Indian excellence initiative in doubt after funding slashed

The future of India’s initiative to develop world-class universities appeared to be uncertain, with the government set to review whether it will continue funding the scheme. 

The Institutes of Eminence (IoE) programme was launched in 2018 by the Ministry of Education in a bid to support a handful of Indian universities to transform into leading teaching and research institutes on the international stage. 

The government promised that those granted the status would receive more autonomy and, in the case of public institutions, additional funding, with 100 billion rupees (£921 million) allocated to the scheme over a five-year period. 

In the latest central budget, announced earlier this month, funding for IoEs fell 74 per cent compared with previous years, although this alone did not necessarily mean the government was shuttering the scheme. 

“Lower absorption of allocated funds earlier can often lead to budget cuts,” said Eldho Mathews, a researcher and policy analyst on Indian higher education. “Public institutions often face absorption capacity issues, making it difficult to fully utilise the funds allocated for their development.”

Yet, while some universities may not yet have spent their initial allocations or the promised funding may have simply come to an end, there are now question marks over whether the government intends to continue with the initiative. 

“The proposal for continuing the grant is pending [with] no final decision on it,” said Aarti Srivastava, professor and head of the higher education department at the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration. 

The excellence initiative was beset with problems almost from the start. Despite committing to giving 20 institutions the status – 10 public and 10 private – the head of the committee said in 2018 that the group was unable to find enough suitable universities, with reports suggesting this was because of the weak quality of teaching and research. 

So far, eight public universities and four private universities have been named institutes of eminence. The committee also recommended giving the status to Jio Institute, a move that sparked backlash given that the university had not yet opened. Today, the institution, along with several other private universities, remains in limbo about whether it will receive this accreditation. 

Tense relations between the Bharatiya Janata Party-headed central government and opposition-led states have also hampered the progress of the scheme. Jadavpur University was denied IoE status in 2023 after the state government refused to match the funding from the central government, while Tamil Nadu’s state government revoked a proposal for Anna University to receive the status after a political row. 

In the same year, a parliamentary report recommended that the process for granting IoE status be expedited, but there appears to have been little movement since then. 

“My impression is that the programme is not ended but, like so much relating to Indian higher education, is started with great fanfare but then not adequately supported,” said Philip Altbach, emeritus professor at Boston College’s Center for International Higher Education. 

Srivastava said she believed the scheme was no longer a priority for the government. The initiative was announced two years before the introduction of India’s landmark National Education Policy, which focuses on improving the quality of the country’s higher education system as a whole, including “a strong emphasis on developing a large number of outstanding public institutions”. 

“There will be a fair and transparent system for determining increased levels of public funding support for public HEIs,” the document continues. “This system will give an equitable opportunity for all public institutions to grow and develop”. 

While neither the IoE scheme nor the concept of world-class universities were mentioned in the policy, the government did set out a new strategy of establishing multidisciplinary education and research universities (MERUs) to “attain the highest global standards in quality education” and “help set the highest standards for multidisciplinary education across India”.

The scheme came to fruition in 2021 and, since then, 35 MERUs have been established, with each awarded 1 billion rupees in additional funding. 

Whether it is coming to an end or not, it remained unclear what impact the excellence initiative has had. While some institutions have improved in Times Higher Education’s global rankings since the scheme launched, including the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science, others have gone down, such as the University of Delhi. 

However, some argue that it may be too soon to judge the initiative’s impact, given that it was planned to run for 10 years, while some institutions have only recently been granted the eminence title and may still be spending the funds. 

On its website, IIT Delhi outlines what it has used the IoE funds for, including establishing a new school of artificial intelligence, launching eight new postgraduate programmes and four undergraduate ones, and funding 1,000 scholars to pursue PhDs at one of the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology. 

“With the money flow there were some improvements, but still it was far below the global expectations,” said Srivastava.

“The IoE scheme seemed rather arbitrary and lopsided to me from the beginning,” said Saikat Majumdar, professor of English and creative writing at Ashoka University, speaking in a personal capacity. “Unlike the Russell Group in the UK, which happened as a select group of universities came together and is hence a self-selecting category, India’s IoE status was imposed from above and outside, by the central government, often following reasons that seemed hard to understand.

“The utter illogic of the scheme is finally catching up with itself and I think it will quickly disappear and no one will even remember it even existed, except as a bit of a joke.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com