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Shubhendu Parth
Managing Editor
eGov
Making of a
knowledge
superpower
Linking student data to UID will
yield a goldmine of insights for
MHRD, for educational policy
making and regulation
T he education sector in
India, particularly the
higher education seg-
ment, is going through a
very exciting phase. Not
just is investment pouring in, the country’s
ministry of Human Resource Development
(MHRD) is driving major policy changes that
would have a long term impact on the overall
education sector in years to come.
Sample this: While HRD minister Kapil Sibal
recently indicated that India’s higher education
enrollment will move up to 4.4 crore from the
current 1.4 crore by 2020, an Ernst & Young-
FICCI report suggests that the segment will grow
nearly 13 percent annually during this period.
The report also predicts that India’s higher
education spend that is currently pegged at
`46,200 crore would grow at an average rate of
12.8 percent to cross `150,000 crore in the next
10 years. It also highlights that the country’s
higher education system has the highest insti-
tution to student ratio—25,951 institutions for
1.36 crore students.
58 egov / www.egovonline.net / December 2010
Compare this with the world’s other two larg-
est nations and we are in for a mega surprise;
the US has just 6,700 institutions for over 1.78
crore students, while China has 4,000 higher
education institutes that serve the needs of its
2.53 crore students.
Interestingly, experts suggest that India still
needs to set up 1,000 more universities to meet
the needs of three crore students that it expects
to enrol over the next decade.
Going by the existing interest of private sector
investments in the segment, and the doubts
raised by the Centre itself in the case of the 44
“deemed universities” earlier this year, the nation
needs to put in place a stringent mechanism to
monitor the performance of these institutions.
The good news is that MHRD has already
signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU)
with Unique Identification Authority of India
(UIDAI) to bring school children under its
umbrella and track their progress at every stage.
While the primary objective of this arrange-
ment is to make Aadhar number an identi-
fier on all performance records—from mark
sheets and merit certificates, to migration cer-
tificates—and help prospective employers and
educational institutions avoid fakes, the initia-
tive will also enable the government to create a
strong tracking mechanism once these students
join higher education institutions.
In fact, smart data mining and analysis will
also help the MHRD map the performance
of each of these institutions—in terms of how
their pass outs are getting placed and where,
the specialisation and trends in each of these
organisations—parameters that could help a
central agency grade these institutes.
The initiative assumes further significance
with the introduction of the Continuous
Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) that aims
to change the existing examination system
in schools, to a more holistic process-driven
monitoring system that includes both summa-
tive and formative assessments.
Link all these data to a central manpower
repository, map it using a GIS platform and
the country is on its way to set up a powerful
human resources planning tool.