Need to double strength of varsities to 2,500: Niti chief

In order to have 50 per cent students in universities, India needs to double the varsities’ strength to 2,500, Niti Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam has said. Delivering a keynote address at the Indian School of Business (ISB) here on Friday,...

PTI

Hyderabad, Updated At : 10:37 AM Nov 17, 2024 IST

File

In order to have 50 per cent students in universities, India needs to double the varsities’ strength to 2,500, Niti Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam has said.

Delivering a keynote address at the Indian School of Business (ISB) here on Friday, he said though one university and two colleges were opened every week in the past 10 years, only 29 per cent of the age cohort enroll in the varsities.

Subrahmanyam also said with a huge digital infrastructure, India has become the biggest laboratory in the digital world where one can experiment at a scale.

“Today, we have 1,200 universities and slightly more than four crore students, but that’s only 29 per cent of the cohort age enroll in the university system. Actually, at least 50 per cent of the students should be in colleges,” he said.

“We need to double the colleges and universities in the country. The country needs 2,500 universities. It may look like a lot of universities are not up to the mark or whatever, but the fact is, you need those numbers. Maybe we need to deliver education differently,” he said.

The CEO said India had created a huge architecture called digital public infrastructure by going the public route rather than the private.

The official said Estonia was the first country with a population of two million, which went for digital identity. However, India did at the scale of 140 crore people and everybody has a digital identity and 120 crore people have bank accounts.

India has become a place which is digitally and financially connected with an identity, which has led to innovations one after another, he said, adding that UPI was an innovation and 48 to 50 per cent of all global financial transactions happen in India.

He said ‘Viksit Bharat’ is not necessarily just being a prosperous country, but also an inclusive nation which will have a “rising tide which lifts all boats.” He said the country was expected to become a USD 30 trillion economy by 2047, surpassing the present size of the US and Chinese economies.