Discuss the issues of access and exclusion in higher education in India. (2019)
Indian higher education is now among the largest systems in the world — the All India Survey on Higher Education for 2023-24 records 4.5 crore students and a Gross Enrolment Ratio of 30, against the 50 that the National Education Policy, 2020 targets for 2035. But access and inclusion are different problems: the system has widened its gate while sorting entrants into sharply unequal circuits, and it excludes as much after admission as before it.
Unequal access: who reaches the gate
- Social group. Against a national GER of 30, Scheduled Caste GER stands at 27.8 and Scheduled Tribe GER at 22.8 (2023-24). Muslim participation has moved the other way: their share of enrolment fell from 4.87 per cent (2016-17) to 4.64 per cent (2020-21), far below their population share, with an absolute drop of over 8 per cent in a single year.
- Gender. Women’s GER is 31.2 and the Gender Parity Index 1.08 — a genuine reversal of the historic male advantage at entry, though not in leadership or in several professional streams.
- Region and residence. State GERs range from the high forties to the mid-teens; rural, small-town and tribal-district students are concentrated in affiliated colleges rather than research universities.
- Institutional stratification. A thin elite tier of central universities and institutes of national importance sits atop a vast tier of underfunded affiliated colleges and self-financing private institutions. Formally the gate is open to all; in practice families buy position through coaching and private schooling.
Exclusion after entry
- Merit as coded advantage. Satish Deshpande (“Exclusive Inequalities”, 2006) argues that “merit” in Indian higher education silently registers accumulated upper-caste privilege, so competitive selection converts inherited advantage into apparently earned standing. Pierre Bourdieu‘s cultural capital operates here through English fluency, examination coaching and familiarity with academic conventions.
- Attrition. A Parliament reply recorded 13,626 SC, ST and OBC students discontinuing central universities, IITs and IIMs over five years — exclusion expressed as dropping out rather than being kept out.
- Faculty and climate. Roughly 28.6 per cent of sanctioned teaching posts in centrally funded institutions were vacant as of January 2025, and several IIMs report almost no SC or ST faculty, leaving reserved posts unfilled and students without role models.
- Humiliation and distress. The Supreme Court’s constitution of a National Task Force on student mental health in higher educational institutions (Amit Kumar v. Union of India, 2025) followed a pattern of student suicides in which caste humiliation has been repeatedly alleged.
The counter-current
Exclusion is not the whole story. Compensatory discrimination — what Marc Galanter called India’s system of Competing Equalities (1984) — has produced a first-generation graduate stratum and Dalit, Adivasi and OBC counter-elites. André Béteille notes that the university is among the few Indian institutions built on equality rather than hierarchy, which is exactly why access to it is fought over so bitterly.
Conclusion
Access is a threshold; inclusion is a process that runs through language, curriculum, hostels, supervision and hiring. Indian higher education has democratised entry faster than it has democratised experience, and unless quality is equalised across institutional tiers, expansion will keep producing differentiated citizenship rather than equal opportunity.