The Central government's All India Survey for Higher Education (AISHE) 2020-21 report is out. According to it, Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of colleges in the country, followed by Maharashtra and Karnataka. Next on the top 10 list are Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana and Kerala, each having at least 29 or more colleges per lakh population.

According to a report by PTI, the survey was released by the Ministry of Education (MoE). The document mentions that there are 8,114 colleges in Uttar Pradesh, and for every one lakh population there are 32 colleges. "Similarly, Maharashtra comes second with 4,532 colleges and 34 colleges per lakh population," the report says.

"Karnataka comes at third position with 4,233 colleges and 62 colleges per lakh population, whereas Rajasthan is at fourth position with 3,694 colleges and 40 colleges per lakh population. Tamil Nadu comes at fifth position with 2,667 colleges and has a college density of 40," it adds.

"Madhya Pradesh comes at sixth position with 2,610 colleges and 29 colleges per lakh population, whereas Andhra Pradesh is at seventh position with 2,601 colleges and 49 colleges per lakh population. At eighth position Gujarat has 2,267 colleges and 31 colleges for every one lakh population," it denotes further.

The survey also points out that most of the colleges run only undergraduate-level programmes. "Only 2.9 per cent of colleges run PhD level programmes and 55.2 per cent run postgraduate level programmes. There are 35.8 per cent of colleges which run only a single programme, out of which 82.2 per cent are privately managed," the report says.

"Among these, 30.9 per cent of colleges run BEd courses only. The majority of colleges are smaller in terms of enrolment, with 23.6 per cent of the colleges having enrolment less than 100 and 48.5 per cent of the colleges have a student strength of 100 to 500 which means that 65.1 per cent of the colleges enrol less than 500 students. Only 4 pc colleges have enrolment of more than 3,000. Out of 41,600 responding colleges, 8,903 (21.4 pc) are government colleges, 5,658 (13.3 pc) are private (aided) and 27,039 (65 pc) are private (unaided)," it adds.

MoE has been conducting AISHE since 2011, covering all higher educational institutions (HEIs) located in India, according to PTI. The survey collects detailed information on different parameters such as student enrolment, teachers' data, infrastructural information, financial information and so on. For the first time, in AISHE 2020-21, the HEIs, filled the data online through the Web Data Capture Format (DCF) developed by the Department of Higher Education with the help of the National Informatics Centre (NIC).