Thirty Thousand Crore, One Line — Who Creates Knowledge in Indian Higher Education

Pritiraj BrahmaFounding Partner, Pritiraj & Partners · 28 August 2026

India’s higher education institutions spent ₹30,909 crore on research in 2023-24, up from ₹9,942 crore four years earlier — the fastest-growing segment of national R&D. That line covers public and private institutions together, with no published split. The state opened its research funding to private universities, withdrew the UGC-CARE list, and never built the register that would show which institutions create knowledge and which only count it.

ProvenancePublished 28 August 2026. R&D expenditure figures are from data placed before the Lok Sabha on 29 July 2026 and from the Department of Science and Technology’s Research & Development Statistics 2025-26 (NSTMIS); the GDP ratio for 2023-24 appears in the published record as both 0.83 and 0.84 per cent and both are stated. Enrolment, university counts and doctoral figures are from AISHE 2021-22, the most recent full edition at the time of writing, with institution counts as on the AISHE portal in June 2025. The UGC-CARE discontinuation is dated by UGC’s letter of 11 February 2025. Readers should treat the AISHE series as three to four years behind the funding decisions discussed here.

India’s higher education institutions spent ₹30,909 crore on research and development in 2023-24, up from ₹9,942 crore four years earlier — the fastest-growing segment of national R&D. That single line covers public and private institutions together, and no split by management type has been published. Private universities now account for 26.3 per cent of university enrolment and have been the fastest-growing supplier of doctoral places in the country. Whether they create knowledge, or only count it, is not a question India’s statistical system is currently built to answer.

India has spent a decade arguing about who should be allowed to open a university. It has spent almost no time arguing about who should be required to show what a university produces. The first argument is settled in practice: private institutions hold a large and rising share of Indian higher education, and no plausible policy reverses that. The second has barely been had.

Our position will satisfy neither camp. The private university is not the problem — India’s research capacity is too small to turn away any institution willing to build it, and the strongest private universities are doing serious work. The problem is that the state has opened its research funding to private institutions, withdrawn the one central instrument it held for judging publication quality, and never built the register that would let a minister, a funder or a faculty candidate tell a university that creates knowledge from one that merely reports it. Politics is the promise. Research is a delivery question, and it is being run without a ledger.

Six findings anchor this analysis:

1. The higher education research line grew faster than any other segment of Indian R&D, and it is undifferentiated. Figures placed before the Lok Sabha on 29 July 2026 record gross R&D expenditure rising 85 per cent from ₹1.33 trillion in 2019-20 to ₹2.45 trillion in 2023-24, while the share of GDP moved only from 0.66 to 0.84 per cent. Within that, the higher education sector grew at 32.79 per cent compound annual growth — ₹9,942 crore to ₹30,909 crore — and still amounted to 12.6 per cent of the national total. The segment expressly includes public and private institutions alike, and is published as one number. Accounts of the Department of Science and Technology’s Research & Development Statistics 2025-26 have carried the 2023-24 GDP ratio as both 0.83 and 0.84 per cent; the discrepancy is small and we state it rather than choose.
2. Private money now dominates Indian R&D — but that is industry, not universities. On the Department of Science and Technology’s figures, private industry accounted for 51.8 per cent of gross R&D expenditure in 2023-24, up from 45.5 per cent in 2021-22, exceeding all levels of government combined for the first time; private-sector spending rose from ₹44,754 crore in 2019-20 to ₹1.18 trillion. The sentence “private R&D has overtaken public R&D in India” is true, and it is about corporate laboratories. Nothing in the published series licenses the move from there to a claim about private universities, and the move is made constantly.
3. The funding architecture was opened to private institutions ahead of the ledger. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation Act, 2023 came into force on 5 February 2024, subsuming the Science and Engineering Research Board. ANRF is planned around a corpus of ₹50,000 crore over 2023-28, of which about ₹36,000 crore — close to 70 per cent — is expected from non-government sources, against a central provision reported at ₹14,000 crore. Its programme documents make recognised private institutions holding valid UGC, AICTE or PCI approval eligible to host funded programmes; a separate ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development and Innovation Fund has been announced for private-led research. What has not been established alongside this is a published record of which institutions receive the money, and under what management type.
4. Private universities are the growth engine of doctoral supply, and enrolment is the only number published about them. AISHE 2021-22 records 1,168 universities: government universities are 58.6 per cent of them but carry 73.7 per cent of enrolment, while private universities account for 26.3 per cent. Doctoral enrolment reached 2.12 lakh, up 81.2 per cent from 1.17 lakh in 2014-15, and remains 1.9 per cent of all higher education enrolment. AISHE reports enrolment and teachers by management type; it does not report doctoral completions, external grants won, or research output by management type. Enrolment is a fee number. Completion is a knowledge number. India publishes the first.
5. The only comparative research measure India possesses covers a fraction of the system and rests on self-report. The AISHE portal counted 70,018 higher education institutions and 1,338 universities as of June 2025 (PIB, 21 June 2025). The National Institutional Ranking Framework — the sole official instrument scoring research across institutions — drew applications from 7,692 institutions for its 2025 edition. An independent longitudinal analysis published in February 2026, not an official source, finds 958 institutions appeared anywhere in NIRF rankings across the decade to 2025: roughly 1.4 per cent of Indian institutions. Whatever NIRF measures, it does not measure the system.
6. The one central check on publication quality was withdrawn in February 2025. UGC introduced the Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics in 2018 and its journal list on 14 June 2019 to counter predatory publishing; institutions widely treated listed journals as the test for appointments, promotions and grants. Following a decision at the Commission’s 584th meeting of 3 October 2024, UGC announced by letter dated 11 February 2025 that it would stop maintaining the list, asking institutions to build their own mechanisms against suggestive parameters. It had already removed the compulsory publication requirement for doctoral candidates in 2022. Each decision is individually defensible. Together they devolve the judgement of publication quality to the institution at the moment the fastest-growing part of the system has the strongest incentive to count publications and the weakest external check on how it counts.

The line that cannot be split

The figure is the argument in one image. The number is real; the growth is real, and faster than any other part of Indian research spending; the composition is unknown to the public. When a ministry says Indian universities are investing in research at three times the rate of four years ago, the statement is accurate and unfalsifiable in the same breath, because no reader can ask the follow-up: how much is the IITs and the central universities, how much the state public universities, and how much the private sector that now teaches a quarter of India’s university students.

Reporting higher education as a single performing sector is conventional under the international definitions NSTMIS follows. But nothing in those conventions forbids a country from breaking down a sector that, in its own case, is split down the middle by ownership and is the subject of live national policy. If a disaggregation by management type exists in the institution-level returns that build the aggregate, it has not been placed in the public domain, and the parliamentary answer of 29 July 2026 did not contain it. The absence cuts both ways, which is how you know it is real: a private university that genuinely funds laboratories and doctoral stipends cannot prove it against its peers from official statistics, and one that funds neither cannot be caught out from them either.

Underneath sits a single word doing two jobs. In the R&D statistics, “private sector industry” is a performing sector — firms, spending their own money, on their own products — and that is what crossed 51.8 per cent. In the higher education statistics, “private” is a management category: who owns the university. The two are welded constantly into one talking point about private-led Indian innovation, and the instruments now assume the weld. ANRF takes its risk by management type and the state reports the result by performing sector. A bet is only auditable if outcomes are reported on the axis the risk was taken.

The counter-case

Four arguments deserve to be put honestly, and the last is the strongest.

First, private universities have produced quality, not merely volume. Work published in Current Science in April 2019 compared the most productive private universities directly against the Indian Institutes of Technology, the central universities and the National Institutes of Technology — a comparison that would be pointless had the private sector nothing to show. Analysis of the 2021 rankings found that of eleven young universities in the national top hundred, ten were private institutions founded after 2007. As a group they still lag the IITs on the research parameter; the leading individual institutions do not.

Second, the CARE list was not a good instrument. UGC’s own expert review found subjectivity in assessment, opacity in inclusion and exclusion, career damage from abrupt delistings, and predatory titles on the list itself. Defending its abolition is reasonable. Our argument is not that the list should return; it is that nothing visible from outside the institution replaced it.

Third, research concentration is normal everywhere; no country produces knowledge uniformly across seventy thousand institutions, and expecting NIRF to cover the system misunderstands what a ranking is for. Fair — but NIRF is doing double duty as India’s only comparative research statement, and a ranking cannot substitute for a register.

Fourth, and most seriously: the state may be right to devolve. NEP 2020’s logic is that central lists and permissions have throttled Indian academic life, and that autonomy with light-touch standards beats compliance with a schedule. That is a serious position and much international evidence supports it — and it is compatible with our finding. Autonomy is a claim about who decides; disclosure is a claim about who can see. A system can devolve every decision and still require every institution to publish the same six numbers in the same format on the same date. India devolved the decisions and did not require the numbers — the one combination that leaves nobody accountable.

What we would do

1. Split the higher education R&D line by management type. The Department of Science and Technology should report the sector’s research expenditure divided into centrally funded institutions, state public universities and private institutions, in Research & Development Statistics and in every parliamentary answer quoting the aggregate. The institution-level returns that build the ₹30,909 crore figure already exist. Publishing the split costs a table and settles a decade of argument in both directions.
2. Make ANRF publish every sanction quarterly, with host institution and management type. A foundation designed to draw 70 per cent of a ₹50,000 crore corpus from industry and philanthropy is asking private money to trust a public allocator. Quarterly disclosure by institution, discipline, amount and management type is the cheapest trust-building instrument available, and it converts the private-eligibility rule from a contested concession into an auditable fact. The same should apply to the ₹1 lakh crore RDI Fund from its first sanction, not after its first controversy.
3. Require an annual research disclosure from every institution awarding a doctorate. Six fields, one page, fixed format, on the institution’s site and mirrored by the regulator: full-time regular faculty holding a doctorate; doctoral candidates registered; degrees awarded; median time to award; external grants received with sanctioning body; and retractions in the year. No new survey and no new inspectorate. The right to award a doctorate should carry the duty to publish what became of the ones awarded.
4. Since the CARE list is gone, publish what replaced it. UGC asked institutions to develop their own mechanisms for evaluating publication venues. Every such mechanism, and the resulting list, should be published and dated with the approving committee named. Devolution without disclosure is not autonomy; it is invisibility. If a standard is sound, publication costs the institution nothing.
5. Report doctoral completion by management type, and stop headlining enrolment. AISHE should carry completions against registrations by management type, and the ministry should lead with that pair rather than enrolment growth. Enrolment measures demand for a credential; completion measures the production of a researcher. India has quoted the first for a decade while describing it as the second.

India has decided, correctly, that it cannot build a research economy out of the public sector alone. It opened the funding, made private institutions eligible, and watched the university research line grow faster than any other segment of national R&D. What it has not built is the one-page record that would let anyone verify which institutions turned that money into knowledge. The seats were built and the ledger was not — and on present arrangements the state will not know which of its universities created anything until someone outside the state goes and counts.

Companion essay. This essay asks who is required to show what a university produces. Where the Seats Came From — Private Supply and the Regulator That Did Not Follow asks who is permitted to build one in the first place.