India’s New Innovation Universities Bill

Higher education in India is notorious for its lacks, in terms of both inaccessibility for a large majority of the country’s youth as well as for its deficits in quality. The National Knowledge Commission and the Planning Commission therefore proposed the creation of fourteen new Research and Innovation Universities in India. Following this recommendation, the government has drafted a Bill which aims to define what a “world-class” university entails and how it would need to function. The Universities for Research and Innovation Bill, 2012, provides for the setting up of new universities by the Union government, or by private bodies — domestic or foreign — or to classify some of the existing universities as research and innovation universities.