To Have 50% Students In Colleges, India Needs 2,500 Universities: Niti Aayog CEO
BVR Subrahmanyam states that India has become the biggest laboratory in the digital world
Highlighting the need for having a robust educational framework, the Chief Executive Officer of Niti Aayog BVR Subrahmanyam has stated that India needs to double its university strength to 2,500 to have 50 per cent of the students in universities. The CEO pointed out that the country has become the biggest laboratory in the digital world where one can experiment at a scale.
In his address at the Indian School of Business (ISB), he said that even after opening one university and two colleges every week in the past ten years, only 29 per cent of the age cohort enroll in the varsities. Subrahmanyam lauded the country’s digital infrastructure and stated that India has created a huge architecture called digital public infrastructure by taking the public route, instead of the private one.
“Today we have 1,200 universities and slightly more than four crore students, but that is only 29 per cent of that age cohort enrolled in the university system. If you actually want atleast 50 per cent of students to go to colleges, we need to be doubling the number of colleges and universities. The country needs 2,500 universities,” stated the Niti Aayog’s CEO.
Stating that numbers do matter, the CEO said that it might look like a lot of universities are not up to the mark or whatever, but the fact is that we need numbers. Speaking on the digital identity front, he stated that Estonia was the first country with a population of two million to go for digital identity. He mentioned that India took that route with 140 crore people and everybody has a digital identity and 120 crore people have bank accounts.
“India has become the biggest laboratory in the digital world. A laboratory where you can experiment at a scale which is impossible and inconceivable anywhere else, probably except the United States. Maybe we even leapfrog them for a variety of reasons,” added the CEO.
He pointed out that the country is expected to become a USD 30 trillion economy by 2047, surpassing the present size of the United States and Chinese economies.
