Party-State Is Marching Into Public Universities. There Is No One to Say No.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta | 12 December 2025 | The Indian Express
The Indian public university is being quietly consigned to oblivion. The long-term structural pressures, political interference, and academic abdication across all regimes have been hollowing out universities at least since the 1970s. The crisis that first engulfed state universities in the 1960s slowly percolated to the central universities. Tragically, it was UPA-II — with its penchant for centralisation masquerading as reform — that laid the foundations for the assaults that would follow. Despite all this, the public system remained obstinately enduring.
This column has, over the years, dwelt on the systemic issues facing Indian universities: Governance structures, funding cuts, and so forth. But even then, there were modest hopes for a turnaround. The expansion of institutions created severe pedagogical stresses; everyone worried about access, almost no one about quality. But the churn in the social composition of universities was an opportunity. Students, unlike in the “time-pass”, strike-ridden culture of the 1970s, were keen to learn….