On Complexity Of Governance In Higher Education In India

Abstract

Although the presence of industrialism (or market) is, as Polanyi (2001) made clear, neither non existential ever before last century nor went undisputed about its length and depth in modern society but sheer shift from state to market in recent decades has attracted enormous attention from different scholars. In this sense, education that has been closely attached with market and state-or its institutional mechanism- inevitability undergoes changes but what would be scale of market is on-going debate especially in a country where the requirement of expenditure, even at elementary level, on education neither met during colonial regime nor in more than six decades of independence. Unfortunately, however, most of the assumptions regarding the predominantly benign and progressive origins of higher education under state apparatus remain for the most part untested and abstract. This paper attempts to address this scholastic lacuna based on secondary data. It is divided into three parts. First, this paper critically assess the main existing understanding about ‘education’  that purport to explain the causal mechanisms behind the rational of education with state and the establishment of state apparatus around education.Second, it suggests that the trend toward complexity of governance structure is hardly driven by politicians’ genuine commitment to democracy, social justice, or universal rights. Rather, it is best understood as the product of a strategic interplay among hegemonic yet threatened political elites, influential economic stakeholders, and bureaucracy. Above mentioned self-interested groups tend to form coalitions to determine the timing, extent, and nature of governance structure of higher education leading to the rise of private players. Thirdly, it analyses the opening of market and jobs demands the ‘skilled’ base knowledge to which government institution seems to be insufficiently equipped with.