Whenever students, teachers, non-teaching staff and the civil society take to the streets to “save” a public university, the first explanation we usually hear is mismanagement. People often discuss poor administration, a lack of planning, corruption, or financial irregularities. Recent protests around universities like Tezpur University have also followed this pattern, with the discussion mostly centred on accountability and governance failures. This is not to deny that cases of mismanagement, corruption, or poor planning exist within public universities, or that governance failures can worsen financial stress. However, focusing only on these factors treats the crisis as accidental rather than structural.
After Independence, public universities in India were seen as social investments. The idea was very clear. Higher education creates knowledge, skilled citizens, and democratic thinking. These benefits cannot be measured only in terms of profit or immediate economic return. Because society as a whole gains from universities, the state took responsibility for funding them. For many decades, this understanding shaped higher education policy. But over time, this idea has begun to give way to a different logic. Universities are increasingly expected to move towards financial self-reliance, cost efficiency, and the ability to generate their own revenue.
This shift is visible in the changing role of the state itself. Instead of being the main provider of funds, the state now presents itself as a facilitator. Universities are encouraged to raise “internal resources,” cut expenses, and design courses according to market demand. In this framework, education is no longer treated primarily as a public good sustained by collective responsibility. It is seen as an investment, where the cost must be shared by institutions and students themselves.
This financial way of thinking does not stop at funding alone. It also affects how universities are governed. Recent policy discussions have suggested that vice-chancellors need not always come from strong academic backgrounds. Professionals from administration, public policy, or even industry, with enough years of experience, are considered suitable. This is often justified in the name of “professional management.” But behind this lies a deeper assumption: that universities are better run like companies, by managers, rather than by academics. Slowly, the university is no longer seen as a community of scholars, but as an organisation needing corporate-style control. While these shifts have unfolded unevenly and are still taking shape, they point towards a broader reorientation in how public higher education is imagined, governed, and financed.
It is within this larger techno-managerial and market-oriented policy framework that mechanisms like the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) have been introduced. While HEFA is a relatively recent initiative, launched in 2017 and still in its early stages, its significance lies less in its scale so far than in the funding logic it normalises. Early-stage policy instruments often shape institutional behaviour well before their full effects are visible. HEFA is often presented as a pragmatic response to limited public finances and urgent infrastructure needs, where loans appear as a neutral technical instrument rather than a political choice. This framing implicitly treats public universities as organisations capable of functioning like profit-making companies that can service debt through future revenue. Academic institutions, however, operate on a different logic: they exist to produce knowledge, critical thinking, and social value that cannot be reliably monetised. Even at this early stage, the turn to borrowing signals a shift in expectations, pushing universities to align academic priorities with repayment imperatives and revenue generation. What is being institutionalised, therefore, is not merely a funding mechanism but a market-driven orientation that has the potential to reshape the character of public universities over time.
As this borrowing-based logic begins to take root, universities are pushed to depend on future income to service these loans. In practice, this means higher student fees, more self-financed courses, and new programmes designed mainly to earn money. At the same time, there is no matching investment in permanent faculty, libraries, laboratories, or student support systems. As a result, already stretched institutions become even more fragile. Subjects that do not promise quick economic return are slowly pushed to the margins.
The impact of these policy shifts is not uniform across institutions. Institutes like IITs, IIMs, Central universities, state universities, and regionally located institutions experience these pressures differently, as their access to public funding, capacity to generate internal resources, and exposure to market pressures vary significantly. Yet the underlying logic shaping funding decisions increasingly moves in the same direction. Students face rising fees and reduced support, as the financial burden moves from the state to individuals. Teaching work is increasingly done by contractual and ad-hoc faculty, which weakens academic stability, freedom, and institutional memory. Non-teaching staff, who are essential for administration, labs, libraries, hostels, and student services, are either hired on contracts or not hired at all. This further adds to the burden on teachers, who are increasingly expected to perform clerical and administrative work alongside their academic responsibilities. This damages the everyday functioning of universities. Institutions in poorer or less developed regions suffer the most. These universities were created to reduce regional inequality, but their limited ability to generate revenue traps them in permanent financial crisis instead of helping them grow.
Most importantly, this transformation changes the very meaning of a public university. A university that is governed by repayment schedules and revenue targets cannot truly remain inclusive. When financial survival becomes the main goal, exclusion is not an accident; it becomes part of the system. Education slowly shifts from being a social right to a personal expense.
This is why explaining university crises only as cases of mismanagement is not enough. Such explanations make the problem look individual and technical, when it is actually political and policy-driven. They suggest that better audits or stricter control will solve everything, while the basic funding model remains unchanged. But even the best-managed university will struggle in a system where public funding is replaced by debt.
The growing unrest on campuses should therefore be read not as resistance to reform, but as a warning signal. Public universities are being asked to perform contradictory roles: to remain inclusive while operating under market logic, to serve public purposes while functioning on private financial principles. These contradictions are unsustainable.
If India truly wants to protect the public character of its universities, it must question the policies and underlying mode of production that have normalised financial self-reliance and debt. Proponents argue that financial self-reliance improves efficiency and autonomy. But in a deeply unequal society, self-reliance does not mean independence from control; it means dependence on markets, debt, and the paying capacity of students.
Saving public universities will need more than administrative adjustments. It requires a renewed commitment to education as social infrastructure. Otherwise, public universities may survive in name, while the idea that once gave them meaning slowly disappears.
