Memories of underdevelopment: Higher Education and India’s Universities*

A consensus in academic circles in India seems to be that India’s universities have not played – since Independence - as significant a role in higher education as was both needed and achievable. The state of higher education is widely criticised as a major policy failure of an uninformed and bumbling bureaucracy. In this lecture, an alternate approach would attempt to find a different, but primarily historical, perspective of a complex social, political and economic reality as well as foreign policy imperatives during India’s independence. Rethinking India's pre- independence past is useful in understanding the present and making guesses about the future. It appears unlikely that the educational framework – the institutions and their governance structure - can, or will, significantly improve anytime soon. Coherent, sustainable and pluralist policy alternatives are urgently needed to address the looming "human-climate" calamity in the country. One, among many such alternatives, may be a return to a not-so-distant-past, with selective refinements.

(“Anything you can rightly say about India, its opposite is also true.” Joan Robinson, Former Economist, University of Cambridge)

* “Memories of underdevelopment” is the title of a Cuban film, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea.