Reflection of Indian educational reforms indicates a widening gap between ambition and reality. While national and state education policies speak the language of flexibility, skills and innovation in public universities across the country that continue to struggle with shrinking resources and expanding responsibilities. Karnataka, projected as an education hub, captures this paradox more vividly when compared with many states.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has made reforms in education, urging multidisciplinary learning, credit flexibility, skill integration, and global competitiveness. However, the real challenge today is not policy intent but institutional capacity. Public universities are struggling to implement sweeping reforms and facing chronic shortage of funds, faculty and infrastructure.
Public universities remain the primary access points for first-generation learners in India, especially children of marginal farmers, petty traders, daily wage labourers and rural households. Public universities educate lakhs of such students in Karnataka, often serving as the only affordable pathway to higher education. In private and deemed universities, funding constraints are minimal whereas public institutions carry a heavy social responsibility under severe financial stress.
One of the critical issues among public universities is the bifurcation and trifurcation of well-established universities. While intended to improve regional access, these structural reorganisations have often fragmented financial resources, weakened academic ecosystems, and created acute shortage of teaching faculty.
Further, the clustering of a few colleges from parent universities has damaged public university stability, reduced internal revenue and disrupted academic continuity.
The challenges have extended far beyond classrooms, especially campuses. Maintaining vast university campuses has become increasingly difficult. Routine but essential activities like maintenance of sophisticated equipment, campus cleanliness, cleaning of washrooms and upkeep of hostels, etc are now major financial burdens. Public universities must meet recurring expenditure for food, drinking water, electricity, internet connectivity, security and sanitation, while paying salaries to a large number of non-teaching staff and security personnel necessary to manage vast campuses.
Added to this are statutory and social responsibilities where universities are required to disburse fellowships or scholarships to SC/ST students and PhD scholars, enabling them to meet academic and living expenses. These commitments are vital for equity and inclusion; delayed reimbursements and inadequate allocations place additional strain on institutional finances.
Public universities also face challenges rarely acknowledged in policy discussions. Unregulated public entry into campuses, debris and waste dumping, damage to green spaces, and disruption of academic environments have become recurring concerns. Establishing and maintaining wastewater treatment plants, solid waste management systems, and environmentally sustainable campuses require substantial investment, which most public universities struggle to mobilise.
Yet, public universities continue to deliver. In Karnataka, they play a vital role in teacher education, basic sciences, social sciences, earth sciences studies, and emerging interdisciplinary domains. Their engagement with local and regional challenges and issues remains far deeper than what conventional rankings capture.
Leaner, flexible systems
Looking ahead, the higher education system must rethink how learning time is structured. As India enters a new academic year, universities should seriously consider leaner, more flexible academic frameworks such as 70-80 credit postgraduate programmes and 120 credit undergraduate programmes.
This would enable students to complete formal classroom learning within 3-3.5 hours a day, freeing time for part-time work under “earn while you learn” models, internships, apprenticeships, additional skill-based or vocational courses, and even parallel degree opportunities.
Higher education cannot remain confined to classrooms from morning to evening. Students must gain greater exposure to industry, research organisations, startups, and community-based work. Internships and apprenticeships should become integral, credit-linked components of every programme. The objective must be to make students job-ready, adaptable and confident.
State-level policies play a decisive role in enabling this transition. The Karnataka State Education Policy rightly emphasises inclusivity, regional relevance, multilingual education, and local knowledge systems. However, autonomy must be matched with adequate funding, administrative flexibility, and timely recruitment. Over-regulation combined with under-support risks weakening the very institutions expected to deliver reform.
At the heart of the system are teachers. Faculty members in public universities across India, especially in Karnataka, have held the system together. They teach large classes, mentor first-generation learners, redesign curricula, guide research, and manage administrative responsibilities, often with limited support. No reform can succeed without sustained investment in faculty recruitment, professional development and academic freedom.
As the year closes, one conclusion is that public universities and schools should be supported to promote social mobility, democratic values, skilled workforce and inclusive development, and should not merely be a competitive sector. Karnataka’s public universities demonstrate that even under severe constraints, institutions can uphold access, quality and social purpose. The real test of India’s education reform will lie not in elite success stories, but in how effectively public universities are strengthened to serve those who depend on them the most.