India’s higher education sector is in a permanent state of flux. There’s constant friction between the federal government and the states, as well as ongoing rivalry between a centralized public system and a dynamic private one. In the background, there’s a society that is deeply unequal and riven with discrimination, especially on the basis of caste.
And all of this is happening in a country which, despite healthy growth since the turn of the century, is still poor, and where funding for higher education is hard to come by. In other words, there are challenges galore. So what does this mean for the short-term future of the country’s higher education system?
With me today is Dr. Pushkar, head of the International Center in Goa, and a frequent commentator on India’s higher education system. Our discussion today ranges widely—from new legislation on system governance to the Supreme Court’s recent intervention suspending anti-caste discrimination measures, and from branch campuses to the epidemic of cheating and falsification in India’s public universities.
Pushkar, as always, is a great guide to the world’s second-largest higher education system. So, without further ado, let’s turn things over to him.
The World of Higher Education Podcast
Episode 4.26 | Branch Campuses, Fake Research, and the Future of Indian Universities
Transcript
Alex Usher (AU): Pushkar, earlier this year the Modi government introduced a bill into parliament—the acronym in Hindi is VBSA, the Developed India Education Commission. What is this new body, and how might it reshape higher education in India?
Dr. Pushkar: I have it right here with me, and it’s about 40-odd pages. First, look—there’s been a lot of talk about making India’s higher education relatively free of regulation, right? And I have always maintained the problem is never about too much regulation or too little regulation.
There are these documents—some very well written. Take the Institutions of Eminence initiative: a great piece of documentation, great thinking about how we should create these 20 world-class universities. Nobody talks about it anymore. What happened to it?
The writing of a constitution does not change daily life in a country. It does not change everything. You could have all kinds of documents written, but what really matters is what happens on the ground—how those documents, those various regulations, are actually implemented. Are they adhered to? Who is in charge? Who’s running things? Is there going to be compliance? What happens if there is noncompliance?
AU: There are two big things in this law that I don’t understand: why they’re coming now, or whether they’re actually priorities. So, one is that it’s effectively merging the UGC with two other bodies, right? And the second is that they’re eliminating the link with funding, right? So this is a regulatory body, but the University Grants Commission was both regulatory and funding. And now funding is a government function, and regulation is here. Were either of those pressing problems? Why choose those two issues to tackle and why now?
Dr. Pushkar: This is something I read in every commentary on this bill, the VBSA, which is: why is funding excluded from that?
The easy answer—or I think the real answer—is that the future of public education is bleak. I mean, it’s really bleak.
Take out institutions which are funded directly by the central government—the IITs, the central universities, the IIMs, research centres, and so on—and the public institutions run by state governments are in very bad shape in terms of their financial health.
There’s always going to be a problem about how much fees you can charge from students. In India, it’s still relatively low—very low, in fact. But others would say it’s not low given average incomes and income distribution. I don’t want to get into that.
But I think there is a broader trend—I’m not an expert on it—but whenever I talk to people who work in public institutions, if they work at an IIT, things are all right. Things are good, in fact. There are more privileged IITs which get more funding from the central government, and less privileged IITs which don’t get as much. And ditto for central universities.
But the universities outside the IIT system—the public universities which were considered great—many of them are in decline. And many of them are seeing a very sharp decline in terms of funding as well as overall quality.
Forget what the world rankings say. Forget what the Indian ranking system says. I think things are becoming bleaker every year.
Year after year, there’s talk about whether funding has gone up or gone down. I’m writing a piece—I’m hoping to finish a piece for International Higher Education—on the 2026 budget and what it means for India’s higher education system. But the budget means nothing, really. A little less money, a little more money—it won’t make a difference.
It’s about what’s really going on at these institutions.
And what is going on is that—other than the money part—we used to say that India’s higher education sector is heavily centralized. It is. Now we take that for granted. The VBSA is going to do exactly the same. It is going to keep it centralized—some would argue even more centralized, and even more under state control.
And when we think of state control, it’s not limited to public universities, but also private universities. There are things you can do and things you cannot do, regardless of whether funding is involved.
I’m not stating this as a criticism, actually. I also have a sense—whether I’m right or wrong—that for most institutions in the country, you need to have some degree of control. The question is: how do you exercise that control? Whether you do it judiciously, and whether you do it in the right direction—that’s what matters.
Which is where I go back to my point: it’s not about more regulation or less regulation. It’s about how you regulate, how you assess, how you set standards.
So the point I’m making is: yes, the VBSA will change things. But that’s nothing new. Delinking it from funding—yes, that’s an interesting development. But does it affect the overall direction or growth of India’s higher education sector? Probably not. It’s just more of the same.
But the other thing I want to mention is in reference to two documents that preceded this. One is the Draft National Education Policy, released in 2019—a big 300-page document, and actually a very interesting read compared to most government documents.
The abbreviated version—the National Education Policy—was much shorter and basically left out a number of things from the original. Sometimes, to understand what’s in the final document, you actually have to go back to the draft.
The VBSA is a departure from the National Education Policy. The NEP talked about decentralization, autonomy, and giving more control to institutions themselves. What this document does is the exact opposite.
Should we be surprised? No.
Because the government itself—one of the ministers or spokespersons—said that the National Education Policy was a document that made recommendations, and the government is not obliged to follow them.
So this is clearly a departure from the NEP. But it also shows strong continuity with the past.
AU: One of the big stories of 2025 in India was the announcement—maybe not sudden, since it had been heralded for some time—but a very large number of new international university branch campuses opening up. I think we got pretty close to 20 by the end—maybe 15 from Australia and the UK, and then a couple from elsewhere, one from Italy, one from the United States. Are we going to see that again this year? How fast is this going to keep moving? Why?
Dr. Pushkar: This is sort of a favourite topic, but you know, I can talk about it and be all over the place. I’ve supported the idea of foreign universities setting up campuses. I think it’s a good thing. Now, the problem is: what’s in it for the foreign university?
If you look at foreign universities around the world—and I wrote a piece on this—since the Second World War, through the entire Cold War period and into the 1980s and 90s, students from the global south desperately needed global north universities, especially with scholarships, because most countries were poor. There was a high level of dependence on the global north for education.
Except things started to change from the 1990s onward. As China became more prosperous, and as pockets of prosperity emerged across the world—including in India by the 2000s—you also had a demographic shift in much of Europe, North America, and Australia. They realized their domestic student pool was shrinking, and they needed international students to sustain their universities.
So my argument is that from 2000 onward, you have growing interdependence between global north universities and students from the global south—they both need each other.
When you look at foreign campuses in India, it’s clear that Indian students need better quality education. The number of good universities—public or private—is limited. The good private universities are few and expensive. Most offer some scholarships, but there still aren’t enough of them.
So British or Australian universities come in with recognizable brand names, and students might go to them. At the same time, over the last five years, there’s been some pushback—including in Canada—about taking in too many international students over a 10–15 year period. So much so that the number of Indian students began to exceed the number of Chinese students.
When I was there in the mid-1990s, around 5,000 Indian students studied in Canada in 1995–96. Chinese students were at the top, or at least in the top three. But by 2010 or 2015, Indians had shot to the top.
And it was all about Canadian, Australian, and British universities needing them. They created new master’s programs, new bachelor’s programs to attract international students, and so on.
But when you think about foreign campuses in India, the first thing that comes to mind is that the reason Indian students go abroad is, for the most part, to migrate—to study there and then live there.
Now these branch campuses can’t really offer that. Sure, you could get a business degree from somewhere like Southampton or Melbourne, and those degrees will get you opportunities anywhere in the world. But so will a degree from an Indian Institute of Management—and there aren’t enough of those.
The Indian School of Business, and a few other good business schools, exist. So for these professional programs, there is probably a market.
AU: From the government’s perspective—my question is, are the 15 to 20 that we saw approved last year something we’re going to see again this year? Or are they going to wait and see how the first group does over two, three, four years, and then maybe try it again? So how fast is this moving?
Dr. Pushkar: I’m not sure I’ve seen the government talking about it as much these days. I get the sense that there are universities waiting that will watch how these first 15 or 20 perform over the next three or four years before making a move.
Because many of these universities are loss-making. British universities are losing a lot of money, and the Australian ones are also losing money.
So whatever the talk about bringing world-class education to India, the fact is that this is also about diversifying revenue streams.
For that reason, I think the overall number will probably stabilize around 20 or 25. Maybe there won’t be another big wave unless something changes dramatically.
And you know, three years from now, if visa rules change—if students are again able to go to the United States, or if the overall political environment shifts—then these universities are doomed.
AU: Okay, well let me ask you another question. One thing I’ve noticed is that a number of countries in the region are betting big on AI in higher education. And certainly there have been a lot of announcements about new programs in artificial intelligence in India.
There’s one institution being used as a pilot test bed for what they call an AI-powered university. There’s also a new quantum AI university in Amaravati. What’s going on? Is this just sizzle—people trying to catch a fad—or does it imply a real ambition on the part of the government of India to become an AI power?
Dr. Pushkar: I think it’s a bit of both. Because you’ll see every second university offering courses in AI and machine learning and so on.
I think it was a few days ago that I read an announcement where Kumar Mangalam Birla, who runs the Birla group—which includes BITS, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, is putting in a lot of money to build a new AI university. Now, in this case, it’s not just talk. When someone like Birla, who runs a successful group of universities—including a new business school, design school, and law school in Navi Mumbai—decides to invest, that’s serious. He’s going to be putting in money, and things are going to happen.
So much depends on who is involved. That really matters—which person, which vice chancellor, with the right connections to a big business group, can actually make something happen.
The other thing is that the government, at this time—I think the war in Iran is going to have some effects, oddly enough, even on higher education. One is energy. India is heavily dependent on LPG for cooking, and they’re going to be looking to diversify energy sources and invest in alternatives.
So beyond AI, I actually hope to see more happening on that front—more money being spent on disciplines and programs related to energy and alternative sources.
So AI—it’s a bit of both. It’s like how every university now wants to offer a bachelor’s program in management. Now they’ll offer a bachelor’s in AI. But if you scratch the surface, you’ll often find there’s not much happening there. Though in some cases, there is.
AU: Just to talk about universities setting up AI programs—very prominently in the last couple of weeks, there was an AI conference in India, in Delhi, I think. And there was a big kerfuffle because one private institution, Galgotias University, was seen to have claimed it had done something in AI, but was actually just ripping off a Chinese company that had done the same thing. And it created a lot of commentary in the media. I read the Indian media all the time, and it was probably the biggest story I’ve seen in about six months. Everybody had their own take on it, but a lot of it came down to this idea that you can’t trust these private universities—that they talk a good game on research and AI, but you can’t really trust them. Is that fair?
Dr. Pushkar: The incident was an embarrassment—very publicly so. But anybody who knows India’s universities, private or public—even the public ones—knows that everyone is, in a sense, faking it.
I wrote a piece many years ago, and the newspaper gave it a new title—Faking It. It was about fake research. So I’ve gotten accustomed to this. I almost expect it now. Everybody’s faking it—that’s the reality.
Now, how do you trust a private university? I’ve had some interaction with a couple of the better ones, and they’re all right. But how do you know they’re all right?
I’m planning to write a short piece for a local newspaper, since college admissions will begin in a couple of months—about how to choose a university.
If you’re looking at private universities, go to their faculty department pages. Look at the faculty. What information is there, and what kind of information?
Do they clearly state where someone got their PhD? That matters. I raised this once when I was teaching here, about 10 years ago, and someone said, “Well, people from the best universities in the world can still be useless.”
And I said, yes, that’s true. But if someone has a PhD from an obscure institution, I’m going to probe further. Chances are, the person from a stronger institution will be better.
People are sensitive about where they got their PhD from. You feel different if you’ve studied at an IIT, or abroad, or at a top 10 or top 50 university.
AU: I guess that tells you why Indian universities care so much about rankings.
Dr. Pushkar: Exactly. And the reason you can’t trust many private universities is that they don’t provide this information.
Why not? If you’ve hired someone good, you should say so. If someone has published, don’t just say “50 papers in international journals.” Specify five of them—recent ones.
Another point—based on people I’ve met through our scholars-in-residence program. We bring in writers from across India who are working on books. And I’ve seen people with strong credentials—a Cambridge PhD, others with PhDs from abroad—struggling to find jobs at private universities.
One person told me he was offered 60% of what an assistant professor should be paid at a private university. That tells you something.
If a university is not willing to pay a Cambridge PhD a standard assistant professor salary—as mandated by the University Grants Commission—then there is something seriously wrong.
And this is the case with, I would say, 90–95% of private universities. They can’t afford to pay. They’re also making money somewhere—officially they are nonprofit, but there are ways they generate revenue.
I’m not talking about any specific institution, but many of them save money by hiring people with PhDs from obscure institutions and so on.
AU: The “faking it” problem, as you put it—that’s not just a private sector issue, right? There was a story last week about Lucknow University, where 95% of doctoral theses submitted showed evidence of plagiarism. Now, that might just be a plagiarism detection program going a bit crazy—95% sounds very high to me. Maybe it’s an error. But still, that’s a pretty big number. So how is that happening across both the public and private sectors?
Dr. Pushkar: Absolutely. And you know what? There is a document by the UGC—a fantastic document—on plagiarism. It’s very well written, very reasonable. It says that up to 20–30% similarity can be acceptable, because sometimes overlap happens. It’s fairly flexible.
The problem is that nobody looks at it. No institution really talks about it.
And often, people appointed to senior positions are themselves guilty of plagiarism, or publishing in fake journals, or other questionable practices. So that’s why I say—you can make all the rules and regulations you want, but things have to change on the ground. That means leadership has to be right. Someone has to lead by example. And that’s not happening. That’s still a long way off.
AU: Pushkar, thank you so much for joining us today.
Dr. Pushkar: Thank you, Alex, as always. And thank you for having me again.
AU: And it just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Tiffany MacLennan and Samantha Pufek, and you—our listeners and readers—for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, or suggestions for future ones, don’t hesitate to get in touch at podcast@higheredstrategy.com. Join us next week, when we’ll be talking about Malaysia’s new tenure plan for higher education. We’ll be joined by Chang Da Wan, professor of education at Taylor’s University in Selangor, Malaysia. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
