Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday announced that the Central Government will establish 30 new central universities across the country to expand higher education.
Addressing the 150th anniversary of University of Mumbai, Dr Singh said work on modalities for setting up these universities has begun and the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the UGC and the Planning Commission are working to operationalise this in the next 2-3 months.
“This expansion is going to be a landmark in expanding access to high quality education across the country,” Dr Singh said, adding that these universities should “focus on achieving international standards of excellence and be rated among the top institutions in the world.”
These universities should have the best faculty, excellent physical resources, a wide range of disciplines, and a diverse student body. “They should become the launching pads for our entry into the knowledge economy,” he said.
Dr Singh was accompanied by Maharashtra Governor S M Krishna, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, and the university Vice-Chancellor Vijay Khole. There was disappointment among the faculty which was expecting the prime minister to grant “national university” status to the University of Mumbai as well as to University of Madras and University of Calcutta.
There are as of now 20 central universities, and the prime minister had expressed concern at a recent high-level meeting on higher education that 16 states did not have a single central university. It impelled him to make the announcement on Friday of massive expansion.

Low enrolment
Dr Singh said 340 districts in the country have extremely low college enrolments. “The Central Government would work with the states to support expansion of colleges to these 340 districts,” he said.
Increasing access to higher education involved expansion of supply as well as improving financial resources of aspiring students, the prime minister said. He emphasised the need for a much larger national programme so that no one who wants to pursue further education is denied opportunity for lack of resources.
Dr Singh, who himself was a beneficiary of scholarships in his own education, said the Government is working on a national system of scholarships and easily available loans so that all needy and deserving students have access to necessary finances to fund their education. “We will realise this goal in the coming year,” he said.
Dr Singh said if the university system expands, “it also needs a larger pool of school leavers.” The Government is working on a plan to gradually universalise secondary schooling to build on the success of the “Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan”, and will cover the entire country in 2-3 years.
To promote excellence, the Government is also working on a programme for having “one high quality school in every block of the country.” These publicly funded 6,000 schools will establish benchmarks for excellence in public schooling which can then be role models for the rest of the public school educational system, Dr Singh said.
He said that not only should new universities be better universities, but even existing universities, including state universities, “must reform and improve themselves.” The reform of existing university system should, therefore, be as much of a priority as its expansion, he said.
“Our university system is, in many parts, in a state of disrepair,” the prime minister said. “We need better facilities, more and better teachers, a flexible approach to curriculum development to make it more relevant, more effective pedagogical and learning methods and more meaningful evaluation systems.”
He expressed concern over politicisation of university appointments, including those of vice-chancellors, which also have become subject of caste and communal considerations. “There are complaints of favouritism and corruption,” Dr Singh said, stating that “we should free university appointments from unnecessary interventions on the part of governments and must promote autonomy and accountability.”
He suggested university governors to “move away from routine approaches to overcome quality bottlenecks in our system.” “We should look at alternative ways of improving the remuneration of professors, at ways of tapping into the large pool of Indian origin teaching manpower spread across the world’s universities, and of linking up with the best universities across the world to promote cross-fertilisation of ideas,” he added.
Dr Singh paid rich tributes to University of Mumbai. “Like the great universities of ancient India, Nalanda, Takshasila and Nagarjuna, Mumbai University has played an important role in the spread of knowledge and learning in our country,” he added.