Public and private segments of higher education in Himachal Pradesh: A comparative analysis

The present paper made an attempt to examine the public-private sectors of higher education1 in Himachal Pradesh. After opening the economy to the private sector in 1991, Government of India gradually opened more sectors to private investment. Higher education has recently been opened to private investment including the foreign private investment. This decision has far-reaching implications for higher education in India including Himachal Pradesh. In fact, the public sector higher education institutions also allowed running the self-financed courses. The main objective was to reduce the financial burden of higher education on the public exchequer.

Several reports/commissions/committee sat the national and international levels have given priority on the privatization of higher education. For organizing the discussions, the paper examining the share of public and private institutes and their enrolment to the total colleges of the state and further the share of the colleges (public and private) and their enrolment at the individual district have also been analyzed. For this purpose secondary data have been used, available from the All India Survey of Higher Education for the year 2014–15), published by the Ministry of Human and Resource Development.

The study was based on the district level for the mapping of data/information. In all, there were 12 districts in the state. The data were represented cartographically in the form of Choropleth maps to show the distribution of various attributes. These maps were generated through computer-aided cartographic techniques using Arc GIS Version 9.3 software.