A Study of Higher Educational Inequality in North-East India: Case Studies in Manipur

Higher education is regarding as the college and University education. Apart from primary and secondary education, higher education is the linking bridge between development and transformation of society and only education can paved the way to reach the real destination to uplift a society. A social dimension of the education, in higher education, is pre-requisite to enhance the social cohesion and equity. The present paper aims to find out the regional inequalities in higher education in the northeast states of India. This paper also attempt to analyse and highlight the level of literacy, the status of higher educational institutes for quality improvement among the states of the region and disparities of institutional quality enhancement. The study of the present paper based on an outcome of in-exhaustive secondary sources of information/data available from e-resources and journals. The study is all about to focus on higher educational scenario in the northeast India after post-independence. Most of the Government and Government aided higher educational institutions of the region are funded by MHRD, UGC, NER and as well as state Government of the respective states but considering the ever increasing need of the students, the facilities provided are inadequate. With the help of secondary data, it has found that the disparity of quality and quantity of the students among the north-eastern states are due to the variation in physical, socio-economic and cultural development of different states. Though, there are number of universities and colleges and mushroom growth of private colleges, the quality of education maintain by the authority as well as infrastructures of the institutions are not up to date to meet the requirement of the students and globalisation criteria given by the University Grants Commission. It is a bit delay to think that good infrastructures applying of modern education technology providing ICT, sufficient funds for research works, skill and opening self employable Degree Programmes-Academic Credit System (ACS) can compete the students of the region to the national and global standard.