While India’s universities largely operate in silos, each with its own labs and computing centres, the US has built great university ecosystems such as Research Triangle Park and the Boston-Cambridge corridor. In the second model, money saved on duplicated infrastructure can be redirected towards faculty, fellowships, and genuine research.
India could now have a chance at something similar.
In the Union Budget 2026-27, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed setting up five university townships. To be established near major industrial and logistic corridors, these ‘planned academic zones’ would include multiple universities, colleges, research institutions, skill centres, and residential complexes.
The immediate commentary centred on industry alignment, and indeed, bridging the gap between the classroom and the workplace is a worthy ambition. But if we limit our appreciation of this initiative to industry integration alone, we miss the far more transformative opportunity embedded within it.
The real revolution in this proposal is not what happens between universities and industry, but among universities themselves. And if we are truly bold, it is what can happen between universities and the schools that feed them.
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What America got right
Every self-respecting university in India maintains its own library, its own auditorium, its own sports complex, its own student health centre, and, increasingly, its own specialised laboratories. Each of these is built to serve a student population of, say, 5,000 to 15,000.
The economics are brutal. A state-of-the-art electron microscopy facility, a genomics lab, a high-performance computing cluster, or an advanced materials testing unit can cost upwards of Rs 50 crore to Rs 100 crore to establish, and requires specialised manpower and continuous maintenance to remain relevant. Yet these facilities sit underutilised for large parts of the year—during semester breaks, examination periods, and weekends—because no single institution’s student population can sustain continuous demand.
The result is a perverse incentive. Institutions chase scale not because larger numbers produce better education, but because larger numbers are the only way to justify the fixed costs of infrastructure built in isolation. We grow to feed our buildings, rather than build what genuinely serves our students.
A university town changes this equation entirely.
This is not speculation. It is the lived experience of the great university ecosystems of the world.
Consider Research Triangle Park in North Carolina. The deliberate co-location of three institutions with distinct mandates and personalities—Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University—created an intellectual commons that none could have built alone. Faculty collaborate across campuses. Students cross-register for courses unavailable at their home institution. Shared research facilities attract federal grants that individual universities could not have competed for. The Research Triangle today is a global centre for pharmaceutical research, technology, and public policy.
Then there’s the Boston-Cambridge corridor, where MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, and Northeastern, among others, form an overlapping ecosystem. Cross-institutional seminars, joint degree programmes, and a culture of intellectual permeability across campuses have made this geography one of the most productive concentrations of knowledge creation on earth.
Interdisciplinarity—the dividend of proximity
There is another benefit that no spreadsheet captures easily, but every serious academic recognises. The best ideas today live at the borders between disciplines. Climate science needs ecologists, economists, engineers, and ethicists in the same room. Artificial intelligence needs computer scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and psychologists in conversation. Biomedical innovation needs biologists, chemists, clinicians, and data scientists within walking distance of each other.
A university town makes these conversations structurally inevitable. When a law school, an engineering institution, a design school, and a school of public health share a geography, collaboration stops being an aspiration in a strategy document and becomes a daily, informal, serendipitous reality.
The coffee shop between campuses can potentially do more for interdisciplinary research than any number of memoranda of understanding signed in distant boardrooms.
Bring the schools in
The government should not stop at universities. Schools must be integrated into these townships as well. This argument operates on two levels, and both are compelling.
The first is about the student. A school-going child who grows up within sight and sound of a university, who walks past research laboratories, attends public lectures, and understands that knowledge is a living and expanding enterprise, is a fundamentally different kind of learner. The aspiration to higher education becomes concrete rather than abstract.
The second is about the teacher. India’s school education system is constrained above all else by the quality and continuous development of its teachers. University towns offer a structural solution to this problem that no standalone training programme has been able to provide. Universities co-located with schools can take genuine, accountable responsibility for the professional development of school teachers, not as a charity or an extension activity, but as a core institutional function.
The larger point
India’s university towns initiative, at its best, is an opportunity to do something we have never managed at scale: build knowledge ecosystems rather than knowledge silos.
The financial case is strong, because shared infrastructure dramatically reduces per-student cost while improving quality. The academic case is stronger still, because proximity enables the interdisciplinary research and teaching this century demands. And the social case is perhaps the strongest of all, because a township that integrates schools with universities, and universities with each other, is not merely an education reform. It is a reimagining of what a community of learning can look like.
We have built enough monuments to institutional isolation. It is time to build something together.
Suresh Prabhu is a former Union Cabinet Minister and Shobhit Mathur is the co-founder and vice-chancellor of Rishihood University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)