New Delhi: India’s reservation policies face legal and political challenges, nearly 30 percent of reserved faculty positions at central universities remain unfilled, and elite institutions receive funding that state colleges do not—these are among the findings in a UNESCO global higher education report published Tuesday.
The report, produced by the UNESCO’s International Institute for Higher Education in Latin America and the Caribbean and covering over 150 countries, identifies India and Brazil as having “long-standing quota systems aimed at dismantling racial or caste-based” discrimination in higher education.
The report says those frameworks are under strain: “In India, legal and political efforts have increasingly challenged the country’s reservation policies.”
The report draws a parallel with the United States, where “the Supreme Court recently struck down race-based affirmative action policies in college admissions”.
India’s own legal pressures include, according to the report, the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling permitting states to sub-classify SC reservations—welcomed by some communities as a correction, contested by others—unresolved debates over the creamy layer ceiling for OBC quotas, which has not been revised in over a decade, and criticism of the 10 percent Economically Weaker Section quota introduced in 2019 as diluting the original constitutional intent of caste-based reservation.
“Despite being politically sensitive,” the UNESCO report states, “quotas represent a rights-based approach to inclusion.”
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Vacant posts
On faculty, the report cites the UGC’s own 2023 findings: “reserved quotas for marginalized groups aim to address historical inequities, yet the 2023 University Grants Commission report found that nearly 30% of these reserved positions at central universities and premier institutions remain vacant.”
Rights groups and parliamentary committees have flagged this problem at IITs, IIMs and central universities for years. The UGC data confirms the scale has not improved.
India spends 1.28 percent of GDP on higher education — the highest in South and West Asia, where the regional average is 0.54 percent.
The report identifies an internal imbalance, however. “Elite central institutions often receive substantial support, many state-level colleges and private providers are operating under budgetary constraints.”
First-generation and lower-income students, who are disproportionately the intended beneficiaries of reservation policy, are also the students most likely to enrol at state-level and private institutions — the ones operating under those constraints.
Data gaps
The report flags a structural weakness in how India counts its own higher education system. The US mandates institutional participation in its federal data system as a condition for federal aid; Canada’s Statistics Act authorises compulsory collection from public institutions.
By contrast, “India’s All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) relies largely on voluntary submissions, which may undermine completeness and timeliness.” Enrollment figures, completion rates and disaggregated caste and gender outcomes are all built on that voluntary base.
India remains the second-largest source of outbound international students globally, after China, according to the report.
“China and India represent the highest share of outbound students internationally, a trend projected to persist at least until 2030,” the report states. Of the 7.3 million students studying abroad worldwide — close to triple the 2.5 million recorded in 2002 — nearly half came from 10 countries, with India near the top.
The government’s Study in India programme seeks to attract students from the Global South. Within India, students from sub-Saharan Africa are the second-largest inbound group. South and West Asia as a whole, however, hosts only one percent of the world’s internationally mobile students.
The report closes its section on quotas with a statement that applies directly to India’s position: “Quotas explicitly highlight some inequities that are crucial to address to afford equity to those who need it and address long-standing exclusion.”
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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