India needs 2,500 universities to accommodate 50% students: NITI Aayog CEO

NITI Aayog CEO advocates for doubling universities in India to increase student enrollment and promote innovation in education.

In order to have 50% students in universities, India needs to double the varsities’ strength to 2,500, NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam has said.

Delivering a keynote address at the Indian School of Business (ISB) on Friday (November 15, 2024) in Hyderabad, he said though one university and two colleges were opened every week in the past ten years, only 29% of the age cohort enroll in the varsities.

Mr. Subrahmanyam also said that with 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 the university system. Actually, at least 50% of the students should be in colleges.

"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.