half a century, legacy boarding schools such as Doon, Mayo, St. Paul’s, Darjeeling, Lawrence, Sanawar, among others, have attracted children of the Indian diaspora (including your correspondent) and neighbouring South Asian countries for games and sports-intensive British public school style education, disp-ensed with a tinge of Indian culture.

More recently, international schools offering high-quality English-medium education, excellent games, sports and residential facilities, and globally respected foreign certification at a fraction of the cost of comparable education in best of West schools, have attracted a second wave of foreign students from Korea and Thailand, and children of the multiplying number of western expatriates working in Indian industry.

“In spite of Indian examination boards and colleges which encourage plagiarism over originality, our top-bracket secondary/higher secondary schools deliver results, because of  a combination of socio-cultural factors unique to India. For instance, unlike in the West, education in the subcontinent is a collaborative effort with parental involvement at every stage. Secondly, our cultural and family values accord great importance to learning and respect for teachers, who by and large are competent and dedicated. Moreover, in Indian education the system highlights students’ weaknesses whereas in the West, weaknesses are overlooked in favour of positive achievements. This prompts Indian students to strive harder, and while their western counterparts have greater self-esteem, it often spills over into over-confidence. And significantly, there is stronger emphasis in India on mental learning, especially in maths. The positive fallout is that most Indians who combine passage through the country’s premier schools with a western university degree do better in life than those whose entire education is in the West,” says Sumer Singh, former principal of Lawrence School, Sanawar and currently headmaster of The Daly College, Indore (estb. 1882), both vintage legacy board-ing schools routinely ranked among the country’s Top 10 in the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings.

Although education experts are reluctant to compare India’s best boarding and international schools head to head with their counterparts abroad, citing the vastly differing host and regulatory environments and invoking apples and oranges arguments, it’s undeniable that India’s top residential and high-end international schools have one major advantage over foreign, especially British public schools: for climatic reasons they offer year-round out-door sports and games opportunities. Moreover, tuition fees of the most high-end legacy boarding schools in India which rarely exceed  Rs.5 lakh ($9,350) per year, are a fraction of the £25,000-30,000 (Rs.21-25.8 lakh)  charged by leading British public schools such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester. Likewise, the tuition fees of even the most expensive new genre international schools in India seldom exceed Rs.10-12 lakh per year for boarders.

According to Sanjiv Bolia, promoter-chairman of Afairs Pvt. Ltd, a Kolkata-based company which schedules and  manages school expositions for instit-utional promotion and student enrolment countrywide as well as abroad (Bangkok, Kathmandu, and Seoul), given the prolonged recession in Europe and Britain in particular, households abroad which value private education are showing increasing interest in India’s high-performing boarding and nexgen international schools that are relatively very affordable. “Simultaneously the inflow of students from South-east Asian countries attracted by high-quality English-medium education provided by the best Indian schools is steadily rising,” says Bolia.

However, the prospect of a sizeable inflow of foreign students — especially from developed OECD countries — into even excellent Indian schools is dismissed as wishful thinking by several knowledgeable educationists and education consultants. Informed opinion is unanimous that on the vital parameter of teacher welfare and development (quality of  faculty), even the very best Indian schools are way behind private schools in the UK, US, Australia and other OECD countries.

“In many aspects — facilities and resources, parental involvement, students’ academic performance and commitment to innovation — the best Indian schools such as Daly College are as good as any worldwide. However, teacher quality is uneven with a large number of teachers continuing to pursue old transmission — teach for exams — pedagogies, depriving their students of the creativity and imaginative work they are capable of and hunger for. In their sister schools in the West, the quality of teachers is consistently good,” says Dr. Fazal Rizvi, professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education of Melbourne University and author of Globalizing Education Policy (Routledge, 2010). Currently, Rizvi is conducting a major transnational research project examining ways in which “nine schools around the world of the English public school tradition are engaging with the challen-ges and opportunities of globalisation”.

Qualitatively inferior teachers are also identified as the defining lacuna of even the highest ranked primary-secondaries in India. The doubling of the country’s annual GDP growth rate following liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, created a massive demand in industry, business and commerce, especially in the services sector for individuals with minimal qualifications and skills. Consequently, the teaching profession in which salaries have traditionally been low because even the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that education provision is necessarily a charitable activity and end user (student) fees should be capped by law, has suffered a sharp inflow reduction of best university graduates. And with government-controlled  teacher training colleges having reduced teacher education to a joke, even the most pricey schools are experiencing an acute shortage of qualified, talented and committed teachers.

“In Britain, USA and OECD countries the best private schools attract graduates from Oxbridge and Ivy League universities, because teacher salaries match industry norms. In India on the other hand, the brightest and best university graduates seldom opt for teaching, especially in schools. Unfortunately for various reasons, teaching has become a socially less respectable profession with slow upward mobility. Moreover, even in terms of infrastructure, India’s top-ranked schools are not as good as the best in the West which are built on a grand scale,” says Shomie Das, who taught Prince Charles at Gordounston College, Scotland before returning to India to serve as headmaster of several legacy boarding schools including Mayo College, Ajmer and Doon School, Dehradun. During the past two decades after retirement, Das has emerged as India’s top K-12 education consultant and is credited with the conceptual-isation and commissioning of over 50 private schools countrywide on a turnkey basis.

However, external assessments of the state of Indian primary-secondary education tend to vary. Just as President Barack Obama discerns a threat to the hegemony of American industry from the Indian and Chinese education systems which, according to his information produce super engi-neers, maths wizards and business management gurus, so Brian Dawson, executive director of the South Africa-based Round Square, an association of  90 top-ranked and 20 regional member schools worldwide “which share a commitment, beyond academic merit to personal growth, and responsibility through service, challenge, adventure and inter-national understanding which ultimately seeks to empower students to become leaders and guardians of tomorrow’s world”, believes the infirmity of Indian schools is under-investment in physical infrastructure.

“The development of physical infrastructure of well-resourced schools in other parts of the world is quite exceptional. Buildings, boarding houses, laboratories and sports facilities are given huge investment. But one must not lose sight of the value of good teachers and I believe that India has an abundance of excellent teaching staff who have an attitude of responsibility to their profession that one seldom finds in other parts of the world,” says Dawson.

But while opinions about the perceived lacunae of the Indian school education system may differ, on the vital parameter of admission into the world’s best universities, higher secondary graduates of India’s top-ranked schools seem to have few problems. On the contrary, foreign — particularly American — universities roll out the red carpet for them. This is not only because foreign students pay higher tuition fees, but also because they lend ethnic and intellectual diversity which is highly prized by American universities in particular. Hence to bag the brightest and best students from India, represen-tatives of top British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand universities routinely visit top tier international, boarding and day schools to recruit best-performing students, offering generous scholar-ships and fee waivers.

According to Lt. General (Retd) Arjun Ray, chief executive of the new genre IBO, Geneva-affiliated  Indus International School, Bangalore, (IIS, estb. 2003) ranked India’s No.1 international school in the Education-World India School Rankings 2012, this summer 94 of the 99 class XII school-leavers of IIS, Bangalore who wrote the IB diploma exam, were snapped up by American and British universities with  scholarships awarded to the brightest valued at $4 million (Rs.22 crore). “Every year admission teams from reputed American, British and Australian universities visit our campus to recruit school-leaving students. Among them are Brown, Wharton, Yale, UCLA, and MIT from the US, and Oxford, Cambridge, London School of Economics, Durham and Warwick from the UK who offer 40-100 percent scholarships to high-performing students,” says Ray.

India’s private schools have also earned global reputation for their academic rigour and curriculums which go way beyond syllabuses set by their affiliating exam boards. According to Arun Kapur, founder-principal of the Vasant Valley School, Delhi (estb. 1990)  ranked the country’s No. 1 day school in the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2012, the school routinely records “dream placements” for its class XII school leavers.

“We don’t set much store by high board exam averages in Vasant Valley. Our objective is to ensure that every school-leaving student gets admission into the course and college of her choice, and the majority of them do. Moreover, our higher secondary students are prized not only by colleges and universities in India, but abroad as well. All the best American universities send recruiting teams to visit our campus every year, and our top students receive handsome scholarship offers because they bring academic rigour into college and university classrooms,” says Kapur, who is disinclined to make direct comparisons with the best private day schools abroad. “They enjoy full freed-om of operations whereas our admis-sion, tuition fees and teacher remun-eration is regulated by government and the courts,” he laments.

Clearly, there’s substance in Kapur’s grievance that India’s much admired (by the middle class) and much maligned (by politicians and leftists) elite private schools which overwhelmingly dominate the EW India School Rankings, are not as independent as their western counterparts. They are subject to constricting operational guidelines framed by the Central and state governments, and moribund exami-nation boards inured to rewarding rote learners, and/or the judiciary which adamantly refuses to acknowledge education as a commercial activity.

Arguably, the only Indian primary-secondaries which can be placed on a par with the best in West are the coun-try’s top-ranked alternative schools such as Rishi Valley, Chittoor and The Valley School, Bangalore which have also topped the EducationWorld India School Rankings 2012. Offering English-medium science, technology and environment rigour combined with culturally-rooted co-curricular educ-ation, new age gurukul schools are rising in public esteem.

Yet in their formative stage, but driven by entirely different value premises, in the long run India’s revivalist new age gurukuls may well evolve into better than best in West schools.

EW RATING: India's Best primary/secondaries vs. Best in West -- 7/10

India’s Higher Education Institutions: distant also-rans

The misfortune of the estimated 14.5 million students enroled in the country’s 31,000 colleges and 611 universities is that higher education is tightly controlled by the Central and state governments. As a result, tertiary and higher education institutions are lumbered with all the ailments of post-independence India’s failed socialist experiment.

For purposes of evaluation, instit-utions of higher education countrywide may be divided into three categories: colleges and universities funded by the Central government; institutions funded by state governments and private colleges and universities. Informed opinion is unanimous that Central government-funded institutions which include Delhi University (with its highly prized affiliated undergrad colleges such as St. Stephen’s, Shri Ram College of Commerce, Lady Shri Ram and Miranda House, among others); the 16 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and 13 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs); All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore; Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) among others, are qualitatively the best in the country. Relatively well-funded and staffed with research and citations-conscious faculty, they are in the vanguard of India’s higher education initiatives in the social sciences, engineering and technology, business management and bio-technology.

Next in the pecking order are the country’s private institutions of higher education including top-rung govern-ment aided colleges such as St. Xavier’s, Mumbai;  Loyola and Madras Christian colleges, Chennai and St. Joseph’s College, Bangalore and the country’s 112 private universities which offer high quality education often on a par with the best Central government univer-sities and institutions. The most well-known among them are the Manipal, Amity, VIT and NIIT deemed univer-sities, and the Indian School of Busi-ness, Hyderabad. These high profile privately promoted institutions have been grudgingly permitted to be established — grudgingly because they levy costs-related tuition fees (high compared with the heavily subsidised fees levied by government colleges and varsities, but rock-bottom by inter-national standards) which is heresy in the wonky socialist dispensation shaped by the Centre and the courts.

They are supplemented by 3,000 private engineering colleges, 194 medical colleges and 2,250 B-schools across the country. And last in the higher education pecking order are 285 state government varsities (and their affiliated colleges) such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Patna, Lucknow universities in all the 28 states and seven Union territories, whose degrees and certification are given minimal respect, if any, in industry and society.

However despite post-independence India’s inherited Central universities and grudgingly tolerated private universities offering undergrad and postgrad education of acceptable standard, the bar in higher education is set so low by an alphabet soup of government constituted regulatory and accreditation agencies such as UGC (University Grants Commission), AICTE (All India Council of Technical Education), NCTE (National Council of Teacher Education), NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council of India) among others, that the certification awarded by even the country’s top-ranked colleges and universities is unreliable. According to a NASSCOM-McKinsey World Institute study (2005), three-fourths of certified graduates of the country’s 3,393 engineering colleges, and 85 percent of arts, science and commerce graduates are not fit for employment in multinational companies. Unsurpris-ingly, Indian industry is reputed to have the highest induction and in-service training costs worldwide.

Therefore in the league tables of the world’s most respected universities published annually by the London-based Quacquarelli Symonds Ltd (QS), a global research and consultancy, and Times Higher Education weekly, India’s domestically top-notch universities suffer grievously in comparison not only with western varsities, but also with the best institutions of higher education in Asia. In the QS World University Rankings 2012-13, the highest ranked Indian university is IIT-Delhi, at No. 212. In the THE league tables for 2012-13 it’s IIT-Kharagpur (234). On the other hand several Chinese and Korean universities are ranked among the top 200 (see tables).

Inevitably there’s no shortage of domestic education experts who question the assessment and evaluation methodologies employed by QS and THE, to rank the world’s best universities. According to them, the rating parameters ignore the peculiar and particular environment within which India’s higher education institutions and their faculties are obliged to function. Curiously, they seem to believe this environment is immutable and beyond change, a belief born out of the craven unwillingness of Indian academics to speak up for overhaul of the system, patently ruined by excessive political interference and control.

Comments Dr. H.A. Ranganath, director of NAAC: “Examined critically, the parameters and relative weightages given to different metrics of the ranking process (of QS and THE), are not ‘global’. For example the weightage given to international faculty as also to research papers published in western publications such as Science and Nature are out of sync with the aims and objectives of Indian universities, which are also presumed to have very adverse student-faculty ratios because of our college affiliations system.”

Likewise, Dr. Ashok Misra, an alum of IIT-Kanpur, Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, former director of IIT-Bombay (2000-2008) and currently the  Bangalore-based chairman (India) of the Seattle-based Intellectual Ventures, a $5 billion global inventions development fund, is unperturbed by the low ranking of IITs in global league tables which he attributes to “erroneous assumptions and poor support of research by government and industry”. He believes the IITs are a “huge name globally” and contrary to popular opinion, “over half the students are postgrads with excellent records of research, especially in incremental inventions”.

However, these are minority opinions driven by nationalist impulses rather than objective reality. The scary truth is that India’s 31,000 colleges and 611 universities are trailing laggards in the global teaching-learning and innovative research race being run in an increasingly globalising world. Five Bills which offer the hope of modernising the country’s moribund higher education system including the Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operations) and the National Commission for Higher Education and Research Bills have been pending in a stalemated Parliament for several years, even as admission cut-offs prescribed by the handful of near-global standard colleges and universities have exceeded 95 percent. A pressure cooker situation is building up in Indian higher education which is conspicuously failing to prepare the world’s largest youth population for the formidable challenges of the 21st century.

EW RATING: India's Best college/universities vs. Best in West -- 4/10