New Delhi: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday tabled the Economic Survey in Parliament, which states that as per the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) total enrolment in higher education increased to nearly 4.33 crore in the financial year 2022 from 3.42 crore in the financial year 2015, an increase of 26.5 per cent since the financial year 2015.
As per the survey, the higher education sector, comprising tertiary and post-school learning in universities and other institutions, has witnessed an acceleration in total enrolment coupled with rising enrolment equity over the past eight years.
“The rise in enrolment in higher education has been driven by underprivileged sections such as SC, ST and OBC, with a faster growth in female enrolment across sections. Female enrolment in higher education increased to 2.07 crore in FY-22 from 1.57 crore in FY-15, a 31.6 per cent increase. The growing equity in higher education implies better employment opportunities for the hitherto backward sections,” the survey mentioned.
India has 26.52 crore students in school, 4.33 crore in higher education and more than 11 crore learners in skilling institutions. The vast expanse of the educational landscape comprises 14.89 lakh schools, 1.50 lakh secondary schools, 1.42 lakh higher secondary schools, 1,168 universities, 45,473 colleges, 12,002 standalone institutions, 94.8 lakh teachers in school education and 15.98 lakh teachers in higher education, the survey states.
The National Credit Framework (NCrF), announced under National Education Policy 2020 in April 2023, forms the bulwark of the regulatory architecture underpinning life-long learning. Bolstering the regulatory architecture is an extensive array of digital solutions, such as digital public infrastructure (DPI), which act as force multipliers.
The survey highlighted that as education is one of the most critical areas for India’s development, mission-mode and cost-effective implementation of well-designed and well-intentioned programmes is essential to improve the quality of education, especially primary education, without which further years of education add little value. To realise the same, unity of purpose and convergence of efforts across the central, state and local governments is called for, as ‘public education’ is a concurrent list subject.
Increasing the cost-effectiveness of public spending on education requires spending on pedagogy and governance. This can include filling supervisory positions to monitor teaching quality, recognition of good and bad teacher performance, and hiring local volunteers to ensure ‘teaching at the right level’ as textbook completion means little if children are way behind curricular standards.
“India is making rapid progress in R&D, with nearly 1,00,000 patents granted in FY24, compared to less than 25,000 patent grants in FY20,” mentioned in the Survey.
As per the survey, on the human resource side, total Ph D enrolment in India has increased to 81.2 per cent in FY22 (2.13 lakh) from FY15 (1.17 lakh). The Gross Expenditure on R&D (GERD) in the country has been consistently increasing over the years and has more than doubled from Rs 60,196.8 crore in FY11 to Rs 127,381 crore in FY21.
As a mark of India’s ascent in high-quality research, the country climbed up to 9th rank in the Nature’s Index 2023, overtaking Australia and Switzerland. India’s share of high-quality research articles (measured in terms of absolute numbers and not percentages) increased by 44 per cent in the past four years, i.e., from 1039.7 in 2019 to 1494.7 in 2023.
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