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Sunday, January 28, 2007

india and china in higher education

With a smaller number going into the education system, the country produces around 6,000 science PhDs each year according to Demos as compared to China’s 15,000 or so. Even the IITs, the most prestigious educational institutes, have a quality problem. According to a vision document prepared by the IIT Delhi a couple of years ago, while the institute had 15 teachers below the age of 35, it had 115 who were over 55 years old. And, while over 200,000 people apply in the IITs joint entrance examination for 2,500 seats, the IIT Delhi got just four applications when it applied for a faculty position some years ago! As a result, in 1996-97, while MIT got 102 patents, the average IIT got between three and six. MIT produces 200 PhDs in engineering every year as compared to a fourth for IIT Delhi and Mumbai. For the education system as a whole, China has more universities among the top 500 in the world, measured by the citations of academics there, the awards won by the alumni and faculty, and so on. Apart from universities, the other big source of cutting edge research are MNC research centres. India has seen a huge surge here, with more than 100 of the 150 such centres here opened in just the last four years. China too has seen a surge of such centres, and the current tally is estimated at around 750, of which around 60 are supposed to be doing fairly innovative R&D.China enjoys similar cost advantages. It is equally, if not more focused in certain areas like nanosciences (between 1999 and 2004, China had around 7,000 scientific publications in the field versus around 2,000 for India, and 19,000 for the US), and spends a lot more than India does on R&D, both in terms of percentage of GDP and in absolute terms since its GDP is a lot higher. Indeed, UK think tank Demos’ special analysis on Chinese R&D reports that last month the OECD announced China had moved ahead of Japan to become the world’s second highest R&D investor after the US.

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