Annual Status of Higher Education (ASHE), 2021

Higher education the world over has been deeply impacted by the pandemic in the past two years and it has been no different in India. Therefore, the impact of COVID-19 and the National Education Policy 2020 constitute the twin focus of this year’s commentary on the annual status of higher education in India.

Our first chapter (Online education- strengths, learnings and challenges) goes deeper and analyses important aspects of online education. The second chapter (Internationalisation of Indian higher education) analyses the implications of the policy objectives for Indian higher educational institutions. The third chapter (Pursuit of quality and excellence in higher education in NEP) analyses the broad aspects of excellence and quality in higher education in India, as envisaged in the policy. Any commentary on the status of higher education in India will not be complete without a snapshot of how the implementation of the NEP has progressed in the last year. This has been covered in chapter 4 (Status of NEP implementation).

It is hoped that these four chapters will complement the numbers, figures, and trends of the states and union territories in part two of the report.