Higher education plays a pivotal role in the accomplishment of any countrys earnest dreams

and desires for economic and technological advancement. This observation applies extremely
well to India considering both the sheer size of the population and the nature of its
development potential. Owing to this extraordinary potential and its implications for
individual advancement, there is an extraordinary demand for higher education among Indias
youth.
Higher education system in India faces challenges in three critical areas namely; Access,
Equity and Quality.
Access
Indias higher education system, although the worlds third largest in terms of students, next
to China and the United States, provides access to education beyond higher secondary
schooling to a mere 17% among the university-age population in India, compared to China's
27 per cent, the USA's 83 per cent and South Korea's 91 per cent. This indicates that India
faces a challenge of major quantitative expansion, in order to provide access to its expanding
population of young people.
Quality
Indian higher education system faces serious quality issues given that the fact that two thirds
(68%) of the countrys universities and 90 percent of its colleges are of middling or poor
quality and that well over half of the faculty in Indias colleges do not have the appropriate
degree qualifications {NAAC report, Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE), July 6, 2007,
A38}.National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM)McKinsey
Report (2005) found out that a mere 25 per cent of technical and 10 per cent of non-technical
graduates are actually employable.
Equity
To make matters worse, there is a wide disparity in higher education Gross Enrolment Ratios
(GERs) across states, urban and rural areas, gender, and communities. According to Ernst &
YoungFICCI (2011), the GER in urban areas is 23.8 per cent while in rural areas it is a poor
7.5 per cent. Delhi has a GER of 31.9 per cent whereas Assam lags behind at 8.3 per cent.
Education can perhaps be the best tool to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

Yet, as these statistics indicate, there are glaring inequalities in access to education which
only further accentuates the divisions in the society.
Given the scale and complex nature of challenges, the government cannot provide all the
solutions to the problems faced by the countrys higher education system. Providing
increased access to education, meeting the challenge of equity and improving the quality of
education all entails large investment. Indias public expenditure on higher education as a
percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is 0.6 per cent (Ernst & YoungFICCI 2009),
which is less than what other nations such as United States (US), United Kingdom (UK) and
China spend on a per-student basis. This results in shortage of funds which inturn affects the
capacity as well as the quality of the govt. funded institutions. It therefore becomes
imperative that the higher education system seeks some amount of private funding for
making up the deficit caused by inadequate state funding.
It is, therefore hardly surprising that in order to respond to the massive demand for education
at the post higher-secondary level and to remove the qualitative deficits in Indian higher
education, the last few decades have seen cropping up of many private institutions. The
institutional variants of privatization range from small technical colleges to internationally
recognized professional schools such as the Indian Business School in Hyderabad and major
educational conglomerates like Symbiosis in Pune.
Privatisation of higher education is especially noticeable in higher education professional
courses such as engineering and Master of Business Administration (MBA), where majority
of the institutions offering such programmes have been established by the private sector. So
much so, the share of private institutes in the field of engineering is more than 90 per cent.
These statistics show that private education players are the norm rather than exception and
that privatisation of higher education is now an irreversible trend in India.
The condition of higher education in the state of Jammu & Kashmir is very much similar to
that of rest of the India. In addition to the problems of expansion, excellence and equity, the
state also has contend with a volatile political environment, has also played its part in
rendering the higher education system in a state of disarray. Higher education in the state
suffers from several systemic deficiencies. As a result, it continues to provide graduates that
are unemployable despite emerging shortages of skilled manpower in an increasing number
of sectors. The standards of academic research are low and declining.

In this context, it appears almost certain it is the time to modernize our higher education
system so as to meet the challenge of contemplated open economy and the demand for
qualitative human resources and high level of R & D. In order to meet the massive challenges
faced by higher education, state will need to attract significant private investment. Entry of
private players will provide the much needed capacity and new ideas on higher education
management, curriculum, teaching methods and research. This is not to say that privatisation
is the panacea to all of states higher education problems. In fact, this phenomenon will bring
about its own set of issues and challenges. However, a radical overhaul of the higher
education system is the need of the hour. The fact that state has a burgeoning youth
population that sees education as a ticket to prosperity, coupled with declining education
spending by the government, translates into a great demand for private higher education.
Time has now come to walk the talk. Or else states youth will be left behind in the global
race.