by Sahana Ghosh

There was a time in India when a professor’s job was put on a pedestal. University faculty were a revered lot and lived fairly secure lives, earning as much as government executives and not much lower than professionals of similar seniority in the private sector. Be it in the Sciences, Social Science or Commerce, the cream of students aspired to join the academy. They took it in their stride if they were forced to spend years teaching part-time, for fees as low as $3 per lecture until they found their first break of a tenured job. But all that was before liberalization and structural adjustments that aligned India with the global village. Economic reforms in the early 1990s marked a sharp break with the past in almost all spheres of Indian urban life, not the least in education. Deglamorization of the academic profession–the less-than-competitive salary structures (a part-time lecturer still can earn $5 per lecture at the most, with a ceiling of $222 per month, as University Grants Commission (UGC) has mandated) not being the least important reason–and the lure of the bigger buck in other spheres of professions or that of better academic prospects abroad have meant that the universities today can attract only the mediocre.

The higher education sector in India is huge–304 universities including 62 deemed-to-be universities (which do not get public funding) and 11 open universities, 14,600 colleges, 5,000,000 full-time teachers and 10 million students– hence quite an economic force to reckon with. University education continues to be primarily a public domain. Universities, which have undergraduate colleges affiliated with them, are entirely public-funded–either by the central or state governments–and have to follow norms laid out by the UGC, which though founded as a grants organization has developed to be the quasi-administrator of the entire system.

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