By Dr. Ashraf Zainabi

With an overwhelming mandate, the elected government has an opportunity to fix crisis-ridden higher education. If the government misses this chance, they’ll be just flogging the dead horse in the name of reforming system.

The first positive sign however came when a recent high-level education meet passed some comforting instructions. Things look promising, but will they translate into action? That’s a big question on Kashmir’s Dead Horse Theory.

It’s a satirical metaphor that illustrates how individuals, institutions, and governments often refuse to acknowledge problems. Instead of abandoning failed strategies, they double down on them – wasting time, resources, and effort in the process. This theory is painfully relevant to the state of higher education in Jammu and Kashmir, where systemic issues continue to be met with superficial solutions rather than genuine reforms.

J&K’s higher education system faces a range of deep-rooted challenges, like lack of proper-research infrastructure, uncertain career prospects for contractual faculty (which constitutes about 50% of teaching force), outdated curricula (shuffling the syllabi units in between semesters won’t make it updated), poor industry-academia linkages, and the unpreparedness of Government Degree Colleges (GDCs) to implement the ambitious Four-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUGP) under NEP 2020.

Yet, rather than addressing these core issues, decision-makers often resort to bureaucratic patchwork solutions—committees, reports, marginal policy adjustments—that do little to change the ground reality. Instead of dismounting the dead horse (accepting that the current system needs an overhaul), they persist in finding ways to justify and sustain it, even when it is clear that these efforts are........

© Kashmir Observer