In India, a college building boom

PATNA, India — On the outskirts of this sprawling city in one of India’s poorest states, the whitewashed columns and domes of Chanakya National Law University rise next to a deep and murky swamp. To get there, visitors bump along potholed streets lined with idle men sipping tea and cows rooting through piles of garbage.

Despite its inauspicious location, the four-year-old university has high aspirations.

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(PHOTO BY SARAH GARLAND/THE HECHINGER REPORT) - Billboards for universities and tutoring services line the streets of Patna.

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“We’re in a position to be a leading national law school,” said Ravi Sarma, an assistant professor of property law.

The university is part of an ambitious plan to expand higher education to India’s most destitute corners, where the country’s vast population of young people is concentrated.

Of 1.2 billion Indians, one third are under the age of 14. Realizing that the youth bulge could be an asset in India’s drive to become a world power, or a disaster that drains its resources and fuels social unrest, the government has responded with an ambitious university building spree.

The effort could help India in its economic competition with China and the United States. While the United States may have enough colleges, President Obama has warned that its higher education system is falling behind. Poor graduation rates plague lower-tier schools with the vast majority of U.S. students, even as budget cuts and rising tuition make it more difficult to enter college and to graduate.

In India, dozens of new public universities are opening. Officials say 374 new “model” colleges, meant as demonstration projects, will be constructed in remote areas. The plan is to increase the postsecondary enrollment rate for 18- to 23-year-olds to 30 percent, from 18 percent, by 2017, said Ved Prakash, chairman of India’s University Grants Commission. The enrollment rate for 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States is 41 percent.

“It has never happened in the history of India, this massive expansion of higher education,” Prakash said.

The government estimated that India had 13.6 million postsecondary students in 2009, about 6 million fewer than the U.S. But if India reaches its goals, it could have nearly twice as many college students as does the United States by the end of the decade.

The construction boom is transforming Patna, a city of more than 5.7 million long written off as a poverty-stricken backwater, into a college town, and the state of Bihar, which borders Nepal, into a hub of higher education.

The government is doubling the number of its renowned and selective Indian Institutes of Technology to 16. IIT Patna opened in 2008 and is waiting to expand into a 500-acre campus in a nearby village.

A National Institute of Fashion Technology opened downtown in the same year, and in 2006, a state technical college opened an expansive new campus near the city’s airport.

The Central University of Bihar, one of 15 new government-sponsored universities that aims to compete with the global elite, opened in 2009 and has been allocated 1,000 acres on the edge of the city. Plans call for enrollment to grow over the next decade from 200 students to as many as 40,000.