Reimagining Crises in the Indian University

The public university in India was conceptualized to provide economically accessible and socially inclusive education. It has had the dual task of simultaneously critiquing and serving the nation. However, along with the declining quality of higher education, there has also been a significant decline in public funding recently. Increasing government intervention in the everyday life of university has further resulted in policies that inadvertently have much to do with increasing surveillance and regulation of university spaces. Placing this within the ambit of the national political situation, there was a lot of student activism and unrest on city streets and inside campuses. A global public health crisis in the midst of all this resulted in a tangential change from the above issues to those of infrastructure, access, and inclusion. At this juncture then, it becomes imperative to reevaluate the purpose of the existing institutions. The paper thus is an attempt to contextualize contemporary Indian higher education, in times of the pandemic. A qualitative approach using unstructured (physical and virtual) conversations along with literature survey has been used. An analysis of the factors, like research quality, institutionalized discrimination, infrastructure, and public funding, is used to decipher how the public university in India negotiates and exists as a prominent social institution in the country.