Economic Implication of Massification in India

Dr. Pearly Jacob

Abstract: The world has experienced the knowledge revolution along with mass growth in the population. To keep abreast with the revolution and changing times the education system had to revamp and become inclusive to be equitable to everyone. Knowledge revolution has caused us to move from one aeon to the other, but the grotesque reality of the present time has been the disparity amongst the masses. We have moved from Moon to Mars, from huge ringing boxes of telephones to the smallest slimmest smartphones, we have moved from papyrus to kindle, yet knowledge is not accessible to everyone. We have the right to education, but has the education rightly reached everyone. The new education system with its innovations and disruptions focus on the skills, employability and inclusiveness, but on the way of achieving it, it has lost its essence and sanctity; the so called contemporary interests. This paper focuses on the economic implications of massification in India. This paper is focused on discussing the repurcussions of massification in the Indian higher education system. The first part of the paper focuses on demographical details like population vis a vis the number of higher education institutions and on the inequitable diaspora of higher education, when its very objective is to be inclusive yet there is a disparity in reference to the gross enrolment ratio on the basis of social categories. The second part of the paper accentuates on the array of advantages of massification namely betterment in the status of women because of government initiatives, the improvement in contribution of the service sector to the GDP because of the education. Some of the convergence area illuminated in the paper are inappropriation of funds, quality of faculty, continuous degradation in the quality of higher education leading to incompetent unemployable graduates, misappopriation, delineation and corruption when involving public private partnership in higher education. The last part of the paper concludes on a positive note yet with caution and suggestions for improvisation of inclusiveness without losing the savor of higher education system.

Keywords: Massification

Edition: Volume 8 Issue 4, April 2019,

Pages: 359 - 365