India media: the Enlightenment of China's higher education to India

The 2018 Nobel Prize for Mathematics was unveiled to Aksai Wenkarsh, an Indian professor from Stanford University in the United States. Four years ago, Manuel balkhara, the same from India, also won the same honor. This once again sparked a sigh of lack of academics and world-class research institutions in India: why do Indians need to achieve such a success in a foreign country?



Shortly after India's independence, India appeared in a number of top research institutions, such as the BARC, the Indian Institutet of Technology (IITs) and the India Institute of management (IIMs), and the initiative and ambition of India's first prime minister, Java Haral Nehru, was the key to the construction of these world-class institutes. It is. Under Nehru, India's research institutes are as many as those built by power plants.



But since then, India's performance in scientific research has been flat, and many developing countries have begun to surpass India in terms of training academic personnel and developing scientific research. The performance of China in this respect has always been extraordinary. In the early twenty-first Century, the gap between the number of top universities in India and China and the gross enrolment rate in higher schools was not quite clear, but since then, China has started to catch up with India and drop it far away.



More Chinese universities have a place in the list of the world's top 500 educational institutions compiled by QS, a British institution, than in India. According to the latest rankings, 22 universities in China are among the top 500, while only 9 in India.



The gap between India and China can also be seen from the frequency and impact of the research publications published in their respective countries. The low level of research output is one of the reasons why Indian research institutions are not ranked high, which is often an important indicator of University rankings.



In 2014, an academic paper pointed out that most of the doctoral students in India did not receive training in independent data collection and related analysis, and they also rarely used different software to verify their assumptions. In contrast, since the end of the 1990s, as part of the five year plan, China has been trying to reform its higher education sector, which has increasingly focused on research and gradually surpassed the United States in the conferring of doctorates. The article mentioned that although Chinese universities were initially dependent on state funding, later, they were able to raise funds from a variety of channels, including students' tuition, university run enterprises and consulting firms' profits, and charitable donations. The increase in resources also increased the enrollment rate of Chinese universities, and surpassed India in early twenty-first Century.



According to global standards, the total expenditure of scientific research in India is very low, and to a large extent, it relies on the support of the government. Unlike western and other Asian economies, charitable giving culture from alumni and businesses has not yet appeared in India. The relationship between research institutes and enterprises is also not developed. Given India's tight financial resources, it may be only with the active involvement of the private sector that high-quality institutions can be established and cutting-edge research promoted.



Improving higher education outcomes also depends on India's ability to improve basic education so that students in Institutions of higher education have basic academic skills. The India Education Annual Report 2017 (ASER) shows that most rural youth in India lack basic skills. According to the survey, more than half of rural youth aged 14 to 18 do not have basic mathematical operations in India.



As the 2014 paper said, "one of the important reasons for China's higher education ahead of India is that it first strengthens the system of compulsory education in primary and secondary schools, and India is now starting to plan to do so."