Shanghaied

Those impressed with the doubling of India's engineering graduates over the last four to five years would do well to cast an eye on what is happening in neighbouring China. While the growth is similar to India's when it comes to the number of graduates, the absolute numbers are quite mind-boggling, as a recent study published by the US National Academy of Science shows. India's graduates with four-year degrees in engineering, computer science and information technology rose from 82,000 in 2000-01 to 170,000 in 2004-05 while those for China rose from 220,000 to 517,000""the US' figure rose from 114,000 to 134,000 in the same period. In the case of higher degrees, the comparisons get worse. India's annual crop of engineering and technology master's degree holders rose from 15,000 to 20,000 in the same period that China's rose from 20,000 to 65,000. Things even out if you include the Master of Computer Application degrees in India, which rose from 9,000 to 39,000, but an MCA is not the same thing as a master's in science. In the case of engineering and technology PhDs, there is no room for such manoeuvring""India's annual PhD output is stagnant at a few hundred while that for China rose from 5,000 in 2000-01 to 9,500 in 2004-05 (the US' fell from 7,000 in 1995-96 to 6,000 in 2000-01, then recovered to 8,000 in 2004-05). Compressed training courses of the sort that India's IT/ITeS industry is resorting to can alleviate the short-term problem of the number of hands that can be thrown at a problem, but no innovative work can be expected without a well-educated workforce. In other words, China can rapidly muscle into India's new-found engineering advantage if there is no corrective action taken here.

None of this though should come as a surprise. Some months ago, the Knowledge Commission recommended that India increase the number of universities from the current 350 to around 1,500 by 2015. The Commission pointed out that China had authorised the creation of 1,250 new universities in the last three years alone. The Commission has a point since it is critical that India increase the proportion of those in the 18-24 age group who go into higher education, from the current 7 per cent to 15 (the current Asian average); much more investment in higher education is the answer, and the Knowledge Commission argues that the budget for this should go from the current 0.7 per cent of GDP to 2 per cent.

More important, as the Commission also recognised, is that none of this will happen as long as India carries on with its current governance structure, where it requires an Act of Parliament to set up a university and the University Grants Commission then micro-manages every aspect of that university from the fees to the curriculum and from admission policy to selection of staff. It is not surprising that just three or four Indian universities figure in the rankings of the world's top 500 universities, compared to 15-16 for China""these are rankings based on objective criteria like the number of Nobel laureates on the science and economics faculties/alumni, the number of articles published by faculty members in refereed journals, and their quality as reflected in the expanded Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index. The World Bank's Knowledge Economy Index (KEI) also points to an Indian decline versus a Chinese surge. The question is when the country will wake up to the urgent need for corrective action, and then take that action. Business as usual is simply not an option.