The increasing number of colleges and universities has always been concerned for various educationalist in India. They are growing like mushrooms everywhere within the country and thus are creating a red alarm and possible threat to the quality of education being imparted in these institutions. Now even our Hon'ble President of India Pranab Mukherjee has also said the same in bi-centenary celebration of the Hindu School held in Kolkata, West Bengal

He on Friday asked the West Bengal government to focus on providing a quality educational environment and not just aim at increasing the number of educational institutions. He also said there was no point increasing the number of educational institutions in the country without giving thrust on quality of education, and emphasised on the need to maintain the assets of such institutes.

Addressing the bi-centenary celebration of the Hindu School in Kolkata, Mukherjee said

“I would like to tell the state education minister that you have to give importance to higher education if you want to improve yourself in the modern era.”“You cannot do things in an old manner. You have to give out-of-box solution,” he said. Emphasising on the need to give importance to quality education, the President said, “In West Bengal, it is good that we have 27 universities but increasing number of schools and colleges should not be our aim. We have to give importance to quality education and research and development.”

On maintaining the assets of educational institutes, he said

“I am the Visitor of 126 central universities… we have only increased infrastructure, not the quality. We are building only assets and not maintaining them.” Asserting that there is a need to provide proper infrastructure for research activities in the country, he said otherwise the way noble laureates like Amartya Sen, Hargovind Khurana and S Subramanyam left the country for better education, the country’s talented pool will also go abroad.

His concerns are very serious and our government both central and respective state governments should make serious effort to rectify the problem as soon as possible. Here, the point to be noted is that education is a subject of the concurrent list in Constitution of India.

What is Concurrent List?

The Concurrent List or List-III (Seventh Schedule) is a list of 52 items (though the last item is numbered 47) given in the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution of India. The legislative section is divided into three lists: Union List, State List and Concurrent List.