Social equality and sustainability: Issues unadressed in the regime of globalisation of higher education in India

Globalisation is today simply understood as a process in which business decisions, production processes, markets, knowledge and cultural resources gradually emulate more “international” characteristics and less “national” ones and with the revolution of ICT, a networked society has emerged to replace real physical space with virtual space. In this realm of globalisation, higher education in India has started witnessing a paradigm shift from traditional mode of knowledge dissemination to the embracement of global parameters in relation to knowledge and skill structures. Higher education is viewed a process of enlarging capacity building among its stakeholders, raising soft and hard productive skills, globalised vision of life such as valuing multiculturalism etc., so on. However, globalisation of higher education in India is thwarted by the ‘forces of social inequality’ and the ‘dogmas of unsustainability’. The former one is relatively a local issue dominated by caste-driven factors or regional-disparity issues, or interplay between manifold disrupting factors; and the latter one is a global phenomenon. Sustainable global higher education based on the principle of egalitarianism shall remain a distant dream unless academic world of our country is liberated from the colonial mindset.