In an aspirational country like modern India, there is an urgent requirement of education at all levels. Education is like defence, finance, health and external affairs. It is essential to our strategic well-being and as such, a primary responsibility of the central government. Education in the Concurrent List presently and the responsibility for its spread and dissemination is shared by the centre and the states. There are also some players in the private sector. This number has been growing recently.

Education ennobles and if rightly imparted, it teaches us to think, apply logic and rationality in our daily lives, and removes bigotry and superstition—in short, it enriches our lives substantially. These lofty long-range goals apart, there needs to be, at the very least, a direct connect between the quality and level of education received and the employment prospects for the person who has been educated. With regard to this last and rather basic need, our education policies, both at the central and state levels, have been unsatisfactory.

There is a limit as to the coverage that can be given by the central educational institutions like the IITs, IISERs, AIIMSs and Central Universities. The graduates from these institutions are largely from the STEM subjects and search for jobs after acquiring degrees like BTech, MTech, MBBS or PhD. The central universities are generally not able to take care of the very large numbers of students who study the humanities, social sciences or any subject that does not fall within the scientific domain. My guesstimate is that it is only a small number of students (say 10%) are able to secure admission to a central government institution and that an even smaller number secure decent employment in India after their studies.

The responsibility for educating the other 90% young people in such a way that they are able to secure some employment after their studies lies fair and square with the state universities and therefore with the respective state governments. There needs to be much understanding between the centre and the states in the matter of education, implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP 2020) and a language policy that helps all and offends none.

Any modern, advanced country is supposed to have one decent university for each million population. By this token, India needs 1400 good universities. We have around 450 state universities that exist formally but many of them are languishing, and practically lifeless. The solution to this huge imbalance between demand and supply with regard to........

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