On a good day, it takes only about an hour and a half to drive from central Delhi to Shiv Nadar University. But once you arrive, you could be forgiven for thinking you are in a different country altogether.
The well-publicised smog, pervasive in central Delhi, is all but absent from this vast green space in the middle of Uttar Pradesh’s wetland, complete with its own lake. The only hints of the capital city’s proximity are the stray dogs wandering around between the glass-fronted libraries, teaching spaces and sizeable accommodation blocks for students and faculty scattered across the 286-acre campus – which also boasts its own golf course, periodically crossed by darting antelope.
These are called nilgai (pictured below), delegates to Times Higher Education’s 2024 Innovation and Impact Summit were informed by Shreyas, our student guide – who also explained that the dogs are cared for by a local NGO that partners with the university.
In short, the campus screams money. And that is hardly surprising when you consider that its eponymous founder, Shiv Nadar, is the Indian billionaire and technology entrepreneur behind HCL Technologies, a multinational IT hardware company.
The university’s first cohort of 295 students graduated in 2015, and the institution is part of a group of well-funded new private universities that have opened in the past two decades, often funded by similarly rich Indian philanthropists and industrialists. Other examples include Azim Premji, Ashoka, Krea, Ahmedabad and O.P. Jindal Global universities, many of which are already considered among the country’s most prestigious higher education institutions.
India is increasingly looking to such institutions to help meet the burgeoning demand for higher education from the country’s vast youth population and achieve the ambitions of its National Education Policy (NEP) to turn out more well-rounded and employable graduates. But can this small cohort of institutions live up to such expectations? Can they really be expected to transcend the many issues that hamper the quality of Indian higher education? And where exactly does research fit into the picture?
Since the 1990s, the rate of growth of private universities in India “has been really phenomenal”, according to Aarti Srivastava, head of the department of higher education and professional education at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA).
Data shows that private universities are where the bulk of student growth is happening in India. And while public institutions still outnumber private ones, between 2017 and 2022, the number of private universities increased by 51 per cent, while public universities increased by 26 per cent. Private institutions now make up 41 per cent of the sector, according to data in the All India Survey on Higher Education.
However, these institutions are “heterogeneous in character”, Srivastava said. At one end of the spectrum are those awarded the “institution of eminence” (IoE) label by the Indian government. The IoE initiative was established in 2017 and is intended to be akin to China’s Double First-Class programme, with the best public institutions rewarded with additional funding to help them develop into world-class universities.
In India, 12 universities have been awarded the coveted status, including four privates – Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), O.P. Jindal Global University (pictured below) and, most recently, Shiv Nadar in 2022. And while private universities don’t receive any additional funding, the badge does come with greater autonomy, as well as the status of being one of India’s best institutions.
With the exception of Shiv Nadar’s addition in October 2022, the list of IoEs has been frozen since 2020, raising questions about the programme’s future. But if it continues, the other elite privates may be expected to join it in time.
At the other end of the quality spectrum, however, is a mass of low-quality private institutions, often set up as money-making ventures despite their not-for-profit official status.
While there is not a clear dividing line between the private “elites” and “non-elites”, there are some indicators as to which side an institution may fall on. For Saikat Majumdar, professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University, a key one is governance: whether the institution is “top-down or has genuine faculty participation”.
“I think institutions supported by collective philanthropy are more credible than those just sponsored by a single family or industrial house,” he said, speaking in a personal capacity. “All these, along with high-quality faculty and students, would make up the definition of ‘elite’ in my mind. There are very few such institutions in India now.”
Whatever their status, the importance of these institutions to India’s development cannot be understated. By 2047, when India will be celebrating 100 years of independence, “private universities will be where most of the students go to study”, predicted Somak Raychaudhury, vice-chancellor of Ashoka – which, like Shiv Nadar, was conceived and founded by philanthropists, opening its doors in 2014.
Under the NEP, launched six years later, India has set a target of achieving a 50 per cent gross enrolment ratio in tertiary education, including vocational education. In 2018, this figure stood at 26 per cent. By the 2021-22 academic year, it had reached 28.4 per cent.
To facilitate such ambitious student growth, “the number of universities has to double”, in Raychaudhury’s view. And there is “no way” the central and the state governments will be able to fund such an expansion alone.
NIEPA’s Srivastava agreed that as higher education funding in India stagnates, public institutions are often the ones taking up the slack. “The government of India has not been able to invest the kind of money that needs to be invested, both in school and higher education,” she said. So “the private [sector] has seeped in”.
Despite this, private institutions currently account for only 26 per cent of total enrolment in higher education. That is because, by design, they generally have significantly smaller cohorts than the country’s vast central universities do. While over 250,000 students were enrolled at the University of Delhi last year, MAHE had about 28,000 at its main campus in Manipal (pictured below), on the Karnataka coast in southern India.
Part of the reason for that is cost. Tuition fees vary across institutions and programmes but can be upwards of 1,000,000 rupees (£9,700) per year. In comparison, tuition costs at Delhi, a top public university, are less than a quarter of that (224,000 rupees).
“[Only] people who can pay that kind of money can enter,” said Srivastava – although she conceded that they do offer fee waivers to students from lower-income backgrounds.
Moreover, even fees of nearly £10,000 are likely to be cheaper than the international fees charged by many Western universities.
“There’s a big Indian middle class growing dramatically daily,” said Philip Altbach, professor emeritus at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, “and many of those families send their sons and daughters overseas to study, but many of them would prefer to keep them at home.”
While these students (and their parents) may dream of attending one of the country’s prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the percentage who actually go on to secure a place is notoriously low. Elite private universities “offer a high-quality alternative”, Altbach continued.
High fees help fund higher wages for faculty, which has helped elite private universities to attract some top faculty – as has faster and less bureaucratic recruitment processes than public universities have. And with top faculty come research ambitions. Accommodating those ambitions is a novel challenge for universities in a country that has historically carried out most of its research in dedicated institutes, but growing its research sector is crucial to India’s planned economic transformation, as well as to its universities’ ambitions to rise up global rankings.
Private universities, in particular, have a lot of catching up to do. In Nature’s ranking of top Indian research institutions, only two privates feature in the top 50 – Vellore Institute of Technology and Shiv Nadar. That is because, as a private university, “your bread and butter is basically going to come from teaching”, MB Srinivas, vice-chancellor of Aditya University, told the Innovation and Impact Summit. Introducing a “research culture” at Aditya, based in the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh, was a priority when he took up his current post in 2024, Srinivas explained, in part spurred by the desires of his faculty to move up the rankings.
The main problem, however, is the expense of conducting impactful research. While the establishment of India’s top private universities was typically funded by wealthy philanthropists, most are expected to cover their day-to-day running costs through student fees. Funding research is another question – whose answer is still being figured out.
“Funding research at private universities is a big, big challenge worldwide,” said Ashoka’s Raychaudhury. “The old universities have endowments. They have alumni who pay for these things.” For a university that is only 10 years old, fundraising is much harder.
Meanwhile, Indian government agencies have historically reserved R&D money for public institutions.
Madhu Chitkara, co-founder and pro chancellor at the private Chitkara University, agreed that funding was the biggest challenge facing her institution, located in the northern state of Punjab. But things are changing, she added. “I think [the] government has become very open [to] the private universities,” she said, explaining that central funding agencies such as the Department of Science and Technology are becoming increasingly amenable to granting money to private institutions.
Similarly, businesses “are coming to the educational institutes to fund them,” she said – and not just to set up new institutions but to support existing ones. India has a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mandate, which states that companies of a certain size must spend at least 2 per cent of their net profits on CSR initiatives. Some of this is being funnelled towards universities.
As India’s private universities mature, the next decade will demonstrate just how secure these funding streams are. In part, their future “depends…on the financial success of these [founding] companies and families”, according to Boston College’s Altbach, and on whether these donors continue investing, particularly as the institutions they founded attempt to move into research.
There are also questions about whether founders will remain happy to leave the running of institutions that often bear their names to their designated leaders – or whether some may be tempted to interfere. Nor is this the only kind of interference that India’s elite private universities need to worry about. At public universities, political interference has long been a major issue as state and central governments tussle for control. Private universities have “significantly more” academic freedom by comparison, said Altbach – but they, too, have faced issues.
In 2023, for instance, Ashoka faced criticism for distancing itself from a paper written by a faculty member that accused India’s ruling party of manipulating the 2019 election results. Sabyasachi Das, the author and, at the time, an assistant professor at the university, eventually resigned.
“Academic freedom is, in fact, the biggest challenge for the private universities,” said Majumdar. This is because “many of their founders have business interests that can be troubled by governments should the universities appear too critical, and the founders are worried about it – as well as about the general perception of institutions being ‘left-liberal’, which is quite a negative thing worldwide now.” That is certainly true in Indian government circles, given the continuing dominance of Narendra Modi’s right-wing, Hindu-nationalist BJP. Such sensitivities can be particularly difficult to manage in the social sciences and humanities, whose research can bear on political issues.
Another change on the horizon for India’s private university sector is the country’s internationalisation drive. While their cohorts tend to be made up of mostly Indian students, private universities are actively recruiting foreign students and collaborating with their overseas counterparts to send their students abroad, including through dual-degree programmes.
Chitkara, for example, offers a two-plus-two model with Arizona State University and other partners in Canada and Australia. The model is financially appealing to many Indians as the fees are cheaper than Western universities typically charge, and they still have the chance to secure a coveted work visa in a Western country. This type of programme also offers more protection from currency fluctuations, which can make studying abroad even more expensive than families anticipate.
While public universities are also establishing overseas collaborations, “privates are a little bit faster because public universities have to follow many steps to [get] permission”, said Chitkara.
India has also begun to welcome foreign universities to the country. Two Australian universities have already opened teaching spaces in Gift City, while the UK’s University of Southampton is developing a campus on the outskirts of Delhi.
On the face of it, foreign campuses are likely to attract the same student demographics as India’s top private universities do – wealthier students with a Western mindset who fail to secure a place at an IIT. However, given the sheer scale of demand for higher education in India, the privates are adamant that these new entrants don’t pose a threat. Some believe it is the newcomers that should be worried.
“I think it’s going to be very difficult to compete with this bunch [of Indian private universities] because they understand the internationalisation part, they understand how the industry outcomes work, they understand [India],” Akshay Chaturvedi, CEO of student recruitment platform Leverage Edu, told the Impact and Innovation Summit.
In particular, he said, private universities have strong industry links and connections with employers that will help students compete in the Indian labour market – the same cannot be said of incoming foreign campuses, Chaturvedi argued.
What about beating the Westerners at their own game? While some of India’s top public institutions have moved to open campuses abroad themselves, there appears to be little drive among private institutions to do the same. In 2000, MAHE established a campus in Dubai which now has over 25,000 students, many of them from the UAE’s large Indian expat community. Yet few others have followed in its footsteps.
“A lot of people come to us and say, ‘Why can’t we have an Ashoka in Kolkata?’,” said Raychaudhury.
“Right now, we’re too overwhelmed,” he joked. “We work with quite a lot of campuses that are abroad and, in particular, young campuses, and we have a lot of exchange programmes with them. And that’s where we’d like to stay.”
At domestic levels, however, experts predict that growth of new private institutions will continue, driven by insatiable demand from India’s mammoth population.
“I think we don’t have the kind of crises plaguing universities in the West, which have to do with high cost and declining birth rates, neither of which are problems here,” said Majumdar. “Here, demand for quality higher education vastly exceeds the supply.”
For India, it is quality that is the issue, as profit-driven private universities continue to mushroom.
“With the growing population and the aspirations, this business never fails,” said NIEPA’s Srivastava. “So…many of the people in India are now wanting to open schools, colleges, universities as a business option…It becomes commercial in nature.”
The challenge ahead for India will be continuing to cultivate high-quality, genuinely non-profit private institutions while regulating the growth of those at the other end of the spectrum.
