In order to have 50 percent students in universities, India needs to double the number of education institutions, these reports have come in from NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam. While he was addressing a gathering at ISB (Indian school of Business) on Friday. He said even after opening of two colleges every week in past 10 years, only 29 per cent of the age cohort enroll in the varsities.
Subrahmanyam also added that we now have a huge digital infrastructure, India has become the biggest laboratory in the digital world where one can experiment at a scale.
“Today we have 1,200 universities and slightly more than four crore students, but that’s only 29 per cent of the cohort age enroll in university system. He said that 50 percent of students should be in colleges at this point of time.
“We need to double the colleges and universities in the country. The country needs 2,500 universities. It may look like a lot of universities are not up to the mark or whatever, but the fact is, you need those numbers. Maybe we need to deliver education differently,” he said.
The CEO said India has created a huge architecture called digital public infrastructure by going the public route rather than the private. The official further said Estonia was the first country with a population of two million which went for digital identity. However, India did at the scale of 140 crore people and everybody has a digital identity and 120 crore people have bank accounts.
As many as 10 billion transactions a month are happening, which may be lower in terms of value and very high in terms of volume, the NITI CEO said.
He said ‘Viksit Bharat’ is not necessarily just being a prosperous country, but also an inclusive nation which will have a “rising tide which lifts all the boats.”
