Public Expenditure on Higher Education in India

Higher education in India is in a deep financial crisis, with escalating costs, and increasing needs of the system on the one hand, and shrinking public budgetary resources and changing public policies on the other. `It should be noted that huge public investments have been made in higher education in independent India, but this impressive growth in investments in nominal prices, is however, more than offset by increase in prices and increase in population, more particularly numbers of student in higher education. On the whole, the trend analysis of government expenditure on higher education shows a real growth rate of 7.5 per cent in the1950s, had it golden days during the 1960s, with the real expenditure increasing at a annual rate of growth of 11 per cent but suffered significantly during the 1970s and came down to 3.4 per cent and showed some tendency to recover during the 1980s at 7.3 per cent (CABE Report 2005). The 1990s heralded an era of austerity and higher education suffered the most. The very important development of the early (1990s) is the introduction of economic reform policies that include stabilisation and structural adjustment programme. Due to these policies, budgetary resources allocated to higher education have indeed being severely affected