When More Is Worse

That could prove disastrous. At present, India has no less than 16 different supervisory bodies for higher education, few of which are independent and all of which are of questionable efficacy. Mostly due to bureaucratic inertia, they've so far blocked attempts to modernize curriculums and methods of evaluation. They haven't done a good job at policing, either. Shoddy for-profit colleges have proliferated even as internationally respected foreign providers have been barred from opening up branch campuses and have struggled to get their joint programs certified. The All India Council of Technical Education, for example, has approved thousands of substandard private engineering colleges—many of them founded by profit-minded politicians. But it has refused to recognize the Indian School of Business, a private institution founded by former McKinsey & Co. managing director Rajat Gupta. And political wrangling at the parliamentary level (engineered by Singh's erstwhile communist coalition partners) has stymied legislation to allow foreign universities to set up campuses, even though Cornell, Columbia, and Stanford universities have all sent high-ranking delegations to the country on exploratory missions.

The will to reform remains strong, at least at the top. But the prime minister and his allies haven't succeeded in actually getting much done. In his introduction to the National Knowledge Commission's second report, published this January, Pitroda warned, "there is still resistance at various levels in the government to new ideas, experimentation ... external interventions, transparency and accountability, due to rigid organizational structures with territorial mindsets." If those obstacles can't be overcome, he wrote, "increasing resources could well result in more of the same." In other words, India could end up throwing good money—a lot of it—after bad, something this nation and its students could ill afford.

© 2008