The first All-India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) was initiated in the year 2011 for the year 2010-11. The survey was necessitated because while enormous changes had taken place in higher education since independence, no source gave the complete picture of higher education in the country. The survey intended to cover all the institutions in the country imparting higher education. It was also the first time that all major stakeholders in higher education, such as the University Grants Commission, All India Council of Technical Education, and Medical Council of India, as well as the state and central governments, participated in the data collection.

Since then, given its immense utility for providing comprehensive data, the survey has become an annual exercise. It is an online survey, is voluntary and is almost entirely based on information supplied by institutions themselves. It collects data on several parameters, such as student enrolment, teachers, courses, examination results, infrastructure, etc., and calculates various indicators of educational development, such as institutional density, gross enrolment ratio, pupil-teacher ratio, gender parity index, and so on. In this regard, the latest available survey is for the year 2021-22, with data collected up to December 31, 2021.

In the next two articles, I propose to sum up the present picture of higher institutions in the country as reflected in this survey. This article sums up data about the institutional........

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