Opinion

At Delhi’s prestigious Maulana Azad Medical College (MAMC), more than 3,200 students are struggling to survive in hostel facilities designed for just 200. The numbers alone are shocking — but what they reflect is far worse: a systemic disregard for the welfare of India’s future doctors and engineers.

Imagine aspiring medical professionals, already battling grueling schedules, forced to squeeze six to seven people into a room meant for two. No space for a study table, no peace to rest, and at times, not even a bed — just a corridor floor or the corner of a nursing station. This is not just poor planning. It’s a failure of basic human decency.

To make matters worse, the college can’t even carry out proper repairs. Bureaucratic roadblocks, ASI restrictions, and land encroachment by mafias have turned the campus into a maze of delays and danger. So dire is the situation that students have had to crowdfund for small repairs.

Now place this beside some of India’s top tech campuses — IITs, VITs, BITS Pilani — where polished infrastructure, reliable power, and secure hostels are often the norm. Yet even here, many students voice concerns about water shortages, ventilation issues, and hygiene lapses. The problem isn’t just limited to one domain — it’s spread across our educational landscape.

The core issue? We glorify innovation, but neglect the innovators. Whether in medicine or engineering, students are paying the price of broken systems. Our future surgeons, coders, scientists, and caregivers deserve better.

The recent intervention by the Delhi L-G and CM, directing emergency expansion and stricter campus security, is a welcome move — but far from enough.

It’s time we shift the focus from cosmetic fixes to a deeper reckoning: Why must the young minds that build our nation sleep in overcrowded rooms and unsafe conditions?

India’s future deserves dignity — not dormitory distress.

In 1975 — the year Microsoft formed and the digital camera was created — another slightly quieter but no less revolutionary milestone occurred within the academic sphere: the launching of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR). Covering only 2,630 journals when it was originally published, today's JCR is world best practice, shaping librarians', researchers', and policymakers' decisions in 22,000+ journals.

As the JCR celebrates 50 years, it's not merely marking growth — it's redefining what it means to measure quality in scholarly publishing.

Why Students and Scholars Ought to Care

For new scholars and institutions entering the intricacies of scholarly publishing, the evolution of the JCR has a straightforward message: trust is the new metric.

When once used interchangeably as synonyms, high impact and high quality are no longer synonymous. The Journal Impact Factor (JIF) — once the measure of choice for comparing journals by popularity — is currently undergoing re-examination in response to increased concerns regarding citation manipulation, papermills, and over-commercialization of publishing.

"Good-quality research should be worth good-quality research," Dr. Nandita Quaderi, SVP and Editor-in-Chief at Clarivate Web of Science, says. "Pressure to publish and be cited has had some regrettable spin-offs, even in top journals."

What's New in JCR 2025?

• Retractions Matter: Citations to and from retracted articles will no longer be part of the JIF score, to enhance the integrity of published material.
• More Balanced Indicators: Arts, humanities, and social science journals are finally on par with science and technology journals due to harmonized listings and field-normalized indicators.
• Transparency Ahead of Everything Else: All indexed journals now bear a JIF — but journals publishing both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed content shall receive only partial listing and no JIFs, ensuring metric integrity.
• AI monitoring: Fresh technology separates potentially suspicious journals for consideration, maintaining spurious journals at bay.

Why It Matters to Institutions

To colleges and universities, especially in India where rankings play a prime determinant in funding and reputation, a transition away from "impact factor chasing" toward "integrity-first" publishing is very important.

Institutions should now re-imagine how they measure research outputs, mentor PhD students, and assess faculty. Ethics in research, peer review transparency, and ethical authorship will be the new pillars of quality.

The Bigger Picture

The JCR's 50 years are a mirror to the wider scholarly world's evolution — from counting citations to conscience-based metrics. When there are AI-written papers and worldwide disinformation, metrics need to do more than tally — they need to account.

This is a challenge for Indian scholarship: invest in research training, foster ethical scholarship, and make each paper published add value to society.

Because, as JCR reminds us, the future of publishing is not so much about what gets cited — but why it matters.

As per the just-out NEET UG 2025 results, more than 12 lakh students have made it to an MBBS seat in India, and 11 lakh other candidates have cleared the JEE Mains 2025 for engineering. MBAs are also much in demand, with almost seven lakh students joining postgraduate management courses every year.

THE LOAN TRAP

Those days are gone when the savings of a parent were enough to fund education at the higher level. Now it is seen that families opt for huge loans, they borrow money from friends and relatives, or are forced to sell houses on the hope that a degree from a well-known institution for their children would culminate in a fat career prospect. As per RBI, the outstanding student loan balance stood at Rs 1.31 lakh crore as of November 2024. 17% up from last year. The Indian Banks' Association also mentioned that loan disbursements have increased at a 10% CAGR between 2015 and 2023, over 25,000 crore per annum.

Alas, repayment is an issue. Education loan NPAs (non-performing assets) were 7.61% in FY20, showing that most borrowers find it hard to repay what they borrow.

ALTERNATE MODELS

A number of nations are looking into new models of finance, including crowdfunded investment in education, skills-based repayment arrangements, equity-based financing of education, Human Capital Contracts (HCCs), and even Income-Share Agreements (ISAs). This involves the student agreeing to pay a fixed percentage of their future earnings rather than paying a conventional loan.

"In 2019, a study by Forbes revisited Milton Friedman's 1955 concept of Income-Share Agreements," says Dr. Girish Jain, Chairperson of Admissions and Professor of Finance at BIMTECH, Greater Noida. He refers to Purdue University's 'Back a Boiler' program, which started in 2016, where one engineering graduate opted for an ISA instead of a traditional loan, promising to repay 8% of his income for 10 years, up to a reasonable cap.

THE NEP OPPORTUNITY

Dr. Jain opines that to make these models operate in India, financial literacy needs to be integrated into higher education coupled with scholarships, boot-camps, and government subsidies. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 with its vision of achieving 50% gross enrolment in higher education by 2035 could become the model for these funding concepts.

India Inc. can also take a game-changing initiative. Dr. Jain has a compelling vision: "Picture this: TCS finances 1,000 tech students every year through income-based repayment terms. Graduates repay 5–7% of their salaries over eight years, but only if they are placed. It's not charity — it's a smart bet on talent. CSR gets smarter — synchronized with ESG objectives and talent needs."

Even HDFC was able to finance management students, who pay through a share of their bonuses. Risky? Maybe. But revolutionary? Absolutely.

In a colossal leap towards indigenous development and next-generation defense readiness, India has successfully tested quantum entanglement-based secure communication—a historic feat under joint leadership by DRDO and IIT Delhi. The test was conducted over a free-space distance of over one kilometre at the DRDO-Industry-Academia Centre of Excellence (DIA-CoE) on the IIT Delhi campus, bringing India at the forefront of quantum-secured communication and future war-fighting capability.

This technology is a quantum entanglement-based next-generation communication protocol rather than the traditional prepare-and-measure quantum key distribution (QKD) approach. Entanglement-based communication has ultra-high security—any eavesdropping on the message disintegrates the quantum state and notifies the sender and receiver simultaneously. It also obviates the requirement of costly optical fiber networks, hence allowing us to safely communicate even in far-flung or city war theaters where installation of infrastructure is not feasible.

The experiment demonstrated a secure key rate of approximately 240 bits per second at a quantum bit error rate of less than 7%, paving the way for possible real-time applications in military-grade cyber security, long-distance QKD, and eventually the building of a full-scale quantum internet.

This work is based on previous Indian achievements: Vindhyachal-Prayagraj intercity quantum link (2022) and a 100-km fiber-based QKD demo (2024). All these are part of DRDO's strategic initiative under its string of 15 DIA-CoEs in premier institutes.

The project, "Design and Development of Photonic Technologies for Free Space QKD", has been approved by DRDO's Directorate of Futuristic Technology Management (DFTM) and was spearheaded by Prof. Bhaskar Kanseri's group at IIT Delhi. DRDO leadership's cream of the crop in the person of DG (MED, COS & CS) and senior IIT Delhi faculty observed the demonstration.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh has described the accomplishment as a "game changer in future warfare," highlighting its significance in driving national security and technology sovereignty. DRDO Chairman Dr. Samir V. Kamat and IIT Delhi Director Prof. Rangan Banerjee also seconded the opinion, describing the milestone as a turning point for India's future in defence innovation along with leadership in quantum technology.

In a data-led, artificial intelligence, five-month innovation cycle world, today's education system, still based mostly on 19th-century models, is fast becoming redundant. Nitin Viijay, CEO and Founder of Motion Education, unearths why education now needs to change not only in terms of content, but also in terms of structure, delivery, and intent.

The origins of today's education can be found in the industrial era, an era in which blackboards and mass delivery model represented advance. Nitin points out, "These techniques valued sameness over individuality. Modeled on 19th-century Prussian models, the system we are doing today values rote memorisation, discipline, and standardisation, better suited to churning out factory hands, rather than fostering innovation and creativity."

This dogmatic, one-size-fits-all approach continues unabated for decades of social and technological advancement. And this is the issue, we are applying antiquated tools to the construction of tomorrow.

The knowledge economy is racing at speeds never seen before. According to the World Economic Forum, the average lifespan of a skill is currently only five years, in certain sectors even shorter. Digital platforms change overnight: from Orkut and Facebook to TikTok and now AI content. What one learns today will be obsolete by the time they join the workforce.

McKinsey forecasts that more than 375 million workers will have to switch careers by 2030 because of automation. This change places flexibility over degrees. The future professionals have to learn, unlearn, and relearn on an ongoing basis.

True education, then, should not only give answers but also instruct on how to ask the correct questions. It needs to breed curiosity, flexibility, and resilience, which can't be standardized or examined but need to be developed on a daily basis.

The age of static learning is behind us. In a world that remakes itself every couple of months, the victors will not be the best-versed, but the most flexible. As Nitin Viijay so elegantly states, education needs to free itself from its industrial heritage and adopt a new ethos: one of progress over performance, curiosity over compliance, and learning as an ongoing adventure and not a phase.

Because in the future, you won't survive based on what you know, but how quickly you can learn whatever is coming next.

Will the Centre act on the regulation following Citizen Rights Foundation raising alarm over high school fees as a contravention of the Right to Education and Equality?

The Department of Higher Education of the Union Ministry of Education, on Friday, instructed the University Grants Commission (UGC) to "examine and submit" a comprehensive report on the proposed Central Education Fee Regulatory Authority (CEFRA)—a statutory body to regulate standard school and higher education fees in India.

The order is issued in the wake of Bengaluru-based Citizen Rights Foundation (CRF), in its memorandum (dated May 9, 2025), urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to initiate legislative and executive action on an urgent basis to curb the commercialisation of education and regulate school and higher education fees in the country.

The Foundation emphasized how the increasing gap between government schools and high-end private schools had increased social inequality, and the poor and middle-class households were being burdened and also pushed into debt in order to provide education for their children.

Declaring that the inability to regulate fees and prevent the commercialization of education was an immediate violation of the constitutional guarantee of equality and social justice, the CRF called for uniform legislation to control the fees, the government to provide affordable and equitable access to education to all citizens and close the corrupt practices in educational institutions through rigorous legislation and effective regulatory enforcement.

Quoting the 'Mohini Jain v. State of Karnataka', (1992) 3 SCC 666, the Foundation reminded that the Supreme Court had categorically held that education was not a commodity and commercialization would have to be checked. Still, in the absence of a binding and enforceable regulatory framework, these constitutional obligations are largely going unfulfilled, it lamented.

Placing the emphasis on the Constitutional mandate, the CRF declared that the arbitrary charging of exorbitant fees breached the Right to Education that requires states to make free and compulsory education a provision for all children of six years of age to fourteen years. Article 14 ensures equality before the law. But the existing disparity in fees in educational institutions violates both, it averred.

The Supreme Court judgments in the 'T.M.A. Pai Foundation v. State of Karnataka (2002)' and 'Modern Dental College v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2016)' have asserted the necessity of regulation of fees in order to avoid the commodification of education. The judiciary sees fee regulation as legitimate as well as necessary. Although institutions are given autonomy, profiteering is not allowed, opined CRF, voicing alarm at the absence of a single fee regulator for education that has let the "donation culture" run rampant in private institutions.

In its suggestions, CRF recommended that a central law like the Electricity Act, 2003 be passed to introduce a Central Education Fee Regulatory Authority with binding functions to regulate fees, check exploitation, and impose common fee structures throughout India. State Education Fee Committees should have binding power and penalising powers for violations (along the lines of Tamil Nadu Schools (Regulation of Collection of Fee) Act, 2009), and fee structures at similar levels of schooling (primary, secondary, higher secondary) should be uniform, with only objective justification for minor variations (such as for infrastructure costs) subject to regulatory approval. It urged the imposition of the Prohibition of Capitation Fee Act firmly with serious sanctions in the form of cancellation of affiliations, hefty fines, and criminal prosecution of offenders. Accepting that the majority of private schools are now controlled by or patronized by elected members and their associates and friends, the CRF demanded that those people connected with schools who are convicted of fee offenses be disqualified from public office or election, as is the disqualification under the Representation of the People Act, 1951.

To address admission malpractices, all school-level admissions should be channelled through centralised government counselling and admission portals, similar to the NEET and KCET models for professional courses. This will eradicate discretion-based admissions and provide transparency, stated the CRF, which urged that an amendment to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 be made to provide detailed and enforceable provisions on fee regulation and anti-capitation measures instead of leaving the issue to the discretion of the state.

After the CRF's letter to the PM, the Cabinet Secretary had given an "urgent communication" (dated June 3, 2025) to the Department of Higher Education, which has now requested the UGC to give a complete framework for CEFRA.