21/12/2019 - Health

IAS Parliament 5 years

KEY POINTS

· India has made considerable progress in improving its gross enrollment ratio (GER) for tertiary education—from 21.5% in 2012-13, it rose to 26.3% in 2018-19. And, the government targets 30% by 2020.

· India has a very low human capital base for research—just 0.45% of the students enrolled in higher education are enrolled in doctoral programmes.

· There is no doubt that India has made significant progress in R&D capacity and output—in 2016, the US’s National Science Foundation data shows, India overtook Japan as the fourth-largest producer of science and engineering research.

· Between 2003 and 2016, India’s article count in Scopus, the world’s largest catalogue of abstracts and citations went up from 27,000 to 110,000.

· The need, now, is to ensure that a critical number of science graduates receive the necessary support to enter post-graduation and get follow-on opportunities in research.

· It is also here that the fall in graduate engineering courses becomes worrying—technical education is key to innovation for the fourth industrial revolution, and India must focus on producing quality engineering graduates who can become part of the R&D ecosystem in companies, or enter the research pipeline at universities.

· Both quality of training and course content in engineering colleges must be radically rethought; else, the country will have the same high proportion of unemployable engineers that has been reported in the recent past.

· Higher education institutions in India’s villages and semi-urban areas must focus on programmes that will skill the youth for the needs of local and traditional industry.

· Consolidation also must happen in the higher education space, as recommended by the draft National Education Policy, in which standalone institutions become part of multidisciplinary universities and colleges, to pool and optimise use of resources.