The peninsular states have achieved per capita incomes well above the national average, eliminated extreme poverty, and made laudable progress in human development. They are manufacturing and modern service hubs, with low-quality jobs increasingly outsourced to migrants from poorer parts of India. The peninsula needs a massive increase in productivity and growth in the size and employment-generating potential of the formal sector. A virtuous nexus of high wages and high productivity is the next aspiration.
This will require a significant increase in the volume and quality of higher education offered in the peninsula. Improving the quality of school education is a necessary priority; however, in the peninsula, there is every reason to simultaneously double down on higher education.
This focus on higher education is both achievable and essential. The peninsular states already have a foundation in quality private higher education institutions, such as medical and engineering schools at Suratkal and Manipal, as well as the evolution of GITAM University, Vellore Christian Medical College, and the Vellore Institute of Technology, among other pioneers. These institutions, along with newer entrants such as SRM University and Azim Premji University, offer a practical starting point for scaling up the quality of higher education to boost productivity.
This is a partial list of higher education institutions that have established an outstanding track record of delivering quality higher education. The success of their placement activities also demonstrates the employment “fit for purpose” delivery of these universities.
These are not babalog universities. The students I teach come from a variety of backgrounds, many of whom are from tier three towns and rural areas. They are curious, eager to learn, and aware that their generation needs to struggle far harder than mine to survive in an increasingly fractious and partitioned global market. They have, through their higher education journey, seen only stagnation in entry-level salaries and a shrinking of economic opportunities in stark contrast to every generation that came to adulthood since 1991.
Even so, they have embraced three core ideas. First, that their economic future, and that of the country, is critically dependent on rapidly increasing productivity in services and manufacturing. Second, there is work to be done to reform the rotten and collapsing socio-economic ecosystem that we have bequeathed to them. Third, and most importantly, a successful career is a byproduct of a holistic and well-rounded education, and it is key to building productivity-enhancing ecosystems.
As I have taught and interacted with students, educators, founders, and leaders in private university campuses across the peninsula, I see these three core ideas both internalised and embraced.
Doubling down on higher education is desirable because:
1. Public higher education institutions in the peninsula have atrophied, as have most in the rest of India. Most of them are now intellectual dead zones occupying desirable real estate, providing subsidised food and housing to those taking competitive exams. And political interference is throttling even the successful outliers.
2. Switching public money to funding school education makes fiscal sense. This need not mean obstacles for financially or socially challenged students—Azim Premji University provides a template for addressing societal, caste, and ethnic barriers to entry. GITAM offers significant means-tested scholarships. I have also worked on a model where every student finances their education through a loan to cover the entire cost of their education. Repayment is calibrated to the student’s employment and remuneration trajectory. Thus, a lawyer who chooses to defend the poor and weak could have her loan written off eventually, while a corporate lawyer would have it paid back with interest at market rates.
3. Founders and faculty realise that a univariate focus on “job prospect” fields— engineering, law, medicine and architecture—should not be a pretext to deprive students in these fields of a rounded social science and humanities education, or to discourage students with aptitudes in the humanities and social sciences from gaining an education that gives them the skills to navigate the job space. A high-productivity ecosystem requires thinking, cognitive, and ethical skills, as well as shared values. Especially in the age of AI, we need a thinking workforce, and that requires a first-rate 360-degree education, not an assembly line of glorified technicians. (There is a need to fix this problem at the school level also; in Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru, only a fraction of schools offer a Humanities (even with Math) higher secondary option.
4. Public-private partnerships to revive public universities and higher education institutions ringfenced from low-level political meddling should be seriously considered as a cost-effective, productivity-enhancing intervention.
A grand bargain—a privately run and managed affordable and holistic higher education ecosystem that delivers knowledge, productivity, and modern thinking skills, with public money then freed to quadruple per student spending on school education—is, in my view, an exceptionally good deal. However, achieving this is no trivial task. It requires jointness in thinking, across the peninsular states and between Samaj–the society that is bringing their children into adult life, Sarkar–the governments of the peninsula, and Bazaar–private founders, industrialists and leaders of the modern economy—to come together to deliver a mutually beneficial political settlement that delivers the next phase of the peninsula’s development transformation—a high productivity high income society that is driven by prosperity and capability, not rents and nepotism.
Peninsular India is fortunate to have the base from which to springboard to achieve this vision. It is up to our generation to have the passion to reverse the declining fortunes of the young by coming together to make it happen.
Rathin Roy | PENINSULA | Distinguished professor at Kautilya School of Public Policy, Hyderabad; visiting senior fellow, Overseas Development Institute, London
(Views are personal)
(rathin100@gmail.com)