India needs 2500 universities to accommodate 50 percent students. We have only 1200 universities and this number should be doubled In order to have 50 per cent students in universities NITI Aayog CEO BVR Subrahmanyam has said. He was delivering a keynote address at the Indian School of Business (ISB) here on Friday, he said though one university and two colleges were opened every week in the past ten years, only 29 per cent of the age cohort enroll in the varsities.
Subrahmanyam also said that India has developed a huge digital infrastructure, and has become the biggest laboratory in the digital world where one can experiment at a scale.
Besides all this only 29 per cent of the cohort age enroll in the university system. Actually, at least 50 per cent of the students should be in colleges.
India needs 2500 universities to accommodate 50 percent students.
“We need to double the colleges and universities in the country. The country needs 2,500 universities. The focus should be on to increase the number of universities first. 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.
He gave the example of Estonia it 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.
“India is the biggest laboratory in the digital world where you can experiment at a scale which is impossible and inconceivable anywhere else, probably except the United States. Maybe we even leapfrog them for a variety of reasons,” he said.
UPI is an innovation and 48 to 50 per cent of all global financial transactions happen in India.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.
India is going to be USD 30 trillion $ economy by 2047 and will surpass the present size of US and Chinese .
What is required to achieve this he said Research and innovation are crucial for becoming a modern developed economy
He enumerated the efforts taken in the past to boost the economy especially the common man he said in the last 10 years, 25 crore people have escaped “acute poverty”, he said, also highlighting the transformation in highways, railways (including Vande Bharat trains) and others in the country.
Observing that most countries in the west have developed stable economies which have to be “rewired and re-engineered” for a green future.
He said such re-engineering is not required in a large part of India and climate-friendly mobility and power systems can be developed.
The government’s missions, such as those related to AI and semiconductor are aimed at keeping the country ahead in the concerned areas, he said.
India is going to be a powerful nation in terms of its innovative capabilities, he said.
“The second area which NITI works in is how we capture the technological trends to benefit the country, India should be a global leader in frontier technologies ” he said.
“I think NITI would lead that drive,” he said.